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,
#8501
John Glenn
#127988
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was an American Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space, and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962. Following his retirement from NASA, he served from 1974 to 1999 as a U.S. Senator from Ohio; in 1998, he flew into space again at the age of 77.
Go to Profile#8502
John Divola
#116990
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. He is a professor in the art department at University of California Riverside.
Go to Profile#8503
Sherwin J Singer
#181690
Overall Influence
#8504
Peter Annan
#161218
Overall Influence
Alexander Peter Annan is an engineer whose research focuses on near-surface geophysics. He has made significant contributions to the development of ground-penetrating radar technology. Annan is the CEO of Sensors & Software, a company he founded to commercialize GPR technology. He has been working on the development of GPR since the 1970s and was one of the lead researchers on the surface electrical properties experiment conducted on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission.
Go to Profile#8505
Namrata Vaswani
#93426
Overall Influence
Namrata Vaswani is an Indian-American electrical engineer known for her research in compressed sensing, robust principal component analysis, signal processing, statistical learning theory, and computer vision. She is a Joseph and Elizabeth Anderlik Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University, and a professor of mathematics at Iowa State.
Go to Profile#8506
Jacqueline Livingston
#69517
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Jacqueline Louise Livingston was an American photographer known for her work exploring woman's role as artist and person and investigating the boundaries of intimacy and propriety. Life and career Born Jaqueline Louise Barrett in Phoenix, Arizona in August 1943, reared in Chandler, Arizona and schooled at Arizona State University, with her then husband, John Livingston, she organized Students for a Democratic Society on the ASU campus in the mid-1960s, spearheading the major SDS activities of civil rights demonstrations, education about corrupt government practices, and protests against the w...
Go to Profile#8507
David Theodore Blaauw
#134327
Overall Influence
David Theodore Blaauw is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to adaptive and low power circuit design.
Go to Profile#8508
Qiang Gao
#181769
Overall Influence
#8509
Matthew Johnson-Roberson
#177343
Overall Influence
Matthew Johnson-Roberson is an American roboticist, researcher, entrepreneur and educator. Since January 2022 he has served as director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously he was a professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering since 2013, where he co-directed the UM Ford Center for Autonomous Vehicles with Ram Vasudevan. His research focuses on computer vision and artificial intelligence, with the specific applications of autonomous underwater vehicles and self-driving cars. He is also the co-founder and CTO of Refraction AI, a company focused...
Go to Profile#8510
Patricia Ann Straat
#105903
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Patricia Ann Straat was an American space scientist. She was part of the labeled release experiment of Viking program and part of the infrared interferometer spectrometer and radiometer on the Mariner 9 mission. In 2019 Straat wrote the book To Mars With Love, which documented the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars.
Go to Profile#8511
Meeko Oishi
#178944
Overall Influence
Meeko Mitsuko Karen Oishi is an American engineer and control theorist. She is Gardner Zemke Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Research Oishi's research focuses on the safety of human-in-the-loop systems for transportation, assistive technology, and robotics, using methods based on stochastic control. She has also studied motor control in Parkinson's disease patients, and the effects of intelligent lighting on circadian rhythms.
Go to Profile#8512
Sidonia Făgărășan
#52642
Overall Influence
Sidonia Făgărășan is a Romanian biological scientist who is a professor at the Riken Institute in Japan. Her research considers the molecular mechanisms that underpin processes in gut microbioata and the mucosal barrier. In 2020, she was awarded the Kobayashi Foundation Award.
Go to Profile#8513
Liz Lightstone
#172735
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Elizabeth Beatrice Lightstone is a British physician and consultant who is a Professor of Nephrology at Imperial College London. Her research investigates disease in kidneys such as lupus nephritis, glomerular disease and chronic kidney disease . Lighthouse has also investigated healthcare inequalities.
Go to Profile#8514
Alexandra Silverthorne
#148465
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Alexandra Silverthorne is a Washington, D.C.-based artist and photographer. Her work focuses on spatial theory and exploration. She has been an adjunct professor at American University for Film and Media Arts as well as the University of the District of Columbia since 2010 where she works with undergraduates in darkroom photography.
