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,
#9801
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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Donald Burmister
1883 - 1981 (98 years)
Donald M. Burmister was a professor of civil engineering and a pioneer in the field of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. Career Donald Burmister served as faculty member at Columbia University for 34 years, beginning in 1929. He was a consultant on the foundation design for many notable construction projects including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Verazanno-Narrows Bridge, Tappan Zee Bridge, first New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, and reconstruction of the White House in 1950.
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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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Philip Drinker
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Philip Drinker was an American industrial hygienist. With Louis Agassiz Shaw, he invented the first widely used iron lung in 1928. Family and early life Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker; his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., pathologist Cecil Kent Drinker, businessman James Drinker, and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. After graduating from St. George's and Princeton in 1915, Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh for two years.
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Lloyd H. Donnell
1895 - 1997 (102 years)
Lloyd Hamilton Donnell was an American mechanical engineer, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is considered internationally renowned expert in engineering mechanics, specifically known for his work on shell analysis and thin-shell structure. He was recipient of the 1969 ASME Medal.
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Don Torrieri
942 - Present (1084 years)
Don J. Torrieri is an American electrical engineer and mathematician. His primary research interests are communication systems, adaptive arrays, and signal processing. He is a Fellow of the US Army Research Laboratory, where he was employed for most of his career. He has authored many articles and several books including "Principles of Spread-Spectrum Communication Systems, 4th edition" . He has taught many graduate courses at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland and many short courses. Don Torrieri received the B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, the MS.
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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.
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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 ...
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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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Raymond D. Mindlin
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Raymond David Mindlin was an American mechanical engineer, Professor of Applied Science at Columbia University, and recipient of the 1946 Presidential Medal for Merit and many other awards and honours. He is known as mechanician, who made seminal contributions to many branches of applied mechanics, applied physics, and engineering sciences.
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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...
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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.
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King-Sun Fu
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.
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Jesse Francis McClendon
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.
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Gerald T. Heydt
Gerald Thomas Heydt is an American electrical engineer and Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Heydt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to the technology of electric power quality.
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Dallas B. Phemister
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.
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John G. Trump
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
John George Trump was an American electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1973, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Trump was noted for developing rotational radiation therapy. Together with Robert J. Van de Graaff, he developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators.
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Paul Davidoff
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Paul Davidoff was an American planner, planning educator, and planning theoretician who conceptualized "advocacy planning" with his wife, Linda Stone Davidoff. In legal scholarship, he is known as the primary litigant in the Mount Laurel decision, which established a state-constitutional basis for inclusionary zoning in New Jersey, a doctrine which has been accepted in other United States jurisdictions. Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute and the urban planning department at Hunter College, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University during his career...
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Hardy Cross
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Hardy Cross was an American structural engineer and the developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures. The method was in general use from c. 1935 until c. 1960 when it was gradually superseded by other methods.
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Ernest Edwin Sechler
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Ernest Edwin Sechler was an aerospace engineer and scientist who specialized in thin-shell structures. He earned his doctorate in 1934 at Caltech as one of the early students of Theodore von Kármán with a dissertation on the mechanics of thin-plate compression.
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Edward C. Molina
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Edward Charles Dixon Molina was an American engineer, known for his contributions to teletraffic engineering. Biography Edward Molina was born on December 13, 1877. After completing high school, he went to work, and was self-taught in mathematics. He began working for the Western Electric Company in 1898 at the age of 21 and entered the AT&T research department in 1901. His invention of relay translators in 1906 resulted in the panel dial systems. In his studies of telephone traffic, Molina independently rediscovered the Poisson distribution in 1908. It was briefly named in his honor among American telephone engineers until the prior art was recovered.
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Rudolf Kompfner
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Rudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born inventor, physicist and architect, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube . Life Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England , where he worked as an architect until 1941. He had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943.
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John R. Ragazzini
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
John Ralph Ragazzini was an American electrical engineer and a professor of Electrical Engineering. Biography Ragazzini was born in Manhattan, New York City from Italian immigrants Luigi Ragazzini and Angelina Badelli and received the degrees of B.S. and E.E. at the City College of New York in 1932 and 1933 and earned the degrees of A.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 1939 and 1941.
