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,
#6801
Wolfgang Kellerer
#159345
Overall Influence
#6802
Frank V. Bright
#159367
Overall Influence
#6803
Thomas Mason
#62846
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Thomas Mason is a Canadian-American condensed-matter physicist who serves as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prior to this appointment, he had been an executive at Battelle Memorial Institute from 2017 to 2018, and the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2007 to 2017. Mason moved to Oak Ridge in 1998 at the start of construction of the Spallation Neutron Source which he led from 2001 until project completion in 2006.
Go to Profile#6804
Asif Saifuddin
#159386
Overall Influence
#6805
Nan Goldin
#40089
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency . The monograph documents the post-Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N. . She lives and works in New York City.
Go to Profile#6806
Albert G. Richards
#77233
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Albert G. Richards was a photographer and dental scientist. Career Born in Chicago. Richards obtained a degree in Chemical Engineering and Physics at the University of Michigan. Richards became a dental instructor in 1940. Richards became a professor in 1959 and taught at Michigan for more than four decades.
Go to Profile#6807
Matteo Sonza Reorda
#159422
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Matteo Sonza Reorda is an electrical engineer at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for his design of test algorithms for reliable circuits and systems. Actually he is the head of CAD - Electronic CAD & Reliabillity Group at Politecnico di Torino. He teaches Computer architectures.
Go to Profile#6808
Hitoshi Iba
#159428
Overall Influence
#6809
Ezio Todini
#159430
Overall Influence
#6810
Frank Ellinger
#159442
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
#6811
L. Henry Jr. Edmunds
#159460
Overall Influence
#6812
Masatoshi Okutomi
#159465
Overall Influence
#6813
Mary Ann Jordan
#159494
Overall Influence
#6814
De-biao Li
#159509
Overall Influence
#6815
Jeffery M. Vance
#159523
Overall Influence
#6816
Jakob Mann
#159544
Overall Influence
#6817
Osamu Fujimura
#101408
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Osamu Fujimura 藤村靖 was a Japanese physicist, phonetician and linguist, recognized as one of the pioneers of speech science. Fujimura was also known for his influential work in the diverse field of speech-related studies including acoustics, phonetics/phonology, instrumentation techniques, speech production mechanisms, and computational/theoretical linguistics.
Go to Profile#6818
Jian Zhen Yu
#159557
Overall Influence
#6819
Paul Tasker
#117974
Overall Influence
Paul Juan Tasker is an electrical engineer known for his research on microwaves. He is a professor at Cardiff University, Wales, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Go to Profile#6820
Hans-joachim Dr Rer Wunderlich
#159565
Overall Influence
#6821
Jonathan Arthur Barker
#159578
Overall Influence
#6822
Tim Leiner
#159583
Overall Influence
#6823
Paul Wayne Eggers
#159593
Overall Influence
#6824
Utkan Demirci
#159594
Overall Influence
#6825
Nicholas John Severs
#159612
Overall Influence
#6826
Tang Lixin
#139645
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Tang Lixin is a Chinese engineer currently serving as a professor and vice-president of Northeastern University. Biography Tang was born in Liaoning in August 1966. He earned a bachelor's degree in industrial automation in 1988, a master's degree in systems engineering in 1991, and a doctor's degree in control theory and application in 1996, all from Northeastern University. After graduating, he taught at the university, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and to full professor in 1999. In November 2015 he was promoted to deputy dean of its School of Information Science and Engineering.
Go to Profile#6827
Anne E. Carpenter
#83008
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Anne E. Carpenter is an American scientist in the field of image analysis for cell biology and artificial intelligence for drug discovery. She is the co-creator of CellProfiler, open-source software for high-throughput biological image analysis, and a co-inventor of the Cell Painting assay, a method for image-based profiling. She is an Institute Scientist and Senior Director of the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute.
