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
Lionel Bailey Budden
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Lionel Bailey Budden FRIBA was an English architect. Born to William Budden and Elizabeth Adams, Budden attended Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby. From 1933 Budden was Roscoe Professor in Architecture in the Liverpool University School of Architecture. He retired in 1952.
Go to Profile#9852
Raffaele Giacomelli
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Raffaele Giacomelli was an aeronautical engineer, linguist, dialectologist, and historian of science. His father was Francesco Giacomelli, of Bolognese origin, first astronomer at the R. Osservatorio del Campidoglio, and his mother was Maria née Marucchi, from a family of scholars. Raffaele Giacomelli's paternal great-grandfather, Raffaele, jurist, had been rector of the University of Bologna, and his uncle, Orazio Marucchi, was a famous archaeologist.
Go to Profile#9853
Mieczysław G. Bekker
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Mieczysław Gregory Bekker was a Polish engineer and scientist. Bekker was born in Strzyżów, near Hrubieszów, Poland and graduated from Warsaw Technical University in 1929. Early career Bekker worked for the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs at the Army Research Institute in Warsaw. There he worked on systems for tracked vehicles to work on uneven ground. In the Invasion of Poland he was in a unit that retreated to Romania and then he was moved to France in 1939.
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Ernst Neufert
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ernst Neufert was a German architect who is known as an assistant of Walter Gropius, as a teacher and member of various standardization organizations, and especially for his widely disseminated reference book Architects' data.
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A. L. Strand
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
August Leroy Strand was an American entomologist who served as President of Montana State University from 1937 to 1942, and as President of Oregon State University from 1942 to 1961. Life and career Strand was born on February 12, 1894, in Victoria, Texas, to August M. and Christina Strand. His father was born in Sweden about 1855, and his mother in Sweden about 1861. They emigrated to the United States, first taking up residence in Missouri, where their first three children were born: Rose L. in 1885, Ettie C. in 1888, and May F. in 1887. The family moved to Victoria, Texas, where August was born in 1894.
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Odd Dahl
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Odd Dahl was a Norwegian engineer and explorer. He is particularly remembered for his contributions to research in nuclear physics. Biography He was born at Drammen in Buskerud, Norway, the son of businessman Lauritz Dahl and his wife Olga Sørensen. Dahl attended an evening technical school during his teenage years. In 1917, he was employed by Fenger Hagen, an electrical engineer with an interest in radio telephony. In 1921, Dahl was admitted as a student at the Army Flyvevæsens flight school at Kjeller in Skedsmo where he received an international pilot's license. Roald Amundsen hired him i...
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William Wurster
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
William Wilson Wurster was an American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, best known for his residential designs in California.
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Gustave Magnel
1889 - 1955 (66 years)
Gustaaf Paul Robert Magnel was a Belgian engineer and professor at Ghent University, known for his expertise regarding reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete. Biography Gustave Magnel studied civil engineering at Ghent University from 1907 to 1912. He left Belgium in 1914 and worked as a civil engineer at the D. G. Somerville & Co. Contractor Company until 1917, finally becoming chief engineer there. After he returned to Belgium from the UK in 1919, he joined the Strength of Materials Laboratory at Ghent University. He first started lecturing at the university in 1922 and went on to bec...
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Eižens Laube
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Eižens Laube was a Latvian architect. He was responsible for some of the reconstruction work of Riga Castle in the 1930s and designed more than 200 houses in Riga. Biography Eižens Laube was born in Riga as a son of a potter. In 1899 he graduated Realschule and started architecture studies in Riga Polytechnic Institute. While still a student he started to work in Konstantīns Pēkšēns's architecture office in 1900. In 1904 he took a study trip to Finland where he was introduced to National Romanticism in architecture. Laube graduated from the Riga Polytechnic Institute's department of architecture in 1907.
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Eugene L. Grant
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Eugene Lodewick Grant , was an American civil engineer and educator. He graduated with a BS from the University of Wisconsin in 1917. He started teaching in 1920 at Montana State University and then in 1930 at the School of Engineering, Stanford University where he taught until 1962. He is known for his work in Engineering Economics with his textbook first published in 1930. Grant was the intellectual heir of work performed by John Charles Lounsbury Fish who published Engineering Economics: First Principles in 1923, providing the critical bridge between Grant and the pioneering effort of Arthur M.
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Thomas Church
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Thomas Dolliver Church was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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Charles Frewen Jenkin
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Charles Frewen Jenkin, CBE, FRS was a British engineer and academic. He held the first chair of engineering at the University of Oxford as Professor of Engineering Science. Early life Jenkin was born on 24 September 1865 in Claygate, Surrey. He was the second son of Fleeming Jenkin who was Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, then an all boys private school in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh, before matriculating into Trinity College, Cambridge in 1883. As the University of Cambridge had no engineering degree, he instead studied the Mathematical Tripos.
