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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#9651
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#9652
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.
Go to Profile#9653
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.
Go to Profile#9654
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.”
Go to Profile#9655
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.
Go to Profile#9656
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.
Go to Profile#9657
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.
Go to Profile#9658
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.
Go to Profile#9659
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
Go to Profile#9660
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.
Go to Profile#9661
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.
Go to Profile#9662
Joseph Henry Keenan
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.
Go to Profile#9663
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.
Go to Profile#9664
Charles Stark Draper
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landingss possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.
Go to Profile#9665
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 .
Go to Profile#9666
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...
Go to Profile#9667
Frederick Terman
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Frederick Emmons Terman was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.
Go to Profile#9668
William B. Kouwenhoven
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
William Bennet Kouwenhoven , also known as the "Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation," is famous for his contributions to the development of the closed-chest cardiac massage and his invention of the cardiac defibrillator. After obtaining his doctorate degree in engineering from the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Germany, Kouwenhoven began his career as the dean at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Kouwenhoven focused his research mainly on improving and saving lives of patients through the application of electricity. With the help and cooperation of the Johns Hopkins School of ...
Go to Profile#9669
Katsutada Sezawa
1895 - 1944 (49 years)
Katsutada Sezawa was a Japanese geophysicist . Sezawa's key work was on the mathematical aspects of wave transmission in media of different viscosities and the Sezawa wave mode of surface waves is named after him.
Go to Profile#9670
Stephen Timoshenko
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Stepan Prokopovich Timoshenko , later known as Stephen Timoshenko, was an ethnic Ukrainian, citizen of the Russian Empire and later, an American engineer and academician. He is considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. An inventor and one of the pioneering mechanical engineers at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in the Russi...
Go to Profile#9671
Forest Baskett
Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration, and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.
Go to Profile#9672
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.
Go to Profile#9673
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.
Go to Profile#9674
Robert J. Linhardt
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary appointment at RPI is based in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting of joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center. He is highly cited in his field, with over 100 papers having each over 100 citations.
Go to Profile#9675
Theodore Paul Wright
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Theodore Paul Wright , also known as T. P. Wright, was a U.S. aeronautical engineer and educator. Biography He was born in Galesburg, Illinois on May 25, 1895. His father was the economist Philip Green Wright and his brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. He graduated from Lombard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in World War I.
Go to Profile#9676
Geoffrey Raynor
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Geoffrey Vincent Raynor FRS was an English metallurgist and university academic. Life Raynor was educated at Nottingham High School before studying Chemistry at Keble College, Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in 1936. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, working with William Hume-Rothery, and carried out metallurgical research for the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow, with the course that he taught in structural and theoretical metallurgy becoming "the forerunner for the development of metallurgical teaching all over the world".
Go to Profile#9677
Lan Jen Chu
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Lan Jen Chu was a noted electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Chu is noted for his work on the fundamental limitations for small antennas, also known as Chu's limit.
Go to Profile#9678
Harold Barlow
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Harold Everard Monteagle Barlow FRS was a British engineer. He was born in Islington, London, the son of Leonard Barlow, an electrical engineer. He entered University College, London where, apart from the World War II years , he spent most of his working life. He was taught by Ambrose Fleming, who held the Pender Chair there. Barlow went on to succeed Fleming in that chair, and hence also in the post of head of department. Among his students, Barlow supervised Charles Kao, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Physics, for a doctoral degree.
Go to Profile#9679
Arnold Tustin
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Arnold Tustin, , was a British engineer, and Professor of Engineering at the University of Birmingham and at Imperial College London, who made important contributions to the development of control engineering and its application to electrical machines.
Go to Profile#9680
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.
Go to Profile#9681
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.
Go to Profile#9682
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.
Go to Profile#9683
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.
Go to Profile#9684
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.
Go to Profile#9685
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.
Go to Profile#9686
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.
Go to Profile#9687
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.
Go to Profile#9688
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.
Go to Profile#9689
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.
Go to Profile#9690
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.
Go to Profile#9691
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.
Go to Profile#9692
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.
Go to Profile#9693
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.
Go to Profile#9694
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.
Go to Profile#9695
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.
Go to Profile#9696
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.
Go to Profile#9697
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.
Go to Profile#9698
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...
Go to Profile#9699
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.
Go to Profile#9700
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.
Go to Profile