Go to Profile#8515
Yang Yang
#152200
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yang Yang is a Taiwanese-American materials scientist. He is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Carol and Lawrence E. Tannas Jr. Endowed Chair in Engineering. Yang is known for his contributions to polymer organic solar cells and lead-halide perovskite solar cells. He was named as one of the "World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds" by Thomson Reuters in 2016. Yang is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, Materials Research...
Go to Profile#8516
Karen Rudie
#168914
Overall Influence
Karen Gail Rudie is a Canadian control theorist and electrical engineer known for her work on the decentralized control of discrete event dynamic systems. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in Queen's University at Kingston.
Go to Profile#8517
Mir Jalaleddin Kazzazi
#52967
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mir Jalaleddin Kazzazi is a professor of Persian literature and an Iranist. Kazzazi is a professor of literature at Allameh Tabataba'i University in Tehran. He is known for his work on the Shahnameh, a Persian long epic poem written between and 1010 CE.
Go to Profile#8518
Utpal Dutt
#59610
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Utpal Dutt was an Indian actor, director, and writer-playwright. He was primarily an actor in Bengali theatre, where he became a pioneering figure in Modern Indian theatre, when he founded the "Little Theatre Group" in 1949. This group enacted many English, Shakespearean and Brecht plays, in a period now known as the "Epic theatre" period, before it immersed itself completely in highly political and radical theatre. His plays became an apt vehicle for the expression of his Marxist ideologies, visible in socio-political plays such as Kallol , Manusher Adhikar, Louha Manob , Tiner Toloar and Maha-Bidroha.
Go to Profile#8519
Jean Marais
#27665
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais , known professionally as Jean Marais , was a French actor, film director, theatre director, painter, sculptor, visual artist, writer and photographer. He performed in over 100 films and was the muse and lover of acclaimed director Jean Cocteau. In 1996, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his contributions to French cinema.
Go to Profile#8520
Mauro Mongiardo
#181913
Overall Influence
Mauro Mongiardo is an electrical engineer at the University of Perugia, Italy. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to the modal analysis of complex electromagnetic structures.
Go to Profile#8521
Rachel Davidson
#151961
Overall Influence
Rachel A. Davidson is an American civil engineer and professor in the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. She is known for her research on natural disaster risk modeling, disaster risk management and civil infrastructure systems. She is a winner of the Dorothy Swanson Excellence in Teaching Award and a nominee for the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. She was the president of Society for Risk Analysis .
Go to Profile#8522
Elena Rodriguez-Falcon
#173838
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Elena Rodriguez-Falcon is a Mexican academic who studies engineering. She is the Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Study Group. Rodriguez-Falcon was Professor of Enterprise and Engineering Education at the University of Sheffield until January 2018. Until September 2023, she was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Rodriguez-Falcon was the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering having briefly served as its Provost and Chief Academic Officer.
Go to Profile#8523
Paul Reas
#72953
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul Reas is a British social documentary photographer and university lecturer. He is best known for photographing consumerism in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. Reas has produced the books I Can Help , Flogging a Dead Horse: Heritage Culture and Its Role in Post-industrial Britain and Fables of Faubus . He has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery and London College of Communication, London; Cornerhouse, Manchester; and Impressions Gallery, Bradford. His work is held in the collection of the British Council.
Go to Profile#8524
Robert E. Johnson
#92882
Overall Influence
Robert E. Johnson is an American mathematician, engineer and physicist, currently the John Lloyd Newcomb Professor Engineering Physics and Materials Science at University of Virginia, with interests on biomolecular, atmospheric and condensed-gas solids.
Go to Profile#8525
Jack Brisco
#68149
Overall Influence
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Freddie Joe "Jack" Brisco was an American amateur and professional wrestler. As an amateur for Oklahoma State, Brisco was two-time All-American and won the NCAA Division I national championship. He turned pro shortly after and performed for various territories of the National Wrestling Alliance , becoming a two-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and multi-time NWA Tag Team Champion with his brother Gerald Brisco.