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Svetopolk Pivko
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Svetopolk Pivko was a professor and engineer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade, was a colonel of the Yugoslav Air Force deputy commander of JRV, the founder and the first director of the Aeronautical Technical Institute in Žarkovo. In 1961 he was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and from 1976 he was a full member of the Academy.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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Eric Arthur
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Eric Ross Arthur, was a Canadian architect, writer and educator. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand and educated in England, he served in World War I with the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. He emigrated to Canada in 1923 to teach architecture at the University of Toronto.
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Leicester Bodine Holland
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Leicester Bodine Holland was an American architect, art historian and archaeologist and holder of the Carnegie Chair at the Library of Congress. Holland was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Dr. James W. Holland and Mary Boggs Holland. His father was the Dean of the Jefferson Medical College; and when he graduated from William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia in 1898 Leicester Holland originally intended to also become a doctor. However, instead he went into architecture and after he received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1902 he gained a further Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture in 1904.
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Mart Stam
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Mart Stam was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer. Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th-century European architecture, including the invention of the cantilever chair, teaching at the Bauhaus, contributions to the Weissenhof Estate, the Van Nelle Factory, , buildings for Ernst May's New Frankfurt housing estates, followed by work in the USSR with the idealistic May Brigade, to teaching positions in Amsterdam and post-war East Germany. Upon return to the Netherlands he contributed to postwar recons...
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Willard Van Dyke
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Willard Ames Van Dyke was an American filmmaker, photographer, arts administrator, teacher, and former director of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art. Early life Van Dyke went to the University of California, Berkeley, circa 1927 dropping out for a time to avoid taking an ROTC course, left in 1929 and did not graduate.
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Walter Diesendorf
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Walter Diesendorf , was an Austrian-born Australian electrical engineer known for his work on high-voltage transmission systems, in particular for the Snowy River Hydro-electric Scheme. Early life and emigration Walter Diesendorf was born in Vienna on 14 December 1906, the son of Jewish parents, Eljukim Wolf and Henie Diesendorf. He attended the Technische Hochschule qualifying in engineering in 1929. He attained a doctorate of technical sciences in 1934 and worked in industry. When Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Diesendorf emigrated to Australia and settled in Sydney. Diesendo...
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Russell Lee
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Russell Werner Lee was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. His images documented the ethnography of various American classes and cultures.
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Gio Ponti
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Giovanni "Gio" Ponti was an Italian architect, industrial designer, furniture designer, artist, teacher, writer and publisher. During his career, which spanned six decades, Ponti built more than a hundred buildings in Italy and in the rest of the world. He designed a considerable number of decorative art and design objects as well as furniture. Thanks to the magazine Domus, which he founded in 1928 and directed almost all his life, and thanks to his active participation in exhibitions such as the Milan Triennial, he was also an enthusiastic advocate of an Italian-style art of living and a major player in the renewal of Italian design after the Second World War.
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Franco Albini
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Franco Albini was an Italian Neo-Rationalist architect, designer and university instructor in design. Education and career A native of Robbiate, near Milan, Albini obtained his degree in architecture at Politecnico di Milano University in 1929 and began his professional career working for Gio Ponti. He started displaying his works at the Milan Triennale, and in 1930 he opened his own practice.
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Hans Schleif
1902 - 1945 (43 years)
Hans Philipp Oswald Schleif was a German architect, architectural and classical archaeologist and member of the SS , last occupying the rank of Standartenführer . He was a member of the Nazi Party since 1937, with membership number 5,380,876.
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Arpad Nadai
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Arpád Ludwig Nádai was a Hungarian-born academic who was a professor of mechanics. Early life and career Nadai was born in Budapest, Hungary. He attended the University of Budapest for his undergraduate education. For doctorate, he went to Germany and studied at the Technical University of Berlin.
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Kenneth H. Roscoe
1914 - 1970 (56 years)
Kenneth Harry Roscoe was a British civil engineer who made tremendous contributions to the plasticity theories of soil mechanics. Early life Roscoe was born in 1914, the son of Col. H. Roscoe, OBE, of Stoke-on-Trent. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied the Mechanical Sciences tripos and was elected a senior scholar. After a brief period spent as a technical trainee at Metropolitan-Cammell, Roscoe was posted as an adjutant to the Corps of Royal Engineers Forward Sub-Area in northern France at the beginning of World War II. In...
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Paul Bonatz
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
Paul Bonatz was a German architect, member of the Stuttgart School and professor at the technical university in that city during part of World War II, and from 1954 until his death. He worked in many styles, but most often in a simplified neo-Romanesque, and designed important public buildings both in the Weimar Republic and under the Third Reich, including major bridges for the new autobahnss. In 1943 he designed several buildings in Turkey, returning to Stuttgart in 1954.
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Bruce Goff
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Bruce Alonzo Goff was an American architect, distinguished by his organic, eclectic, and often flamboyant designs for houses and other buildings in Oklahoma and elsewhere. A 1951 Life Magazine article stated that Goff was "one of the few US architects whom Frank Lloyd Wright considers creative...scorns houses that are ‘boxes with little holes."
