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,
#801
Ben Wang
#18548
Overall Influence
Ben Wang is an American materials scientist who specializes in materials engineering, applying emerging technologies to improve the manufacturing of affordable composite materials. He is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, holds the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair in Manufacturing, and is the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.
Go to Profile#802
Menachem Mendel Schneerson
#968
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Menachem Mendel Schneerson , known to adherents of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or simply the Rebbe, was an Orthodox rabbi and the most recent Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#803
Harold Lawson
#18686
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Harold W. "Bud" Lawson was a software engineer, computer architect and systems engineer. Lawson is credited with the 1964 invention of the pointer in high-level programming languages . In 2000, Lawson was presented the Computer Pioneer Award by the IEEE for his invention.
Go to Profile#804
Gene F. Franklin
#30862
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Gene F. Franklin was an American electrical engineer and control theorist known for his pioneering work towards the advancement of the control systems engineering – a subfield of electrical engineering. Most of his work on control theory was adapted immediately into NASA's U.S. space program, most famously in the control systems for the Apollo missions to the Moon in 1960s–1970s.
Go to Profile#805
Aaron Siskind
#10805
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Aaron Siskind was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with painters Franz Kline , Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Go to Profile#806
Mitch Altman
#18755
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mitch Altman is a Berlin-based hacker and inventor of TV-B-Gone. He is a featured speaker at hacker conferences, an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and teaches introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
Go to Profile#807
Oskar von Stryk
#16526
Overall Influence
#808
Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman Al Hussein
#30765
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman Al Hussein is a Saudi engineer. He has been the minister of water and electricity since 2004. Education Al Hussein obtained a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in 1973. He received a master of science degree in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976.
Go to Profile#809
Tatsuo Itoh
#40537
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tatsuo Itoh was an electrical engineer who was professor and holder of the Northrop Grumman Chair in Microwave and Millimeter Wave Electronics in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he taught and conducted research on microwave and millimeter wave electronics, guided wave structures, low power wireless electronics, and integrated passive components and antennas.
Go to Profile#810
K. R. Rao
#7142
Overall Influence
1961 - 2021 (60 years)
Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao was an Indian-American electrical engineer. He was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington . Academically known as K. R. Rao, he is credited with the co-invention of discrete cosine transform , along with Nasir Ahmed and T. Natarajan due to their landmark publication, Discrete Cosine Transform.
Go to Profile#811
Eleanor K. Baum
#25811
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Electrical Engineering Eleanor K. Baum was born in Poland. She is currently Dean Emeritus of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering at Cooper Union. As a young child, Baum and her family were forced to flee their homeland by the Nazi invasion and occupation of their country. After escaping from Poland to the Soviet Union, they traveled across Siberia to reach Japan. From there, the family immigrated to Canada, before entering the US and settling in Brooklyn, New York, where Baum, an only child, attended Midwood High School. Baum received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1959 from City College of New York, where she was the only woman in her class.
Go to Profile#812
Theodore Rappaport
#32721
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Theodore Scott Rappaport is an American electrical engineer and the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and founding director of NYU WIRELESS.
Go to Profile#813
Ayanna Howard
#21447
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#814
Kenneth C. Smith
#24891
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Kenneth C. Smith is a Canadian electrical engineer and professor. He is currently Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto. Academic career Smith received the Bachelor of Applied Science degree from the Division of Engineering Physics in 1954, the M.A.Sc in electrical engineering in 1956, and the Ph.D. in Physics in 1960, all from the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#815
Menachem Elimelech
#48324
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Menachem Elimelech is the Sterling Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University. Elimelech is the only professor from an engineering department at Yale to be awarded the Sterling professorship since its establishment in 1920. Elimelech moved from the University of California, Los Angeles to Yale University in 1998 and founded Yale's Environmental Engineering program.
Go to Profile#816
Chi-Wang Shu
#32081
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Chi-Wang Shu is the Theodore B. Stowell University Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He is known for his research in the fields of computational fluid dynamics, numerical solutions of conservation laws and Hamilton–Jacobi type equations. Shu has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge.
