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).
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#9601
Henry J. Kelley
1926 - 1988 (62 years)
Henry J. Kelley was Christopher C. Kraft Professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He produced major contributions to control theory, especially in aeronautical engineering and flight optimization.
Go to Profile#9602
Alfred Grenander
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
Alfred Frederik Elias Grenander was a Swedish architect, who became one of the most prominent engineers during the first building period of the Berlin U-Bahn network in the early twentieth century. Biography Grenander was born at Skövde in Västra Götaland County, Sweden. He was raised in Stockholm and began studying at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in 1881. He changed to the Royal Technical College of Charlottenburg in 1885. After his final degree in 1890 he became a site engineer at the construction of the new Reichstag building under the direction of Paul Wallot and continued hi...
Go to Profile#9603
Harold M. Westergaard
1888 - 1950 (62 years)
Harold Malcolm Westergaard was a Danish structural engineer. He was Professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at the University of Illinois in Urbana and of Civil Engineering at Harvard. Biography Westergaard graduated in engineering from Copenhagen Danmarks Tekniske Højskole in 1911. He continued his practice in reinforced concrete in Hamburg, London, Göttingen, and prepared his written dissertation at Königlich Bayerische Technische Hochschule München in 1915. He obtained a PhD at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1916 and was appointed lecturer there for theoretical and applied mechanics.
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Franca Helg
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Franca Helg was an Italian designer and architect. She also had a career teaching at Istituto Universitario Architettura Venezia and Polytechnic of Milan. She collaborated with Franco Albini from 1945 through 1977.
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Girard Desargues
1591 - 1661 (70 years)
Girard Desargues was a French mathematician and engineer, who is considered one of the founders of projective geometry. Desargues' theorem, the Desargues graph, and the crater Desargues on the Moon are named in his honour.
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Robert Stevenson
1772 - 1850 (78 years)
Robert Stevenson, FRSE, FGS, FRAS, FSA Scot, MWS was a Scottish civil engineer, and designer and builder of lighthouses. His works include the Bell Rock Lighthouse. Early life Robert Stevenson was born in Glasgow. His father was Alan Stevenson, a partner in a West Indies sugar trading house in the city. Alan died of an epidemic fever on the island of St. Christopher in the West Indies on 26 May 1774, a few days before Robert's second birthday. Robert's uncle died of the same disease around the same time. Since this left Alan's widow, Jean Lillie Stevenson, in much-reduced financial circumstan...
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Jørgen Henrich Rawert
1751 - 1823 (72 years)
Jørgen Henrich Rawert was a was a Danish architect. He created the masterplan for the rebuilding of Copenhagen after the Great Fire of 1795 in his capacity of city architect and was also involved in many building projects, mostly of townhouses, often collaborating with Andreas Hallander.
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Alexander Graham Christie
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Alexander Graham Christie was a Canadian/American mechanical engineer and Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, who served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1939–40.
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Edith Hughes
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Edith Mary Wardlaw Burnet Hughes HonFRIAS was a Scottish architect, and is considered Britain's first practising female architect, having established her own architecture firm in 1920. Early life Edith Mary Burnet was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of May Crudelius and George Wardlaw Burnet, an advocate. The family lived at 6 West Circus Place in the Stockbridge district. The family moved to 59 Queens Road in Aberdeen when her father was created Sheriff Substitute for Aberdeenshire around 1890.
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Walter Maria Kersting
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Walter Maria Kersting was a German architect and industrial designer. Career In 1928, he published the Bilderbuch für Kaufleute, a publicity handbook containing examples of catalogues, posters and packaging designs which had been created by Kersting and his wife in a plain and functional style. From 1927 to 1932 he was Professor of Artistic and Technical Design at the Kölner Werkschulen. With his students, Kersting designed the bakelite cabinet for the radio receiver, Volksempfänger model VE 301, which was launched at the 1933 Berlin Radio Show and which, on account of its striking design and the number of units sold, would become an icon of the Nazi period.
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Aleksandr Chernyshyov
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Aleksandr Alekseyevich Chernyshyov , anglicised Alexander Chernyshov, was an electrical engineer. He graduated from Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1907, and worked there until the end of his life. His research consisted of radio engineering and high-voltage techniques. He won the Lenin Prize in 1930.