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John Harbeson
1888 - 1986 (98 years)
John Frederick Harbeson was a Philadelphia architect and a long-time architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a principal in the Philadelphia design firm, Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson, successors to the office of Paul Cret.
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George William Osborn Howe
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
George William Osborn Howe D.Sc. LL.D. was a British electrical engineer. After education at the Roan School, Greenwich, Howe was apprenticed to Siemens Brothers, at Woolwich, where he worked for seven years. During that time he attended evening classes at Woolwich Polytechnic and, as an outstanding student, received an Whitford Exhibition scholarship and a senior county scholarship. With this financial aid, Howe studied for three years at Armstrong College, graduating with honours in 1900. He was then employed for two years by Siemens & Halske, at Charlottenburg .
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William Penn Cresson
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
William Penn Cresson was an American architect, author, diplomat, and husband of sculptor Margaret French Cresson . Education Born in Claymont, Delaware, Cresson studied at the University of Pennsylvania from 1895 until graduation in 1897. Shortly after graduation, Cresson moved to France to study at the influential École des Beaux-Arts until 1902, when he went on to become a student at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.
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Frank Wattendorf
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Frank Wattendorf was an American physicist specializing in wind tunnels for research in aerodynamics. Wattendorf is recalled for his report on the wind tunnel at Ötztal that was under construction in Austria during World War II. Wattendorf's report, and one by Theodore von Kármán, spurred on renewed research in aerodynamics.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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James Friauf
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
James Byron Friauf was an American electrical engineer who first determined the crystal structure of MgZn2 in 1927. Friauf was a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He had received training in the determination of the structure of crystals as a student at California Institute of Technology where he studied with Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson.
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Sturgis Elleno Leavitt
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Sturgis Elleno Leavitt was the Kenan Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, the author of many books on Spanish language and literature, the president of several Spanish language teaching organizations, an adviser to the U.S. State Department and for many years the chairman of the Southern Humanities Conference as well as editor of the Hispanic Review.
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Charles Inglis
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Sir Charles Edward Inglis, was a British civil engineer. The son of a medical doctor, he was educated at Cheltenham College and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he would later forge a career as an academic. Inglis spent a two-year period with the engineering firm run by John Wolfe-Barry before he returned to King's College as a lecturer. Working with Professors James Alfred Ewing and Bertram Hopkinson, he made several important studies into the effects of vibration on structures and defects on the strength of plate steel.
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Hans Reissner
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Hans Jacob Reissner, also known as Jacob Johannes Reissner , was a German aeronautical engineer whose avocation was mathematical physics. During World War I he was awarded the Iron Cross second class for his pioneering work on aircraft design.
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John Ambrose Fleming
1849 - 1945 (96 years)
Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS was an English electrical engineer and physicist who invented the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, designed the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic radio transmission was made, and also established the right-hand rule used in physics.
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Heinrich Hencky
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Heinrich Hencky was a German engineer. Born in Ansbach, he studied civil engineering in Munich and received his PhD from the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. In 1913, he joined a railway company in Kharkiv, Ukraine. On the outbreak of World War I he was interned. After the war he taught at Darmstadt, Dresden and at Delft in the Netherlands.
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Emery Roth
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Emery Roth was an American architect of Hungarian-Jewish descent who designed many New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, incorporating Beaux-Arts and Art Deco details. His sons continued in the family enterprise, largely expanding the firm under the name Emery Roth & Sons.
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Piero Portaluppi
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Piero Portaluppi was an Italian architect. Biography Pietro Portaluppi was born in Milan, son of the engineer Oreste Portaluppi and wife Luisa Gadda. He graduated in 1905 from the Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo and registered at the Politecnico, studying with and Carlo Calzecchi. During this time, he worked as a caricaturist with the satirical newspapers Il Babau, A quel paese, and Guerin Meschino.