Go to Profile#8526
Akiko Matsuo
#181956
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Akiko Matsuo is a Japanese engineer specialising in computational fluid dynamics. She is a professor at Keio University. Biography Matsuo was born in Saga Prefecture. She studied mathematics for her undergraduate degree at Tsuda University and became interested in computational fluid dynamics during her postgraduate studies in aeronautical engineering at Nagoya University. After graduating, she worked at a research institute that specialised in supercomputers, and completed further study at Princeton University in the United States.
Go to Profile#8527
Roberto Toro
#180925
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Roberto Toro is a neuroscientist of Chilean origin, and is now Director of Research at the Neuroscience Department of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. His research focuses on the development and evolution of the brain, specifically using mathematical modelling, magnetic resonance imaging and genetics to better understand the origin of neocortical organisation. He develops computational neuroanatomy methods to analyse the normal diversity of human brain anatomy, and to look for differences associated with neurodevelopmental pathologies, in particular autism spectrum disorders. Roberto is an open ...
Go to Profile#8528
Roman Viktyuk
#117044
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Roman Hryhorovych Viktyuk was a Ukrainian theatre director, actor and screenwriter. Biography Viktyuk was born in Lwów, Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine. In 1956 he graduated from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow. Among the teachers were Yuri Zavadsky and Anatoly Efros.
Go to Profile#8529
Neill Gorton
#137457
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Neill Gorton is an English special effects artist, visual effects specialist and make-up artist specialised in animatronics and prosthetics. He is known for his work on films like Saving Private Ryan and Children of Men and the series Doctor Who .
Go to Profile#8530
Zahra Fakhraai
#142835
Overall Influence
Zahra Fakhraai is an Iranian-Canadian materials scientist who is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Fakhraai does research focused on glass transition, nonlinear optics, nanoparticle plasmonics, and polymer physics. She studies the impact of nanoconfinement on the structure of materials. She was awarded the 2019 American Physical Society John H. Dillon Medal. Fakhraai was one of the researchers to start laying the ground work to better understand the optical properties of glass.
Go to Profile#8531
Zhang Xu
#82969
Overall Influence
1913 - 2015 (102 years)
Zhang Xu was a Chinese telecommunications engineer and academic who taught for more than five decades at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He was the first professor in China to teach radio communications and played a major role in the development of fiber-optic communication in the country. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980.
Go to Profile#8532
Ken Fleming
#73358
Overall Influence
1933 - 2001 (68 years)
Wilfred George Kenneth Fleming was an influential piling engineer and former chairman of the Federation of Piling Contractors. Early life and education Born in Maguiresbridge, County Fermanagh Ken Fleming was the son of a Church of Ireland minister.
Go to Profile#8533
Hele Savin
#174406
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Hele Irene Savin is a Finnish scientist and inventor, best known for her research in solar cells and is a professor of micro and nanoelectronics at Aalto University. She is publicly known as an inventor and developer of high-efficiency solar cells using nanostructured, so-called black silicon.
Go to Profile#8534
Denise Bower
#150761
Overall Influence
Denise Bower is an English civil engineer and academic. She is Professor of Engineering Project Management at the University of Leeds, and an executive director at Mott MacDonald. Biography Education Bower received her Bachelor of Engineering in civil engineering from the University of Manchester in 1990. In 1995, she earned her Doctor of Philosophy in project management from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#8535
Michael Cook
#82246
Overall Influence
1933 - 1994 (61 years)
Michael Cook was a Canadian playwright known for his plays set in Newfoundland. Early life Cook was born in Fulham, London, England. He attended boarding schools until age fifteen. He served five years in the British Army, mostly in Asia including Japan where he saw the Ama harvesting shellfish, sea urchins, pearls, etc., from the ocean, and later attended the University of Nottingham, earning teaching qualifications. He then settled in Newfoundland in 1965.