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Charles H. Wacker
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Charles Henry Wacker , born in Chicago, Illinois, was a German American businessman and philanthropist. He was vice chairman of the general committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and in 1909 was appointed chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission by Mayor Fred A. Busse. As commission chairman from 1909 to 1926, he championed the Burnham Plan for improving Chicago. His work to promote the plan included addresses, obtaining wide publicity from newspapers, and publishing Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago as a textbook for local schoolchildren.
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Konstantine Hovhannisyan
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Konstantine Hovhannisyan was an Armenian professor, architect and archaeologist. He was the head of an excavation team that was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Urartian city of Erebuni .
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Robert E. Stiemke
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Robert E. Stiemke was an American civil engineer, director of the Georgia Tech School of Civil Engineering from 1950 to 1962, director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute from 1961 to 1963, and Georgia Tech's first Associate Dean of Faculties and Administrator of Research after July 1, 1963.
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John Braithwaite
1797 - 1870 (73 years)
John Braithwaite, the younger , was an English engineer who invented the first steam fire engine. He also co-designed the first locomotive claimed to have covered a mile in less than a minute. Early life Braithwaite was third son of John Braithwaite the elder. He was born at 1 Bath Place, New Road, London, on 19 March 1797, and, after being educated at Mr. Lord's school at Tooting in Surrey, attended in his father's manufactory, where he made himself master of practical engineering, and became a skilled draughtsman. In June 1818 his father died, leaving the business to his sons Francis and John.
Go to Profile#9616
Joshua Thomas Noble Anderson
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Joshua Thomas Noble Anderson was an engineer practising in Melbourne, Australia, and New Zealand during the difficult times in the Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, but still practised innovative engineering in these periods.
Go to Profile#9617
Harvie Branscomb
1894 - 1998 (104 years)
Bennett Harvie Branscomb was an American theologian and academic administrator. He served as the fourth chancellor of Vanderbilt University, a private university in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1946 to 1963. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, he was the director of the Duke University Libraries and dean of the Duke Divinity School. Additionally, he served as a professor of Christian theology at Southern Methodist University. He was the author of several books about New Testament theology.
Go to Profile#9618
James Madison Porter III
1864 - 1928 (64 years)
James Madison Porter III was an American civil engineer notable for his role in designing two unique bridges across the Delaware River and for his development of the civil engineering program at Lafayette College. His grandfather, James Madison Porter, was one of the college's founders. Porter III served on the civil engineering faculty at Lafayette from 1890 to 1917 and was an early advocate for materials testing.
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Josep Domènech i Estapà
1858 - 1917 (59 years)
Josep Domènech i Estapà was a Catalan architect. He graduated in 1881, and became professor of geodesy and descriptive geometry at the University of Barcelona, and member of the Acadèmia de Ciències i Arts , of which he subsequently became president.
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Masaichi Kobayashi
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Masaichi Kobayashi was a Japanese architect. His work was part of the architecture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
Go to Profile#9621
Archimedes Russell
1840 - 1915 (75 years)
Archimedes Russell was an American architect most active in the Syracuse, New York area. Biography Born in Andover, Massachusetts and trained under local architect Horatio Nelson White, Russell served as a professor of architecture at Syracuse University from 1873 through 1881.
Go to Profile#9622
George S. Richardson
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
George Sherwood Richardson was an American engineer known for his elegant bridges, innovative construction techniques and skillful planning of highways. Designer of many bridges in the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County areas in the 20th century, he has been called "the dean of Pittsburgh bridge engineers".
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George Fillmore Swain
1857 - 1931 (74 years)
George Fillmore Swain was a civil engineer from the United States. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Harvard University. Biography He was graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877 and then studied in Berlin, German Empire, for three years. On his return to the United States, he settled in Boston. In 1887 he became professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was then located in Boston. He remained at MIT until 1909, when he became professor of civil engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science.