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Karl Schwanzer
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
Karl Schwanzer was an Austrian architect. He was an important figure of post-war architecture. Life As early as high school, the architecture enthusiast Karl Schwanzer and his uncle planned and built an allotment garden house for his family on Vienna's Schafberg in 1935. After his graduation from high school at the Bundesrealgymnasium Wien 7 in 1936, he completed his mandatory service in the Austrian national guard.
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Louis George Carpenter
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Louis George Carpenter , was a college Professor and later the Dean of Engineering & Physics at Colorado State University formerly known as the Colorado Agricultural College. He was also a mathematician and an irrigation and consulting engineer.
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Mustafa İnan
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Mustafa İnan was a Turkish civil engineering academic. Life He was born in Adana. His mother was Rabia and father was Hüseyin Avni. At the end of the First World War Adana was occupied by the French forces and his family had to move to Konya. At the end of the Turkish War of Independence the family returned to Adana and Mustafa continued his secondary education in Adana. In 1931 he took the first place in the entrance examinations of the Istanbul Technical University . Later he was sent to Switzerland for advanced studies in the ETH Zurich . After his doctorate thesis 1941, he returned to Turkey to continue academic studies in the Engineering School.
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Giovanni Muzio
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Giovanni Muzio was an Italian architect. Muzio was born and died in Milan. He was closely associated with the Novecento Italiano artists group. Biography The son of Virginio Muzio, an accomplished architect, Muzio studied in Milan, and after participation in the war and a trip to Europe, in 1920 he opened in Milan a study with Giuseppe De Finetti, Gio Ponti, Emilio Lancia and Mino Fiocchi and actively participated in the cultural life of Milan.
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Samuel H. Caldwell
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Samuel Hawks Caldwell was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers. Early life and education Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier . In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique ...
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Louis A. Simon
1867 - 1958 (91 years)
Louis A. Simon was an American architect. He spent almost his entire career with the Office of the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury. He served as the last supervising architect from 1934 to 1939 and thereafter of the Public Buildings Branch of the Federal Works Agency until 1941. He was also principal architect for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.
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Wilhelm Cauer
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specific...
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Yoshirō Taniguchi
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Yoshirō Taniguchi was a Japanese architect. He was born in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He was a graduate of Tokyo University Department of Architecture and professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1929–1965. As an architect, he created over 50 buildings and 10 memorials and participated in many professional activities as a statesman of Japanese modern architecture. “Yoshirō Taniguchi must be regarded as one of the most widely known, and, in the best sense, popular architects in Japan. Taniguchi is also well known for his writings and has made a name for himself as ...
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Thomas Rickman
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Thomas Rickman was an English architect and architectural antiquary who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival. He is particularly remembered for his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture , which established the basic chronological classification and terminology that are still in widespread use for the different styles of English medieval ecclesiastical architecture.
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John Eisenmann
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
John Eisenmann was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. As part of Eisenmann & Smith he designed the Cleveland Arcade in downtown Cleveland. He also designed the Main building for Case School of Applied Science, present-day Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the school's first professor of civil engineering. He pioneered structural steel construction in the United States and is credited with co-designing Cleveland's Arcade, "the first commercial building in the state designated an historic landmark in architecture." Eisenmann is also credited with designing the flag of Ohio in 19...
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Dugald C. Jackson
1865 - 1951 (86 years)
Dugald Caleb Jackson was an American electrical engineer. He received the IEEE Edison Medal for "outstanding and inspiring leadership in engineering education and in the field of generation and distribution of electric power".
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Józef Szanajca
1902 - 1939 (37 years)
Józef Szanajca was a Polish architect. Founder and member of PRAESENS group: "The Praesens group played a pioneering role in the development of modern architecture in Poland. From 1927 a link with Le Corbusier was established. Its members participated in all the main meetings".
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Jo van den Broek
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, was a Dutch architect influential in the rebuilding of Rotterdam after World War II. Van den Broek was born in Rotterdam. He joined with Johannes Brinkman in 1936, after the death of Brinkman's partner Leendert van der Vlugt. The firm's work during this time including a new terminal building for the Holland-America cruise line.
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