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,
#9851
Wolfgang Klemperer
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Dr. Wolfgang Benjamin Klemperer was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of the Austrian nationals Leon and Charlotte Klemperer. He was in his time a prominent aviation and aerospace scientist and engineer, who ranks among the pioneers of early aviation.
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Vassili Samarsky-Bykhovets
1803 - 1870 (67 years)
Vasili Yevgrafovich Samarsky-Bykhovets was a Russian mining engineer and the chief of Russian Mining Engineering Corps between 1845 and 1861. The mineral samarskite , and chemical element samarium are named after him. He was the first person whose name was given to a chemical element.
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Thomas Lomar Gray
1850 - 1908 (58 years)
Thomas Lomar Gray was a Scottish engineer noted for his pioneering work in seismology. Early life Born in Lochgelly, Fife, Scotland, Gray graduated in 1878 from the University of Glasgow with a BSc in engineering. At Glasgow, he awarded the Cleland Medal for "An Experimental Determination of Magnetic Moments in Absolute Measurements.".
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William Ward Watkin
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
William Ward Watkin was an architect primarily practicing in Houston, Texas. He was the founder of the Architecture Department of Rice University in 1912, and remained on the Rice faculty until his death. Concurrently, he also designed a number of important projects, mostly in the Houston area.
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Hermann Friedrich Waesemann
1813 - 1879 (66 years)
Hermann Friedrich Waesemann was a German architect. He was born in Danzig , the son of an architect. He studied mathematics and science in Bonn from 1830 to 1832, before going to Berlin to study architecture at the Bauakademie. His main work is the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin.
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Barbara Brukalska
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Barbara Brukalska was a Polish architect, an architectural theorist, a prominent exponent of Functionalism, a member of the Praesens group, and a professor at Warsaw Polytechnic. She was also the wife of architect Stanisław Brukalski.
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Carl Roesner
1804 - 1869 (65 years)
Carl Roesner was an Austrian architect. Life He studied architecture in Vienna and Rome. In 1826, he began his work as a proofreader for lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and, in 1835, became a Professor there. He gravitated to the Romanticists and concentrated on sacred art. Wilhelm Stiassny was one of his students. He was also editor of the Allgemeine Bauzeitung .
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Gaetano Cima
1805 - 1878 (73 years)
Gaetano Cima was an Italian architect, exponent of the neoclassical movement. Biography Gaetano Cima was born in Cagliari, Sardinia by an upper-middle-class family. Gaetano Cima died in Cagliari in 1878.
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Jacob Frederik Klinkhamer
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Jacob Frederik Klinkhamer was a Dutch architect and professor of architecture. He designed several buildings in the Netherlands, Dutch East Indies and South Africa. Career Klinkhamer studied in Delft at the then Polytechnic, where in 1878 he graduated as a civil engineer. He started in 1882 as an independent architect in Amsterdam. With Dolf van Gendt he designed the Granary Korthals Altes . He designed railroad building including Main II , an office building for the NISM and the station building of Soestdijk and Baarn Station . He also designed villas and houses. Several of his works are recognized as significant.
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Turpin Bannister
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Turpin Chambers Bannister was one of the leading American architectural historians of his generation. A long-time professor at the University of Illinois and the University of Florida, he is best known for his work in architectural history, including his work with The Society of Architectural Historians, and editorship of The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
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Joseph Hansom
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Joseph Aloysius Hansom was a British architect working principally in the Gothic Revival style. He invented the Hansom cab and founded the eminent architectural journal The Builder in 1843. Career Hansom was born in the parish of St Martin's , York to a large Roman Catholic family and baptised as Josephus Aloysius Handsom. He was the brother of the architect Charles Francis Hansom and the uncle of Edward J. Hansom. He was apprenticed to his father, Henry, as a joiner, but showing an early aptitude for draughtsmanship and construction, he transferred his apprenticeship to a York architect named Matthew Philips, without informing the City of York.
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Martin Bercovici
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Martin Bercovici was a Romanian electrical engineer who contributed to the development of energy engineering education in Romania and to the plan of electric networks building of Romania. He served as a dean to the then newly founded Faculty of Energy Engineering within the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.