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August von Borries
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
August Friedrich Wilhelm von Borries was one of Germany's most influential railway engineers, who was primarily concerned with developments in steam locomotives. Von Borries graduated from the Royal Institute of Trade in Charlottenburg, and then spent a year working at the Bergisch-Märkische railway. In 1875, he joined the service of the Hanover division of the Prussian state railways and subsequently became their Chief Mechanical Engineer. In 1880 he designed the first Prussian compound locomotive, built by Schichau in Elbląg. This showed significant fuel savings. His work on compound locom...
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Max Reinhardt
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
Max Reinhardt was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his innovative stage productions, he is regarded as one of the most prominent directors of German-language theatre in the early 20th century. In 1920, he established the Salzburg Festival with the performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann.
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Howard T. Fisher
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Howard T. Fisher was an American architect, city planner, and educator. Early life Howard Taylor Fisher was born October 30, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Walter Lowrie Fisher and Mabel Taylor. He graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, in 1926. He attended the School of Architecture, Harvard University, from 1926 to 1928.
Go to Profile#9627
Lee Yuk-wing
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Lee Yuk-wing was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for adapting and popularizing the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener and for his own research on statistical communication theory.
Go to Profile#9628
Francis B. Foley
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Francis B. Foley , was an American ferrous metallurgist. Biography Foley was born July 7, 1887, in Philadelphia. His father, Dennis Foley, died in 1889 in Dakota Territory, leaving a wife, daughter, and three sons . Francis was enrolled in Girard College, a free boarding school, at that time limited to fatherless white boys, from which he graduated in 1904, after completing a high school education. He worked for a year in the art department of the Philadelphia North American, a daily morning newspaper.
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Vyacheslav Golubtsov
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Vyacheslav Alekseyevich Golubtsov was a Soviet and Russian scientist and a specialist in the field of thermal engineering. Biography He was born on 29 March in 1894 in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of a teacher. He was a brother of Valeria Golubtsova, the wife of the Soviet statesman Georgy Malenkov.
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Laurie D. Cox
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Laurie Davidson Cox was a leading American landscape architect and Hall of Fame coach and contributor to the sport of lacrosse. He was professor of Landscape Engineering at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, where he was responsible for establishing Syracuse University's lacrosse program. Cox later became the president of New England College.
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John Dexter
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
John Dexter was an English theatre, opera and film director. Theatre Born in Derby, Derbyshire, England, Dexter left school at the age of fourteen to serve in the British Army during the Second World War. Following the war, he began working as a stage actor before turning to producing and directing shows for repertory companies. In 1957, he was appointed Associate Director of the English Stage Company based at the Royal Court.
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Boris Shavyrin
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Boris Ivanovich Shavyrin was a Soviet artillery and rocket engineer who developed the first air-augmented rocket, Gnom, or Gnome , as well as many other Soviet mortars and rockets. He was the first Head and Chief Designer of KB Mashinostroyeniya.
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Emanuele Luigi Galizia
1830 - 1907 (77 years)
Emanuele Luigi Galizia was a Maltese architect and civil engineer, who designed many public buildings and several churches. He is regarded as "the principal Maltese architect throughout the second half of the nineteenth century".
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Giorgio Pullicino
1779 - 1851 (72 years)
Giorgio Pullicino was a Maltese painter, architect, and professor of drawing and architecture at the University of Malta. He is known for his harbour views painted in a number of media, and he is also considered to be one of the first neoclassical architects in Malta. He produced designs for a number of buildings, but the only structure which is definitely proven to have been designed by him is a monumental obelisk known as the Spencer Monument. However, several other buildings including the Monument to Sir Alexander Ball are widely attributed to him.
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Victor F. Tapson
#9636
Andrew D. Blann
#9637
Morton Lippmann
#9638
Charles Wellford Leavitt
1871 - 1928 (57 years)
Charles Wellford Leavitt was an American landscape architect, urban planner, and civil engineer who designed everything from elaborate gardens on Long Island, New York and New Jersey estates to federal parks in Cuba, hotels in Puerto Rico, plans of towns in Florida, New York and elsewhere. New York publisher Julius David Stern called Leavitt "a rare combination of engineer, artist, and diplomat", and the multi-faceted career chosen by Leavitt, veering between public and private commissions and embracing everything from hard-edged engineering to sensuous garden design, and calling for negotiat...