Go to Profile#8536
Francis Joseph Mullin
#82798
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Francis Joseph Mullin , also often known as F.J. Mullin or Joe Mullin, was an American academic and the seventh president of Shimer College. He was raised Catholic, but became an Episcopalian as a teenager. He was key in engineering Shimer's brief period as an Episcopal-affiliated college; the school had previously had a Baptist affiliation.
Go to Profile#8537
Mohamed E. El-Hawary
#171612
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Mohamed El-Aref El-Hawary , was an Egyptian-born Canadian scientist of electric power system studies and the involvement of traditional/modern optimization algorithms, fuzzy systems, and artificial neural networks in their applications. El-Hawary was a mathematician, electrical engineer, computational intelligence researcher and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Dalhousie University.
Go to Profile#8538
Zoran Živković
#182112
Overall Influence
#8539
Nick Jenkins
#182139
Overall Influence
#8540
Andrés Ruzo
#60970
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Andrés Ruzo is a geoscientist, conservationist, author, science communicator and educator, who became the first scientist that was granted permission to study the Boiling River of the Amazon in 2011.
Go to Profile#8541
Cecil Hobbs
#57936
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Cecil Hobbs was an American scholar of Southeast Asian history, best known for being the head of the Southern Asia Section of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress. He was regarded as a major contributor to scholarship on Asia and the development of South East Asian coverage in American library collections during a career at the Library of Congress spanning 28 years.
Go to Profile#8542
Doris Derby
#51405
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Doris Adelaide Derby was an American activist and documentary photographer. She was the adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Georgia State University and the founding director of their Office of African-American Student Services and Programs. She was active in the Mississippi civil rights movement, and her work discusses the themes of race and African-American identity. She was a working member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and co-founder of the Free Southern Theater. Her photography has been exhibited internationally. Two of her photographs were published in Han...
Go to Profile#8543
Robert Little
#154845
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Robert Andrews Little was a modernist architect based in Cleveland, Ohio. He received the Cleveland Arts Prize for Architecture in 1965. Little practiced in the Bauhaus and International styles. He also designed and advocated energy-efficient features, and employed Jewish and African-American architects and engineers.
Go to Profile#8544
Ning Jinsheng
#176068
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Ning Jinsheng was a Chinese engineer who was a professor at Wuhan University, a president of Wuhan University of Surveying and Mapping Technology, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering .
Go to Profile#8545
Monica Riley
#83150
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Monica Riley was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery of messenger RNA in her Ph.D work with Arthur Pardee, and was later a pioneer in the exploration and computer representation of the Escherichia coli genome.
Go to Profile#8546
Fyodor Khitruk
#81550
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk was a Soviet and Russian animator and animation director. Biography Khitruk was born in Tver , into a Jewish family. He came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with Soyuzmultfilm in 1938 as an animator. From 1962 onwards, he worked as a director. His first film The Story of a Crime was an immense success. Today, this film is seen as the beginning of a renaissance of Soviet animation after a two-decade-long life in the shadows of Socialist realism.
Go to Profile#8547
Robert N. Trebits
#171124
Overall Influence
Robert N. Trebits was a researcher in radar-related technologies, and was director of the Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute from around 1991 until 2006 and worked at GTRI from 1972 to 2006 .
Go to Profile#8548
Christoph Schlingensief
#96980
Overall Influence
1960 - 2010 (50 years)
Christoph Maria Schlingensief was a German theatre director, performance artist, and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies. In the final years before his death, he staged Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and worked at several opera houses, establishing himself as a Regietheater artist.
Go to Profile#8549
Li Ping
#176989
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Li Ping was a Chinese geologist and earthquake engineer. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Li Ping was born on 20 March 1924 in Dawu County, Hubei, Republic of China. He entered National Central University in 1943, and became a faculty member after graduating in 1947.
Go to Profile#8550
Kevin Lang
#182237
Overall Influence