Go to Profile#817
Henrik I. Christensen
#27026
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Henrik Iskov Christensen is a Danish roboticist and Professor of Computer Science at Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also the Director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.
Go to Profile#818
Adrian Mihai Ionescu
#27038
Overall Influence
Adrian Ionescu is a full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne on a special contract. Education He received the B.S./M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 1989 and 1997, respectively. He has held staff and/or visiting positions at LETI-CEA, Grenoble, France, LPCS-ENSERG, Grenoble, France and Stanford University, US, in 1998 and 1999. He was a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2012 and 2016.
Go to Profile#819
Toyohiro Akiyama
#7683
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Toyohiro Akiyama is a retired Japanese TV journalist and professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design. In December 1990, he spent seven days aboard the Mir space station. He became the first person of Japanese nationality to fly in space, and his space mission was the second spaceflight to be commercially sponsored and funded. Akiyama was also the first civilian to use commercial space flight, and the first journalist to report from outer space.
Go to Profile#820
Sung-Mo Kang
#20070
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang is an American electrical engineering scientist, professor, writer, inventor, entrepreneur and 15th president of KAIST. Kang was appointed as the second chancellor of the University of California, Merced in 2007. He was the first department head of foreign origin at the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kang teaches and has written extensively in the field of computer-aided design for electronic circuits and systems; he is recognized and respected worldwide for his outstanding research contributions. Kang has ...
Go to Profile#821
George Cybenko
#5556
Overall Influence
George V. Cybenko is the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and a fellow of the IEEE and SIAM. Education Cybenko obtained his BA in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1974 and received his PhD from Princeton in applied mathematics of electrical and computer engineering in 1978 under Bede Liu.
Go to Profile#822
Markus J. Buehler
#25791
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Markus J. Buehler is an American materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he holds the endowed McAfee Professorship of Engineering chair. He is a member of the faculty at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics , and also a member of MIT's Center for Computational Science and Engineering in the Schwarzman College of Computing. His scholarship spans science to art, and he is also a composer of experimental, classical and electronic music, with an interest in sonification.
Go to Profile#823
Bijoy Jain
#37440
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Bijoy Jain is an Indian architect and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor at Yale University. Biography Bijoy Jain grew up in Mumbai and studied architecture at Washington University in St Louis until 1990 and worked in Richard Meier office at Los Angeles and London between 1989 and 1995. He returned to India in 1995 and founded his own firm Studio Mumbai. Bijoy Jain was invited by Alejandro Aravena to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 and to the ETH Zurich as a guest critic by Raphael Zuber in 2018.
Go to Profile#824
George A. Bekey
#29265
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
George A. Bekey is an American roboticist and the Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Bekey was born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1928 before immigrating at the beginning of WW2 to Bolivia before moving to the United States five years later at the age of 17 in 1945.
Go to Profile#825
Rajko Tomović
#38611
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Rajko Tomović was a Serbian and Yugoslav scientist, who developed research programs in robotics, medical information technology, biomedical engineering, rehabilitation engineering, artificial organs, and other disciplines. He is officially credited for creation of the first artificial hand with five fingers in 1963 in Belgrade. He was a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts .
Go to Profile#826
Povl Ole Fanger
#37358
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Povl Ole Fanger was an expert in the field of thermal comfort and perception of indoor environments. He was a senior professor at the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy at the Technical University of Denmark. He was a visiting University Professor at Syracuse University when he died at the age of 72 from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. His work is credited with demonstrating that poor air quality in homes can cause asthma in children, and that poor air quality in workplaces decreases productivity. His contribution to the research on thermal comfort still defines the state of the art in HVAC technology and the basis for international standardisation.
Go to Profile#827
John O. Limb
#27782
Overall Influence
John O. Limb is an Australian engineer, known for fundamental contributions to the development of digital video communications and holder of a series of patents related to computer communications. Early life and education Born in Western Australia, he got a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. on the thesis Vision Oriented Coding of Visual Signal , both from the University of Western Australia. Limb studied the human vision's role in the encoding of picture, partially under the direction of Dr. Albert Seyler and Professor Zig Budrikis.