Go to Profile#6828
Ya Cheng
#159672
Overall Influence
#6829
Guang Gong
#159701
Overall Influence
#6830
Eric Harold Mansfield
#122998
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Eric Harold Mansfield FRS FREng was an aeronautical engineer who won the Royal Medal in 1994, "for his many fundamental and analytical contributions to our knowledge of advanced aeronautical structures, and more recently to the biological sciences."
Go to Profile#6831
Jayne Woodside
#158622
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jayne Valerie Woodside is a British nutritionist who is Professor of Human Nutrition at the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen's University Belfast. Her research considers human nutrition intervention with whole foods. She is on the Board of Trustees of The Nutrition Society.
Go to Profile#6832
Toshikazu Takeda
#159751
Overall Influence
#6833
Ian F. C. Mckenzie
#159770
Overall Influence
#6834
John Ross
#159773
Overall Influence
#6835
Shaily Mahendra
#148720
Overall Influence
Shaily Mahendra is an Indian-American civil and environmental engineer. She is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles . Career After earning her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, Mahendra accepted a research scientist position at Rice University. At Rice, Mahendra studied how silver nanoparticles contained in water filtration membranes, polymers, and oil paints, worked to disinfect viruses, bacteria, and fungi. She also led a project to explore natural and engineered bioremediation of 1,4-dioxane in colder climate...
Go to Profile#6836
Lu Yongxiang
#96880
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Lu Yongxiang is a Chinese mechanical engineer and politician. He served as President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Vice Chairman of the National People's Congress. Biography Lu studied in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University , and majored in hydrodynamics . He graduated from ZJU in 1964, and became a lecturer in his department at ZJU. 1979, Lu was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at RWTH Aachen University, West Germany. Lu obtained his doctorate in 1981, based on his dissertation Entwicklung vorgesteuerter Proportionalventile mit 2-Wege-Einbauventil als Stellglied und mit geräteinterner Rückführung.
Go to Profile#6837
Zenonas Turskis
#159790
Overall Influence
#6838
Hiroshi Kageyama
#159796
Overall Influence
#6839
Costas Galiotis
#159834
Overall Influence
#6840
Indraneel Mittra
#93009
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Indraneel Mittra, MBBS, PhD. , FRCS , FASc, FNA is an Indian cancer surgeon, basic research scientist, and public health researcher. He is the Dr. Ernest Borges Chair in Translational Research and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Surgical Oncology, Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai. He established the first dedicated multi-disciplinary Breast Unit in India – a model which has since been adopted by most centers in the country. He pioneered the discipline of clinical research in cancer in India and pursued the cause of improving cancer care in the developing world. In this context, and wit...
Go to Profile#6841
Itala Fulvia Villa
#135871
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Itala Fulvia Villa was an Argentinian architect whose main forte was city planning. She was an integral part of creating and designing the urban model for the city of Buenos Aires. As part of urbanization process, she designed and built a plan for the neighborhood known as Bajo Flores, where Pope Francis grew up, for which she received first prize in the 6th National Exhibition of Architecture Fair in 1945. In 1979, she was a representative of the Argentina Federation of University Women.
Go to Profile#6842
Hoay Beng. Gooi
#159883
Overall Influence
#6843
Todd Brun
#105987
Overall Influence
Todd A. Brun is an American engineer and physicist, currently a professor at University of Southern California. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "contributions to quantum theory and quantum information science, including decoherence and continuous quantum measurement, quantum computation, and quantum error correction." He is a coinventor of the method of entanglement-assisted quantum error correction, which allows for the use of shared entanglement in quantum error correction and for producing a quantum error correction code from an arbitrary classical error correction code.
Go to Profile#6844
Filippo Cademartiri
#159886
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#6845
R. H. Jackson
#159912
Overall Influence
#6846
Kornell F. Ehmann
#159919
Overall Influence
#6847
Tsutomu Ohzuku
#159927
Overall Influence
#6848
Nicos Makris
#159929
Overall Influence
#6849
Seshadri Raju
#159947
Overall Influence
#6850
Stefano Maci
#159966
Overall Influence
