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.
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#9601
Igor Ilyinsky
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Igor Vladimirovich Ilyinsky was a Soviet and Russian stage and film actor, director and comedian. Hero of Socialist Labour and People's Artist of the USSR . Early years Igor Ilyinsky was born on 24 July 1901 in Moscow. At age 16 he entered the Theatre Studio of Theodore Komisarjevsky and in half a year already debuted on the professional stage in Komissarzhevskaya Theatre. His first theatre role was that of the "Old Man" in Aristophanes' play Lysistrata. In 1920, he joined the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre. The young actor's style was in correspondence with the principles of Meyerhold, and so Ilyinsky soon became the central actor of that theatre.
Go to Profile#9602
Andrew Bryan
1893 - 1988 (95 years)
Sir Andrew Meikle Bryan was a Scottish mining engineer and academic. Life Andrew Bryan was born on 1 March 1893, the son of John Bryan, of Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and was educated at Greenfields School and at the former Hamilton Academy and is listed as a notable former pupil of the school in the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association Magazine, February 1950, feature on Hamilton Academy in the article series 'Famous Scottish Schools'.
Go to Profile#9603
George Washington
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
George Constant Louis Washington was a Belgian inventor and businessman. He is best remembered for his improvement of an early instant coffee process and for the company he founded to mass-produce it, the G. Washington Coffee Company.
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H. B. Warner
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Henry Byron Warner was an English film and theatre actor. He was popular during the silent era and played Jesus Christ in The King of Kings. In later years, he successfully moved into supporting roles and appeared in numerous films directed by Frank Capra. Warner's most recognizable role to modern audiences is Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life, directed by Capra. He appeared in the original 1937 version of Lost Horizon as Chang, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
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Haig P. Manoogian
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Haig Manoogian was an Armenian-American professor of film at New York University who served as the main influence for many filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, who was a student of his at New York University. Martin Scorsese called Manoogian teachings “The most precious gift I have ever received.”
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Luchino Visconti
1287 - 1349 (62 years)
Luchino Visconti was lord of Milan from 1339 to 1349. He was also a condottiero, and lord of Pavia. Biography Ruler of Pavia from 1315, five years later he was podestà of Vigevano, where he erected the castle that is still visible. In 1323, along with all his family, he was excommunicated with the charge of heresy. The charges of heresy and excommunication were later withdrawn and he became a Papal Vicar in 1341.
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Peter Faber
1810 - 1877 (67 years)
Peter Christian Frederik Faber was a Danish telegraphy pioneer and song writer. In Denmark, he is remembered first and foremost for his songwriting. Faber was also an amateur photographer and is credited with the oldest photograph on record in Denmark.
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Édouard Collignon
1831 - 1913 (82 years)
Édouard Charles Romain Collignon was a French engineer and scientist, known for the Collignon projection and for his role in building railways in Russia. Career After graduating from the l'École polytechnique in 1849, he became an ingénieur des ponts et chaussées. He became inspecteur des Ponts et chaussées in 1878.
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Mahendranath Gupta
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
Mahendranath Gupta , , was a disciple of Ramakrishna and a great mystic himself. He was the author of Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita , a Bengali classic; in English, it is known as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He was also an early teacher to Paramahansa Yogananda, a famous 20th-century yogi, guru and philosopher. In his autobiography, Yogananda noted that Gupta ran a small boys' high school in Kolkata, and he recounted their visits, as they often traveled to the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple together. Having a devotional nature, Gupta worshipped the Divine Mother in the form of Kali, and often reflected the wisdom of his guru Ramakrishna in his daily life and mannerisms.