Go to Profile#828
James H. McClellan
#25550
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James H. McClellan is the Byers Professor of Signal Processing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is widely known for his creation of the McClellan transform and for his co-authorship of the Parks–McClellan filter design algorithm.
Go to Profile#829
Braden Allenby
#21061
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Braden R. Allenby is an American environmental scientist, environmental attorney and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and of Law, at Arizona State University. Biography Allenby was born in Highland Park, Illinois on December 29, 1950, to Dr. Richard J. Allenby, Jr. and Julia T. Allenby. He is the oldest of three brothers, Dr. Kent Allenby and Peter Allenby.
Go to Profile#830
Jeanette Epps
#35266
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jeanette Jo Epps is an American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut. Epps received both her M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, where she was part of the rotor-craft research group and was a NASA GSRP Fellow. She was chosen for the 20th class of NASA astronauts in 2009, graduating in 2011. Epps currently serves as a member of the ISS Operations Branch and has completed analog astronaut missions, including NEEMO 18 and CAVES 19. She is the second woman and first African-American woman to have participated in CAVES. She has been selected to fly to...
Go to Profile#831
Jim Dine
#3742
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Jim Dine is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking , sculpture and photography; his early works encompassed assemblage and happenings, while in recent years his poetry output, both in publications and readings, has increased.
Go to Profile#832
Michael McKinnell
#28375
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Noel Michael McKinnell was a British-born American architect and co-founder of the Kallmann McKinnell & Wood architectural design firm. In 1962, McKinnell, who was a Columbia University graduate student at the time, and Columbia professor Gerhard Kallmann submitted the winning design for Boston City Hall, which opened in 1968. McKinnell and Kallman moved to Boston shortly after winning the competition and founded their firm, now known as Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, in 1962.
Go to Profile#833
Ping King Tien
#35907
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Ping King Tien was a Chinese-American electrical engineer and scientist, noted for his contributions to microwave amplifiers and integrated optical circuits. Biography Tien was born in Shangyu, Shaoxing, Chekiang province, China. He did his undergraduate studies in the National Central University in Nanjing and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1942. Tien continued his study in the United States, and received his master's degree in 1948 and PhD in 1951 both from the Stanford University.
Go to Profile#834
Nikola Hajdin
#42924
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Nikola Hajdin was a Serbian construction engineer, professor and the president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, as a member of the Department of Technical Sciences. Biography As a construction engineer, he built many bridges in Yugoslavia; most prominently the New Railway Bridge in Belgrade and the Liberty Bridge in Novi Sad. Nikola Hajdin also designed the bridge which was built in 2007 in Poland - the Solidarity Bridge in Płock over the Vistula river.
Go to Profile#835
Johannes Knoops
#23126
Overall Influence
Johannes M. P. Knoops is an American architect, international architectural correspondent, and Professor in the Department of Interior Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology / State University of New York in New York City. Knoops design for a private study in the tradition of a Japanese scholar's study as influenced by origami was written about in New York Magazine and his design for a new wedding chapel atop the New York Municipal Building by Architectural Scholar.
Go to Profile#836
Thomas Stockham
#27918
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Thomas Greenway Stockham was an American scientist who developed one of the first practical digital audio recording systems, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing. He also led the development of the Digital Audio Tape system.
Go to Profile#837
Jens Blauert
#26158
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jens Peter Blauert is a German scientist specializing in psychoacoustics and an emeritus professor at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he founded the Institute of Communication Acoustics. His major scientific fields of interest are spatial hearing, binaural technology, aural architecture, perceptual quality, speech technology, virtual environments and tele-presence.
Go to Profile#838
Yoshio Watanabe
#44904
Overall Influence
1907 - 2000 (93 years)
Yoshio Watanabe was a Japanese photographer. Publications Kenzō Tange and Noboru Kawazoe. Ise. Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Photographs by Yoshio Watanabe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1965.Sutemi Horiguchi and Yoshio Watanabe. Ise jingū. [Tōkyō]: Heibonsha, 1973.Yoshio Watanabe. Ise jingū. Tōkyō: Nikkōrukurabu, 1994.
