The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#6251

Mohamed Yousef Soliman

Mohamed Yousef Soliman
#140325
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Mohamed Yousef Soliman is a professor and the former chairperson of the department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University. After working for Halliburton for 32 years, he joined Texas Tech in January 2011. He obtained his bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from Cairo University in 1971. Having completed his bachelor's degree he came to the United States to continue higher education. He received his master's degree and doctorate degrees, both in Petroleum engineering, from Stanford University in 1975 and 1978 His M. S. Thesis was "Rheological Properties of Emulsion Flowing Thr...
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#6252

Angus Kirkland

#140867
Overall Influence
Angus Ian Kirkland FInstP FRSC FRMS is the JEOL Professor of Electron Microscopy at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. Professor Kirkland specialises in High-resolution transmission electron microscopy and Scanning transmission electron microscopy.
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#6253

Solomon B. Levine

#83545
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Solomon Bernard Levine was one of the U.S.'s foremost experts on Japanese labor and industrial relations. Biography Levine's book "Industrial Relations in Postwar Japan", published in 1958, was considered to be a landmark in the field, influencing a generation of Asian scholars. His deep knowledge and interest in Japan came long before the 1980s explosion in interest and writing about the rapid growth and success of the Japanese economy and employment system. Levine’s book then became the classic reference that everyone working on these topics were told to read.
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#6254

Yugang Niu

#152993
Overall Influence
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#6255

Mark Pimentel

#153005
Overall Influence
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#6256

Ruigang Yang

#153006
Overall Influence
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#6257

Iosr Journals

#153016
Overall Influence
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#6258

Satoshi Tadokoro

#153022
Overall Influence
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#6259

Shai Avidan

#153025
Overall Influence
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#6260

Kenneth A. Krohn

#153046
Overall Influence
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#6261

Raymond J. Kim

#153068
Overall Influence
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#6262

Vijay Kumar Garg

#153073
Overall Influence
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#6263

David Andrew Bender

#153088
Overall Influence
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#6264

Patrick Huerre

#130261
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Patrick Huerre, born in 1947, is a French physicist in fluid mechanics. An engineer from the École centrale de Paris , and a doctor of aeronautical sciences from Stanford University, he began his career at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In 1989, he was appointed Professor of Mechanics at the École polytechnique where he created, with Jean-Marc Chomaz, and then directed the Laboratoire d'hydrodynamique , a joint CNRS-École polytechnique research unit. He is currently Director of Research Emeritus at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique . He is a member of the ...
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#6265

Lino Bianco

Lino Bianco
#107415
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lino Bianco is a Maltese architect, academic and diplomat. Biography Bianco graduated in philosophy and in architecture at the University of Malta. He furthered his studies in industrial geology at the University of Leicester, and in architecture at The Bartlett Graduate School, University College London . He achieved a doctoral degree in architecture and politics at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, Sofia, under the academic supervision of Veselina Troeva, with a thesis on the development of Sofia. Bianco holds the Eur. Ing. from the European Federation of Nat...
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#6266

Ming Wah Wong

#153107
Overall Influence
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#6267

Serge Leroueils. Leroueil

#153108
Overall Influence
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#6268

Vladimir S. Cherkassky

#153115
Overall Influence
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#6269

Douglas Llewellyn Jones

#153116
Overall Influence
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#6270

Maria Elena Valcher

#153119
Overall Influence
Maria Elena Valcher is an Italian control theorist, and a professor at the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova. Valcher was the president for IEEE Control Systems Society in 2015. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012, "for contributions to positive systems theory and the behavioral approach to system analysis and control". She is also a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control.
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#6271

Thomas Lee Paoli

#153124
Overall Influence
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#6272

Joseph Laws McKibben

#77996
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Joseph Laws McKibben was an American physicist and engineer who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer as a group leader on the Manhattan Project. He personally witnessed the Trinity test and flipped the switch that set off the atomic bomb at Trinity. McKibben, motivated by his daughter Karan's paralysed hands due to polio, also invented the Air Muscle in 1957.
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#6273