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Anatoly Efros
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Anatoly Vasilievich Efros was a Soviet theatre and film director. He was a leading interpreter of Russian classics during the Era of Stagnation and "received numerous awards for creative excellence".
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Rosario Candela
1890 - 1953 (63 years)
Rosario Candela was an Italian American architect who achieved renown through his apartment building designs in New York City, primarily during the boom years of the 1920s. He is credited with defining the city's characteristic terraced setbacks and signature penthouses. Over time, Candela's buildings have become some of New York's most coveted addresses. As architectural historian Cristopher Gray has written: "Rosario Candela has replaced Stanford White as the real estate brokers' name-drop of choice. Nowadays, to own a 10- to 20-room apartment in a Candela-designed building is to accede t...
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W. Eugene Smith
1918 - 1978 (60 years)
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist. He has been described as "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay." His major photo essays include World War II photographs, the visual stories of an American country doctor and a nurse midwife, the clinic of Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa, the city of Pittsburgh, and the pollution which damaged the health of the residents of Minamata in Japan. His 1948 series, Country Doctor, photographed for Life, is now recognized as "the first extended editorial photo story...
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Mathew Brady
1822 - 1896 (74 years)
Mathew B. Brady was an American photographer, one of the earliest and most famous in American history. Best known for his scenes of the Civil War, he studied under inventor Samuel Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York City in 1844, and went on to photograph U.S. presidents John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Van Buren, among other public figures.
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Norman Isham
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Norman Morrison Isham was a prominent architectural historian, author, and professor at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design . He was an ardent preservationist and a pioneer in the study of early American architecture.
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Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Gustav Heinrich Johann Apollon Tammann was a prominent Baltic German chemist-physicist who made important contributions in the fields of glassy and solid solutions, heterogeneous equilibria, crystallization, and metallurgy.
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Mansfield Merriman
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Mansfield Merriman was an American civil engineer, born in Southington, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1871, was an assistant in the United States Corps of Engineers in 187273, and was an instructor in civil engineering at Sheffield from 1875 to 1878. He was professor of civil engineering at Lehigh University from 1878 to 1907 and, thereafter, a consulting civil and hydraulic engineer.
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Frederic C. Williams
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Sir Frederic Calland Williams, , known as F.C. Williams or Freddie Williams, was an English engineer, a pioneer in radar and computer technology. Education Williams was born in Romiley, Stockport, and educated at Stockport Grammar School. He gained a scholarship to study engineering at the University of Manchester where he was awarded Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1936 for research carried out as a postgraduate student of Magdalen College, Oxford.
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Margaret Bourke-White
1904 - 1971 (67 years)
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She was arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' first five-year plan, as the first American female war photojournalist, and for taking the photograph that became the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.
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Berthold K.p. Horn
#9873
Peter Harrison
1716 - 1775 (59 years)
Peter Harrison was a colonial American architect in New England who is credited with bringing the Palladian architectural movement to the colonies. Early life and education Born in York, England, Harrison immigrated to the colony of Rhode Island in 1740 with his brother Joseph Harrison. They initially established themselves as merchants and captains of their own trading vessels.
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Johann Sahulka
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Johann Sahulka was an Austrian scientist and professor of electrical engineering at Vienna University of Technology. He discovered that mercury arcs act as a rectifier. See also Mercury-arc valve
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Daniel B. Luten
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Daniel B. Luten also known as Daniel Benjamin Luten was an American bridge builder and engineer based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Career He designed and patented the Luten arch, a type of concrete arch bridge. He obtained more than 30 patents eventually, including various refinements of design that used transverse and other reinforcement which allowed bridges to be lighter. "By 1919, Luten claimed to have designed some 17,000 arches, and stated that examples of his designs could be found in all but three states of the Union. Indiana alone had some 2,000 Luten arches." He was born in Grand Rapi...
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Kenneth Tynan
1927 - 1980 (53 years)
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at The Observer, he praised John Osborne's Look Back in Anger , and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent. In 1963, Tynan was appointed as the new National Theatre Company's literary manager.
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Diane Arbus
1923 - 1971 (48 years)
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity...