Go to Profile#839
George Nemhauser
#12929
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.
Go to Profile#840
James Harder
#39366
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
James Albert Harder, Ph.D., was a professor of civil and hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor emeritus there. Harder also had interest in ufology. Engineering Harder taught in civil engineering at several levels, including practical aspects like lab experiments relating to the field and model testing. He produced few papers but was known for their quality.
Go to Profile#841
Charbel Farhat
#19733
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where from 2008 to 2023, he chaired the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. From 2022 to 2023, he chaired this department as the inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is also Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Director of the Stanford-King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics. From 2017 to 2023, he served on the Space...
Go to Profile#842
Richard Meier
#19996
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Richard Meier is an American abstract artist and architect, whose geometric designs make prominent use of the color white. A winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984, Meier has designed several iconic buildings including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and San Jose City Hall. In 2018, some of Meier's employees accused him of sexual assault, which led to him resigning from his firm in 2021.
Go to Profile#843
Jim K. Omura
#27064
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jimmy K. Omura is an electrical engineer and information theorist. Omura received his B.S. and M.S. from MIT, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. He was a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA for 15 years. His notable work includes the design of a number of spread spectrum communications systems, and the Massey-Omura cryptosystem . With Andrew Viterbi he co-authored Principles of Digital Communication and Coding , a standard textbook in digital communications. He also co-authored the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook .
Go to Profile#844
Abdus Suttar Khan
#23376
Overall Influence
1941 - 2008 (67 years)
Abdus Suttar Khan was a Bangladeshi scientist. He researched on aerospace for four decades with NASA, United Technology, and Alstom, a French power generation company. Khan invented more than forty different alloys for commercial application in space shuttles, jet engines, train engines and industrial gas turbines.
Go to Profile#845
James. C. Bezdek
#51628
Overall Influence
#846
Man-Chung Tang
#26347
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Man-Chung Tang Ph.D., P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, NAE, CorrFRSE is a Chinese-born American civil engineer and businessman. Tang is chairman of the board and the technical director of T. Y. Lin International, an American design and construction company.
Go to Profile#847
Leonardo Benevolo
#32208
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Leonardo Benevolo was an Italian architect, city planner and architecture historian. Born in Orta San Giulio, Italy, Benevolo studied architecture in Rome where he graduated in 1946. Later taught history of architecture in Rome, Florence, Venice and Palermo. His book Storia dell'archittetura moderna first published in 1960 has been reprinted 18 times, as of 1996, and translated into six other languages. Benevolo developed the concept of ‘neo-conservative’ city which became an important contribution to the understanding of cities’ evolution.
Go to Profile#848
Mohan Munasinghe
#13200
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Mohan Munasinghe is a Sri Lankan physicist, engineer and economist with a focus on energy, water resources, sustainable development and climate change. He was the 2021 Blue Planet Prize Laureate, and Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice-President of the United States Al Gore. Munasinghe is the Founder Chairman of the Munasinghe Institute for Development. He has also served as an honorary senior advisor to the government of Sri Lanka since 1980.
Go to Profile#849
Ralph Lorenz
#35257
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ralph D. Lorenz is a planetary scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. whose research focuses on understanding surfaces, atmospheres, and their interactions on planetary bodies, especially Titan, Venus, Mars, and Earth. He currently serves as Mission Architect of Dragonfly, NASA's fourth selected New Frontiers mission, and as participating scientist on Akatsuki and InSight. He is a Co-Investigator on the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover, responsible for interpreting data from its microphone. He leads the Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation on the DAVINCI Discovery mission to Venus.
Go to Profile#850
Salman A. Avestimehr
#26300
Overall Influence
Salman A. Avestimehr is a Dean's professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments of University of Southern California, where he is the inaugural director of the USC-Amazon Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning and the director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning research lab. He is also the CEO and Co-Founder of FedML. Avestimehr's contributions in research and publications are in the areas of information theory, machine learning, large-scale distributed computing, and secure/private computing and learning. In particular, he is best known for deterministic approximation approaches to network information theory and coded computing.
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