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John Thomson
1837 - 1921 (84 years)
John Thomson FRGS was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer, and traveller. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artefacts of eastern cultures. Upon returning home, his work among the street people of London cemented his reputation, and is regarded as a classic instance of social documentary which laid the foundations for photojournalism. He went on to become a portrait photographer of High Society in Mayfair, gaining the Royal Warrant in 1881.
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Enrique Seoane Ros
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Enrique Buenaventura Juan Seoane Ros was a Peruvian modernist architect of the 20th century. Early life Seoane was born in Lima on January 12, 1915, to parents Buenaventura Guillermo Seoane García and Rosario Ros Gutiérrez. He studied at the Colegio de La Inmaculada and followed architecture courses at the National School of Engineers, predecessor of the National University of Engineering .
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Thomas Arthur Rickard
1864 - 1953 (89 years)
T. A. Rickard , formally known as Thomas Arthur Rickard was born on 29 August 1864 in Italy. Rickard's parents were British, and he became a mining engineer practising in the United States, Europe and Australia. He was also a publisher and author on mine engineering subjects.
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Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Soviet and Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer and theatre administrator, who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his colleague, Konstantin Stanislavski, in 1898.
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Bryant Fleming
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Bryant Fleming was an American architect and landscape architect. Early life Fleming was born on July 19, 1877, in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Cornell University in 1901, where he studied horticulture, architecture, architectural history, and art.
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Koichi Kawana
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Koichi Kawana was a post-war Japanese American garden designer, landscape architect and teacher. He designed gardens in San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Colorado, Chicago, Illinois, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri. Some of his major works include the Seiwa-en Japanese Garden in the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden and a dry landscape garden at Sawtelle, Los Angeles. He designed the bonsai collection for the Pavilion of Japanese Art at LACMA in the 90s.
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John Benjamin Henck
1815 - 1903 (88 years)
John Benjamin Henck although educated as a classical scholar and graduating as valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1840 yet, during his career, transitioned to a practicing civil engineer. As an engineering educator, Henck required a strict knowledge of classical literature" and a "thorough and accurate knowledge of science". One of his notable students was Arthur M Wellington, author of The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways.
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Daryl E. Hooper
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
Daryl Egbert Hooper was an electronic engineer notable for pioneering engineering at La Trobe University and heading up the GEC Research Hirst Centre in the 1980s. He is also notable for his textbook on amplifier design.
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Mario Romañach
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Mario Romañach was a Cuban modernist architect, planner, and university professor. Biography Mario Romañach finished his higher studies at the University of Havana and, along with Max Borges Jr., Frank Martinez, Nicolás Quintana, Ricardo Porro, Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Emilio del Junco, was one of the architects students who participated in the "Burning of Vignola" event. They sought to rebel against the education system in force until then in Cuba. The event took place in the courtyard of the School of Architecture of the University of Havana in 1944, when a group of students and recen...
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Rudolf Wiegmann
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Ernst Gottfried Rudolf Wiegmann was a German painter, archaeologist, art historian, graphic artist and architect. He worked in the Classical style and, as a painter, is best known for his vedute. His wife, Marie Wiegmann, whom he married in 1841, was also a painter of some note.
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Henry Langley
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Henry Langley was a Canadian architect based in Toronto. He was active from 1854 to 1907. Among the first architects born and trained in Canada, he was a founding members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880 and was instrumental in establishing the Ontario Association of Architects in 1889. A conservative in architectural design, he is primarily known for designing numerous churches in the Toronto area, although he designed many secular buildings as well including residential, commercial and public buildings. Langley designed 70 churches throughout Ontario. He was the first chair of ...
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Genrikh Graftio
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Genrikh Osipovich Graftio was a Russian and Soviet engineer credited as a pioneer of the hydroelectric station construction, as one of the founders of the GOELRO plan, and notable for the construction of the first hydroelectric stations in the Soviet Union, the Volkhov Hydroelectric Station in Volkhov and the Lower Svir Hydroelectric Station in Svirstroy.
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