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Emil Wohlwill
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Wolf Emil Wohlwill was a German-Jewish engineer of electrochemistry. He invented the Wohlwill process in 1874. Literary works Galilei und sein Kampf für die copernikanische Lehre, the 1st volume, 1909the 2nd volume, 1926
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Charles Combes
1801 - 1872 (71 years)
Charles Pierre Mathieu Combes was a French engineer. He was Inspector-General of Mines and the Director of the School of Mines in Paris. His name is on the Eiffel Tower. Biography Early life Charles-Pierre-Mathieu Combes was born on 26 December 1801 in Cahors. His father was a senior policeman named Pierre Combes Mathieu. He joined the Ecole Polytechnique before the usual starting age of seventeen on 1 September 1817 and completed his studies in 1820 when he was admitted to the School of Mines. Combes completed the three-year course in just two years. He graduated on 1 July 1822.
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Émile Jouguet
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
Jacques Charles Émile Jouguet was a French engineer and scientist, whose name is attached to the Chapman–Jouguet condition. He was the son of Félix Jouguet , mining engineer and mayor of Bessèges.
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Bill Wittrick
1922 - 1986 (64 years)
Professor William Henry Wittrick FAA FRS was a British engineer and academic who spent 20 years in Australia, including 10 years as Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Sydney . He was Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Birmingham , and Beale Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham .
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Alexander Tselikov
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Tselikov was a Soviet metallurgist, industrial machines designer, and Hero of Socialist Labor . He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1953 and full member in 1964.
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Rufus Oldenburger
1908 - 1969 (61 years)
Rufus Oldenburger was an American mathematician and mechanical engineer. Education and career Oldenburger received an A.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1928, a master's degree in mathematics in 1930, and a Ph.D. in 1934. After teaching mathematics at the University of Michigan, at the Case Institute of Technology, at Illinois Institute of Technology, and at DePaul University, he changed the focus of his research from pure mathematics to mechanical engineering and automatic control. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1936 at Oslo. For the a...
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Harry Platt
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Sir Harry Platt, 1st Baronet, FRCS, KStJ was an English orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He was a founder of the British Orthopaedic Association, of which he became president in 1934–1935.
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Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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John D. Eshelby
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
John Douglas Eshelby FRS was a scientist in micromechanics. He made significant contributions to the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including important aspects of the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.
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Abel Wolman
1892 - 1989 (97 years)
Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.
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Theodore Theodorsen
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Theodore Theodorsen was a Norwegian-American theoretical aerodynamicist noted for his work at NACA and for his contributions to the study of turbulence. Early years Theodorsen was born at Sandefjord in Vestfold, Norway to parents Ole Christian Theodorsen, a chief engineer in the Norwegian merchant marine, and his wife Andrea Larsen. He was the oldest of six children. When Theodore’s father took the examinations for a merchant marine engineer's license, he was the only applicant who correctly answered a particularly difficult question. To his father’s surprise his then 12-year-old son was als...
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Hans Albert Einstein
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Hans Albert Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of physicists Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. He was a long-time professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Ernst Guillemin
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Ernst Adolph Guillemin was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent his career extending the art and science of linear network analysis and synthesis. His nephew Victor Guillemin is a math professor at MIT, his nephew Robert Charles Guillemin was a sidewalk artist, his great-niece Karen Guillemin is a biology professor at the University of Oregon, and his granddaughter Mary Elizabeth Meyerand is a Medical Physics Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Robert Franklin Mehl
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Robert Franklin Mehl was an American metallurgist. Mehl was noted for transforming of nineteenth-century metallurgy into the modern materials science. He was the founder and the head of a division of Physical metallurgy at the Naval Research Laboratory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers established a gold medal award in his name in 1973.
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Hakaru Masumoto
1895 - 1987 (92 years)
Hakaru Masumoto was a pioneer in metal and alloy research. He discovered numerous superior and unique alloys, and contributed to improving the performance of precision machinery. A student of Kotaro Honda, Masumoto developed a magnetic metal powder Sendust in 1936, and was the winner of the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy in 1946.
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Frank Benford
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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Horst Rittel
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.
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Alan Mara Bateman
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.
