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,
#7201
Nikolay Vatolin
#115894
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Nikolay Anatolyevich Vatolin was a Soviet and Russian metallurgist. He was born in Sverdlovsk and educated at the Ural State Technical University. He was a scientific researcher, Head of laboratory and from 1968 Director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Metallurgy from 1952 to 1998, after which he was an adviser to the Academy. He was also a professor at the Ural State Mining University from 1973.
Go to Profile#7202
Héctor M. García‐garcía
#164210
Overall Influence
#7203
Allan Douglas Jepson
#164218
Overall Influence
#7204
M. Anthony Schork
#164261
Overall Influence
#7205
Antoinette Jane Taylor
#164286
Overall Influence
#7206
Chang Won Song
#164296
Overall Influence
#7207
Maryam Tabrizian
#164298
Overall Influence
#7208
Charles Natanson
#164305
Overall Influence
#7209
Merit Ester Cudkowicz
#164334
Overall Influence
#7210
Michael J. Morris
#164339
Overall Influence
#7211
Emil J. Hopfinger
#164340
Overall Influence
#7212
Gregory R. D. Evans
#164359
Overall Influence
#7213
Nathan W. Cheung
#164360
Overall Influence
#7214
Charles L. Tucker
#164369
Overall Influence
#7215
Michael Beer
#164391
Overall Influence
#7216
Michael T. Orchard
#164392
Overall Influence
#7217
Howard Kent Birnbaum
#123101
Overall Influence
1932 - 2005 (73 years)
Howard Kent Birnbaum was an American metallurgist who was well known due to his works on the interaction of point, linear and planar defects in plastic deformation of materials. He received his BS in 1953 and MS in 1955 from Columbia University. In 1958 he received his PhD in metallurgy from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1958 he started teaching at the University of Chicago and joined University of Illinois in 1961.
Go to Profile#7218
Emil Burzo
#164442
Overall Influence
#7219
Boon-teck. Ooi
#164449
Overall Influence
#7220
Brian B. Avants
#164452
Overall Influence
#7221
George Ronald Hadley
#164464
Overall Influence
#7222
Robert Alfred Laudise
#164465
Overall Influence
#7223
Borko Furht
#164468
Overall Influence
#7224
Ruwan Gopura
#145201
Overall Influence
Ruwan Chandra Gopura is a professor attached to the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and a former Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa. He is the Founding Head, Department of Medical Technology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Moratuwa. He is currently the Director/Research at the same university. Gopura was the chairperson of IEEE Sri Lanka Section in 2020. He was the chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Sri Lanka Section Chapter from February 2017 to February 2020. He was the secretary of the same Chapter from 2013 to 2017.
Go to Profile#7225
Vijay Kumar Sharma
#164477
Overall Influence
#7226
Manuel Doblaré
#164484
Overall Influence
#7227
Dian‐yuan Fan
#164486
Overall Influence
#7228
Mark C. Preul
#164495
Overall Influence
#7229
Lynn Davis
#80345
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lynn Davis is an American photographer known for her large-scale black-and-white photographs which are widely collected publicly and privately and are internationally exhibited. Biography Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1944, Davis studied at University of Colorado between 1962 and 1964, and at the University of Minnesota from 1964 to 1966. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970, and in 1974 she began her career as an apprentice to Berenice Abbott.
Go to Profile#7230
Richard Dean Piner
#164541
Overall Influence
#7231
Graham De Vahl Davis
#164549
Overall Influence
#7232
William Henry Steier
#164572
Overall Influence
#7233
Regina G. H. Beets‐tan
#164623
Overall Influence
#7234
Dan Linetzky Waitzberg
#164627
Overall Influence
#7235
Sung Kyu Lim
#164655
Overall Influence
#7236
Wayne A. J. Morrison
#164679
Overall Influence
#7237
Mingyan Liu
#98056
Overall Influence
Mingyan Liu is an electrical engineering and computer science professor, and the Peter and Evelyn Fuss Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Her research is in optimal resource allocation, sequential decision theory, incentive design, online learning, and modeling and mining of large scale Internet measurement data concerning cyber security. She was a co-founder of the cybersecurity scoring startup Quadmetrics in 2014. Quadmetrics was named a "2016 Cool Vendor in Risk Management" by Gartner, and was acquired by FICO in 2016.
Go to Profile#7238
Dario Pompili
#164711
Overall Influence
#7239
Craig Ν. Shealy
#164721
Overall Influence
#7240
Klaus-josef Bengler
#164732
Overall Influence
#7241
Charles L. Byrne
#164733
Overall Influence
#7242
Pamela Cosman
#153373
Overall Influence
Pamela Cosman is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. She has conducted a pioneering research on the quality of compressed images for application in medical diagnostic imaging. At UCSD, Cosman currently researches ways to improve wireless video transmission.
Go to Profile#7243
Hsia Chu-joe
#105129
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hsia Chu-joe is a Taiwanese activist, architect, and academic specializing in urban design. Life and career Hsia was born in Nanjing, Republic of China in 1947. His father founded the Taiwan Daily. Hsia Chu-joe has two younger siblings, brother Hsia Yu-joe, and sister .
Go to Profile#7244
Volker Musahl
#164766
Overall Influence
#7245
Laszlo Peter Kollar
#108727
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
László Peter Kollar was an Australian architect and professor at the University of New South Wales, who was known for his Design Principles, which were influenced by the human condition and spiritual traditions.
Go to Profile#7246
Susan Rankaitis
#65931
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susan Rankaitis is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy , whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
Go to Profile#7247
Seung-hoi Hong
#164789
Overall Influence
#7248
Julian T. Parer
#164800
Overall Influence
#7249
George Martel And J. R. Brock Hidy
#164806
Overall Influence
#7250
Charles M. Rader
#164825
Overall Influence