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Hugo Ehrlich
1879 - 1936 (57 years)
Hugo Ehrlich was a Croatian architect. Early life and education Ehrlich was born in Zagreb to a wealthy Jewish family of builder and entrepreneur Herman Ehrlich and his wife Marija . His maternal grandfather was Zagreb's Rabbi. He was raised together with his brothers, Adolf, Ernest, Đuro and sister Mira. In 1897, Ehrlich enrolled in the Vienna University of Technology, just like his brother Đuro had a few years before. He studied under architect Carl König, for whom he worked as an associate in the König studio. After graduation from the university, Ehrlich stayed in Vienna, where he worked ...
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Anastasios Orlandos
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Anastasios Orlandos was a Greek architect and historian of architecture. Biography A descendant of Ioannis Orlandos, Anastasios was born and died in Athens. He studied as a civil engineer in the National Technical University of Athens, and completed his studies in archaeology at the University of Athens, where he later served as a professor. He was among the leading researchers in ancient and Byzantine architecture, and responsible for the restoration of many ancient and medieval monuments throughout the country. He was also chairman of the Academy of Athens in 1950, and from 1951 until his d...
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William Ripper
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
William Ripper, CH was a British educationalist. He was principal of Sheffield Technical School when it merged with other institutions to create the University of Sheffield, and he was acting vice-chancellor of the university from 1917 to 1919.
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Branko Tanazević
1876 - 1945 (69 years)
Branko Tanazević was one of the most famous Serbian architects of the Art Nouveau and Serbo-Byzantine Revival, also known as the Serbian national style, which he successfully combined in his works. He graduated from two faculties: the Technical Faculty in Belgrade, the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Architecture in Munich.
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Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt was a British town planner, journalist, editor and educator. She was at the centre of the transnational network of theoreticians and practitioners who shaped the post-war Modern Movement in decentralized community design, residential architecture and social reform. She contributed in developing methods for the application of the ideas of Patrick Geddes, as well as publicizing them. Even Tyrwhitt had never met Geddes, she was able to extract from his many writings key ideas and concepts to disseminate among her colleagues and injected Geddesian thinking into conferences...
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Ivan Edward Sutherland
#9884
Henry Selby Hele-Shaw
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Henry Selby Hele-Shaw FRS was an English mechanical and automobile engineer. He was the inventor of the variable-pitch propeller, which contributed to British success in the Battle of Britain in 1940, and he experimented with flows through thin cells. Flows through such configurations are named in his honour . He was also a co-founder of Victaulic.
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David Belasco
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
David Belasco was an American theatrical producer, impresario, director, and playwright. He was the first writer to adapt the short story Madame Butterfly for the stage. He launched the theatrical career of many actors, including James O'Neill, Mary Pickford, Lenore Ulric, and Barbara Stanwyck. Belasco pioneered many innovative new forms of stage lighting and special effects in order to create realism and naturalism.
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Stanley Hart White
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Stanley Hart White was a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois from 1922 to 1959 and the inventor of the green wall. Career White called his invention "Botanical Bricks" and developed prototypes in his backyard in Urbana, Illinois. Stanley's brother E.B. White documented the invention in his 1937 letter to Katherine S. White, writing, “I guess everyone has crazy brothers and sisters. I know I have. Stan, by the way, has taken out a patent on an invention of his called ‘Botanical Bricks,’ which are simply plant units capable of being built up to any height, for quick landscape effects, the vertical surfaces covered with flowering vines, or the like.
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Henry Fox Talbot
1800 - 1877 (77 years)
William Henry Fox Talbot FRS FRSE FRAS was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent that affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He ...
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Hans Lorenz
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Hans Lorenz was a German engineer and mathematical physicist. He was an influential professor at the University of Göttingen and at Danzig where he was involved in establishing the training of engineers with sound mathematical and physics foundations.
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Freidun Aghalyan
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Freidun Aghalyan was an Armenian architect. In 1903 Aghalian finished a building for the Saint-Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineering. Between 1903 & 1921 he oversaw the construction of railroad bridges, gymnasia, the Treasury palace and Workers' House in Baku, and the Armenian church of Armavir, Russia. In 1921, he moved to Yerevan, here he headed the construction department of Kanaker. He was the author of Kanaker HES and several other buildings in Yerevan, Kanaker and Getamej. After 1917, Aghalian also worked as a lecturer in Baku and then in Yerevan.