Nicholas Muzyczka

#153134
Overall Influence
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#6274

Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson
#67900
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Steve Johnson is an American special effects artist whose career has spanned more than thirty years. His work has appeared in over 200 films, countless television shows, theme parks, commercials, and music videos. Some of his best-known creations include Slimer for Ghostbusters , the alien seductress Sil for Species , Robin Williams's robotics for Bicentennial Man , and Doctor Octopus's arms for Spider-Man 2 .
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#6275

Amar Bose

Amar Bose
#103418
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Amar Gopal Bose was an American entrepreneur and academic. An electrical engineer and sound engineer, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over 45 years. He was also the founder and chairman of Bose Corporation.
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#6276

George Alexander

#153159
Overall Influence
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#6277

Marco Schieppati

#153171
Overall Influence
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#6278

Alan D. Irvine

#153193
Overall Influence
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#6279

Ravi S. Prasher

#153194
Overall Influence
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#6280

Takashi Kyotani

#153207
Overall Influence
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#6281

Marc Jordi

#132218
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Marc Jordi is a Swiss architect and artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His artistic work is in sculpture, drawing and photography. Jordi is a partner in the architecture office of Jordi-Keller. He is an advocate of "contextualism" in urban planning which bases the analysis of the surroundings and the history of the location as the foundation for the architectural design. His work consists of the integration of components from demolished buildings into the new buildings, and is so-called Spolia "virtuoso". In his "Torsi" sculptures he explores the relationship of becoming and decaying as testimony of aging and as a central theme of the creative process.
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#6282

Alex B. Gershman

#153248
Overall Influence
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#6283

Munish Kumar Gupta

#153263
Overall Influence
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#6284

Michael J. Buchmeier

#153287
Overall Influence
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#6285

Radha Poovendran

#153288
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Radha Poovendran is a Professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is Chair of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and founding director of the Network Security Lab. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to security in cyber-physical systems.
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#6286

Alberto Porta

#153308
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
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#6287

Martyn Vincent Twigg

#153316
Overall Influence
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#6288

Niels Olhoff

#153317
Overall Influence
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#6289

Curtis A. Dickman

#153345
Overall Influence
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#6290

Zuyi Li

#153350
Overall Influence
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#6291

J. F. Illingworth

#153351
Overall Influence
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#6292

William D. Ray

#153352
Overall Influence
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#6293

Luca Schenato

#153361
Overall Influence
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#6294

Anu Sabhlok

#67246
Overall Influence
Anu Sabhlok is an Indian architect, geographer and feminist scholar. Her main focus of work is on issues of identity and space in the context of a ‘developing world’. She earned a double Ph.D. in ‘Feminist Geography’ from Pennsylvania State University in 2007. Her doctoral work at Penn State focused on the role of women of the informal sector in construction of identity amidst heightened nationalism and liberalisation of the economy in Gujarat, India.
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#6295

Gunther Reinhart

#153394
Overall Influence
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#6296

Francis Landis Markley

#153413
Overall Influence
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#6297

Eyad A. Masad

#153424
Overall Influence
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#6298

Mary Ryan

Mary Ryan
#138824
Overall Influence
Mary Patricia Ryan is a Professor of Materials Science at Imperial College London and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Education Ryan completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Manchester. Her PhD was on using "in-situ ECSTM to study the formation of ultra-thin surface oxides on base metals", and she managed to show for the first time that these surface oxides have crystalline phases. She spent three years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, where she developed in situ electrochemical systems using synchrotron radiation-based techniques.
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#6299

Jian-wei Xia

#153465
Overall Influence
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#6300

Stephen Trimberger

#109749
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stephen "Steve" Trimberger is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, philanthropist, and prolific inventor with 250 US utility patents as of August 26, 2021. He is a DARPA program manager of the microsystems technology office.
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