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Herbert Reich
1900 - 2000 (100 years)
Herbert Reich was a pioneering figure in electrical engineering. Reich made substantial contributions towards the design of early oscilloscopes as a graduate student at Cornell University. Reich later taught as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Yale University . From 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University with Frederick Terman. After his retirement from Yale, he periodically taught courses at Deep Springs College.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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Edwin Howard Armstrong
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous awards, including the first Medal of Honor awarded by the Institute of Radio Engineers , the French Legion of Honor, the 1941 Franklin Medal and the 1942 Edison Medal. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and included in the International Telecommunication Union's roster of great inventors. Armstrong attended Columbia University, and served as a professor there for most of his life.
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Walter Boas
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Walter Moritz Boas FAA was a German-Australian metallurgist. Boas was born in Berlin, Germany and was educated at the Berlin Institute of Technology . After several positions at German and Swiss institutions, Boas became a lecturer in metallurgy at University of Melbourne in 1938; then from 1940 to 1947, senior lecturer. From 1947 to 1949, Boas was principal research officer, CSIR Division of Tribophysics; and from 1949 to 1969 chief of the division.
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Saul Kaplun
1924 - 1964 (40 years)
Saul Kaplun was a Polish-American aerodynamicist at the California Institute of Technology . Family Kaplun was the only child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Morris J. Kaplun , a textile businessman and industrialist and a prominent Zionist philanthropist beginning in the 1930s, and Betty Kaplun . Saul and his parents, who were refugees from Nazi persecution, lived in Lwów until 1939, when they fled Poland; they immigrated to New York shortly before World War II. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1944 and served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946.
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Gordon Rawcliffe
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe FRS was a British electrical engineer and academic. Life Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe, whose father was an Anglican clergyman in Sheffield, was born on 2 June 1910, moving from Sheffield to Gloucester when he was two. He was educated at the King's School, Gloucester, Hereford Cathedral School and St Edmund's School, Canterbury before matriculating at Keble College, Oxford to study mathematics. After his first-year examinations, he switched to engineering, under Richard V. Southwell, and obtained a first-class degree in 1932. He worked for the next five years for Metropolitan-Vickers in Manchester, initially as an apprentice and then as a design engineer.
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Llewellyn M. K. Boelter
1898 - 1966 (68 years)
Llewellyn Michael Kraus Boelter was an American engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and founding Dean of its UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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Markus Reiner
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Markus Reiner was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology. Biography Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna . After the First World War, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa.
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F. W. Hutchinson
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Francis William Hutchinson was an engineer, and a pioneer in HVAC research. Hutchinson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1931, and received an M.S. and M.E. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937. He was a professor of engineering at Berkeley and at Purdue University. At Purdue, he established a solar energy research program in which two experimental solar houses were built on the Purdue campus in the summer of 1945. By analyzing this experiment, Hutchinson concluded that the solar gain through the double glazed house was greater than the excess heat loss.
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Alexander Hrennikoff
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Alexander Pavlovich Hrennikoff was a Russian-Canadian structural engineer, a founder of the Finite Element Method. Biography Alexander was born in Russia, graduated from the Institute of Railway Engineering in Moscow, received M.A.Sc. degree from the University of British Columbia , and D.Sc degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1933 until his death in 1984 he worked as a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia.
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Cecil Burgess
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Cecil Burgess was a Canadian architect. He was born in Walkden, Lancashire, England on 8 July 1888. He was educated Walkden, Lancashire, England. He articled to Henry Kirkby, an architect in Manchester, England. Cecil Burgess arrived in Ottawa, Ontario with his parents in 1905. He married Violet Hervey from Round Hill, Nova Scotia, in 1913. The couple had a son, Bernard W. Burgess of Montreal, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Joyce Greenwood.
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Walter Rautenstrauch
1880 - 1951 (71 years)
Walter Rautenstrauch was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, and Professor at Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s. He coined the term break-even point, and developing the break-even chart together with Charles Edward Knoeppel.
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Otto Julius Zobel
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Otto Julius Zobel was an electrical engineer who worked for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the early part of the 20th century. Zobel's work on filter design was revolutionary and led, in conjunction with the work of John R. Carson, to significant commercial advances for AT&T in the field of frequency-division multiplex telephone transmissions.