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James A. Wetmore
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
James Alfonso Wetmore was an American lawyer and administrator, best known as the Acting Supervising Architect of the U.S. Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department from 1915 through 1933.
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Karl von Fischer
1782 - 1820 (38 years)
Karl von Fischer was a German architect. His plans had considerable influence on the architecture of neo-classicism in Munich and South Germany. Biography Fischer was born in Mannheim. From 1796 Fischer was trained by Maximilian von Verschaffelt before he moved to Vienna in 1799 to study architecture under Ferdinand von Hohenberg. An early design, at the age of only 22, the Prinz-Carl-Palais in Munich , made him famous and he became a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in 1809. In 1811–18 Fischer constructed the National Theatre, destroyed in an 1823 fire. He als...
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Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah
1894 - 1935 (41 years)
Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah was a Lebanese electrical and electronics research engineer, mathematician and inventor. He was born in Nabatieh in present-day Lebanon. Biography He studied at the American University of Beirut. In 1916, he was conscripted into the Ottoman army, and worked as a telegraph operator. He later taught mathematics in Damascus, Syria, and at the American University of Beirut.
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Giovan Battista Filippo Basile
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Giovan Battista Filippo Basile was an Italian architect. Born to a family of humble means. From childhood, Vincenzo Tineo, an erudite horticulturalist in Palermo, recognized Basile's talent, and was able to sponsor his education, and gain him entry into the university to study physical and mathematical sciences. Basile and eventually received or won his degree in architecture, which at the time was a prize conferred through a competition. He also taught physics at university, and at the atheneum, taught descriptive geometry and its applications.
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Riccardo Morandi
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Riccardo Morandi was an Italian civil engineer best known for his innovative use of reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete, although over the years some of his particular cable-stayed bridges have had some maintenance trouble.
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Peter Nicholson
1765 - 1844 (79 years)
Peter Nicholson was a Scottish architect, mathematician and engineer. Largely self-taught, he was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker but soon abandoned his trade in favour of teaching and writing. He practised as an architect but is best remembered for his theoretical work on the skew arch , his invention of draughtsman's instruments, including a centrolinead and a cyclograph, and his prolific writing on numerous practical subjects.
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Robert Lee Flowers
1870 - 1951 (81 years)
Robert Lee Flowers served as president of Duke University from 1941 to 1948. Flowers graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and worked for Trinity College as a professor in electrical engineering and mathematics before becoming an administrator. He served the university for over sixty years – holding the positions of Treasurer, Vice-President, President, and Chancellor.
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Martin Dülfer
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Martin Dülfer was a German architect and professor; best known for designing theatres in the Historical and Art-Nouveau styles. Life and work His father, Carl Dülfer, was a publisher and book dealer. After completing his secondary education, he attended a trade school in Schweidnitz. Then, from 1877 to 1879, he studied at the Polytechnic School in Hannover, with Conrad Wilhelm Hase and, from 1879 to 1880, at the Technischen Hochschule in Stuttgart with Christian Friedrich von Leins. Following a brief period of military service, he took a position at the Berlin offices of and Karl von Großheim.
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Leslie Green
1875 - 1908 (33 years)
Leslie William Green was an English architect. He is best known for his design of iconic stationss constructed on the London Underground railway system in central London during the first decade of the 20th century, with distinctive oxblood red faïence blocks including pillars and semi-circular first-floor windows, and patterned tiled interiors done in the Modern Style .
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Ub Iwerks
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Ubbe Ert Iwwerks , known as Ub Iwerks , was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, known for his work with Walt Disney Animation Studios in general, and for having worked on the development of the design of the character of Mickey Mouse, among others. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentious relationship with his father, who abandoned him as a child. Iwerks met fellow artist Walt Disney while working at a Kansas City art studio in 1919. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, Disney and Iwerks ventured into animation together.
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Carl Schäfer
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Carl Wilhelm Ernst Schäfer was a German architect and university professor. Schäfer became the most important representative of the late Gothic Revival in Germany. He created several churches: Modification of the Catholic Propsteikirche St. Gertrude of Brabant in Wattenscheid , Catholic parish church of St. Nikolai in Lippstadt , Protestant church in Bralitz , Catholic parish church of St. John Baptist in Birkung , Old Catholic Church in Karlsruhe .
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