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John Ely Burchard
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
John Ely Burchard was an American professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a historian and architectural critic. He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1954 to 1957.
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Christopher Tunnard
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Arthur Coney Tunnard , later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape . Biography Christopher Tunnard was the son of Christopher Coney Tunnard, second son of Charles Thomas Tunnard of Frampton House, near Boston, Lincolnshire and Madeline Kingscote. He had one younger brother, Peter Kingscote Tunnard , who died at age 20. Tunnard's uncle was John Charles Tunnard whose only son was British surrealist artist John Tunnard . Another uncle was Thomas Monkton Tunnard of Birtles Hall, vicar o...
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Hayne Constant
1904 - 1968 (64 years)
Hayne Constant, CB, CBE., MA., FRAeS., FRS, was an English mechanical and aeronautical engineer who developed jet engines during World War II. Education Constant was born at Gravesend, the son of Frederick Charles Constant and his wife Mary Theresa Hayne. His father was a dental surgeon in Folkestone. Hayne was educated at King's College Choir School Cambridge, King's School, Canterbury, The Technical Institute Folkestone, Sir Roger Manwood's School, Sandwich and Queens' College, Cambridge.
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Jerome Clarke Hunsaker
1886 - 1984 (98 years)
Jerome Clarke Hunsaker was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work with Gustav Eiffel outside Paris led to the first wind tunnel in the US at MIT. He was instrumental in developing a weather reporting and airway navigation. Hunsaker was also pivotal in establishing the theoretical and scientific study of aerodynamics in the United States. And he was primarily responsible for the design and construction of the Navy-Curtiss airplane that accomplished the first transatlantic flight , and the first successful shipboard fighter.
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Friedrich Eisenkolb
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Friedrich Eisenkolb was a German metallurgist. Life Eisenkolb was born at the start of the twentieth century in Warnsdorf, at that time a small German-speaking town in northern Bohemia. His father was employed in finance security. Eisenkolb passed his School final exams in 1919 and then, from 1919 till 1923, studied Chemistry and Metallurgy at the Prague Poly-technical Institute. He received his doctorate in 1924 and went to work for Eisenwerke AG at Rothau-Neudek, on the Bohemian side of the Western Ore Mountains. In 1928 Eisenkolb completed a second dissertation, his subject being the pickling of sheet-metals.
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Tokushichi Mishima
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Tokushichi Mishima was a Japanese metallurgist and inventor. He discovered that aluminum restored magnetism to non-magnetic nickel steel. He invented MKM steel, which was an extremely inexpensive magnetic substance that has been used in many applications. It is also closely related to the modern Alnico magnets. He later became a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. After his death, his remains were buried in the Tama Cemetery in Tokyo.
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Bernard D. H. Tellegen
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Bernard D.H. Tellegen was a Dutch electrical engineer and inventor of the pentode and the gyrator. He is also known for a theorem in circuit theory, Tellegen's theorem. He obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering from Delft University in 1923, and joined the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven. In 1926, he invented the pentode vacuum tube. The gyrator was invented by him around 1948. The gyrator is useful to simulate the effect of an inductor without using a coil. For example, it is used in hi-fi graphic equalizers. He held 41 US patents.
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Walter Curt Behrendt
1884 - 1945 (61 years)
Walter Curt Behrendt was a German-American architect and active advocate of German modernism. He was an authority on city planning and housing, editor of Die Form, and author of The Victory of the New Building Style among many other works.
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Otto Lindig
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Otto Lindig was a German master potter who was a student and later a workshop manager at the famous Bauhaus art school in Weimar, Germany. Background Lindig was born in Pößneck, Germany. Initially trained as an artist and modeler, he also studied sculpture with architect and designer Henry van de Velde in 1913-15 at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule , in the building that would soon become the first location of the Bauhaus. Shortly after the Bauhaus opened in 1919, Lindig enrolled in the program and, beginning in 1920, studied ceramics with sculptor Gerhard Marcks, his Formmeister and Master Pot...
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