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André Godard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
André Godard was an archaeologist, architect and historian of French and Middle Eastern Art. He served as the director of the Iranian Archeological Service for many years. Life Godard was born in Chaumont. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris, he studied Middle Eastern archaeology, particularly that of Iran, and later became known for designing the National Museum of Iran, where he was appointed inaugural director in 1936. He was also instrumental in the design of Tehran University campus.
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Max Schuler
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Maximilian Joseph Johannes Eduard Schuler was a German engineer and is best known for discovering the principle known as Schuler tuning which is fundamental to the operation of a gyrocompass or inertial guidance system that will be operated near the surface of the Earth.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist. He is referred to as being one of the founders of modern rocketry and astronautics, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Germans Hermann Oberth, Fritz von Opel, Wernher Von Braun and the American Robert H. Goddard.
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George de Bothezat
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
George de Bothezat was a Romanian-Russian American engineer, businessman, and pioneer of helicopter flight. Biography George de Bothezat was born in 1882 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, to Alexander Botezat and Nadine Rabutowskaja. His father Alexander Il'ich Botezat belonged to a family of Bessarabian landlords, graduated from the department of history and philology of the Saint Petersburg University and worked in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first in Saint Petersburg and then in Paris. Mother, Nadezhda L'vovna Rabutovskaya, belonged to Russian nobility. After the father's ...
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Paul Fillunger
1883 - 1937 (54 years)
Paul Fillunger was an Austrian geotechnical engineer. Raised in a family of engineers, he studied at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna and took a position in the state-owned railway company in 1906. In 1908 he completed a PhD and then went to teach mathematics, machine industry and then mechanics at the University of Vienna.
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Albert Caquot
1881 - 1976 (95 years)
Albert Irénée Caquot was considered the "best living French engineer." He received the “Croix de Guerre 1914–1918 ” and was Grand-Corix of the Légion d’Honneur . In 1962, he was awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal. He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1934 until his death in 1976.
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Shadrach Woods
1923 - 1973 (50 years)
Shadrach Woods was an American architect, urban planner and theorist. Biography Schooled in engineering at New York University and in literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, Woods joined the Paris office of Le Corbusier in 1948. Assigned to the project for the Unité d'Habitation, then under construction in Marseille, France, Woods met the Azerbaijan-born Greek architect George Candilis, with whom he would later form a lasting partnership.
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Colin McWilliam
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Colin McWilliam was a British architecture academic and author. Career Born in London, he graduated from the University of Cambridge and became Director of the Scottish National Buildings Record, then the Assistant Secretary of the National Trust for Scotland. He also directed architectural history and conservation at Edinburgh College of Art, and later Heriot-Watt University. He was a founder of the Dictionary of Scottish Architects Project, and was instrumental in setting up the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland.
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Erna Hamburger
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Erna Hamburger was a Swiss engineer and professor. In 1957, she became professor of electrometry at the University of Lausanne. She was the first woman in the history of Switzerland to be named a professor at a STEM university.
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Karl Gehlen
1883 - 1933 (50 years)
Karl Gehlen was the chief designer of the German Flugzeugbau Friedrichshafen GmbH company, formed on June 17, 1912 by Diplom Ingenieur Theodor Kober, a working associate of Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
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William Freeman Myrick Goss
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
William Freeman Myrick Goss was an American mechanical engineer, inventor, Professor at Purdue University and its first dean of engineering, author and president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
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Ernest R. Matthews
1873 - Present (153 years)
Prof Ernest Romney Matthews FRSE FGS MICE was a British civil engineer and expert on coastal erosion. In authorship he is known as Ernest R. Matthews. Life He was born in Hastings in Sussex on the southern English coast on 16 January 1873. He was the son of William Henry Matthews, the local chief coastguard and had a lifelong interest in the coast. He attended St Michael's School in Hastings.
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James Melvin Rhodes
1916 - 1976 (60 years)
James Melvin Rhodes was an American educational scientist, assistant professor of education and creativity researcher who was the originator of the pioneering concept of the 4 "P"s of creativity. Biography Mel Rhodes was born on June 14, 1916, to Waldo and Grace Rhodes in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as the second eldest of 7 siblings.
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Mukul Dey
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Mukul Chandra Dey was one of five children of Purnashashi Devi and Kula Chandra Dey. He was a student of Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan and is considered as a pioneer of drypoint-etching in India. The entire family of Mukul Dey had artistic talents, the brother Manishi Dey was a well-known painter, and his two sisters, Annapura and Rani Chanda, were accomplished in arts and crafts as well.
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Wajiro Kon
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
was a Japanese architect, designer, and educator. He is renowned as the father of "modernology" , a branch of sociology which studied the changes in cityscape and people which emerged as a consequence of Tokyo becoming a modern metropolis in the early Showa Era.
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James M. Hyde
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
James McDonald Hyde was a metallurgist who designed the first significant froth flotation plant in the United States. He also served as a member of the Los Angeles, California, City Council from 1931 to 1939.
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Theodor Rehbock
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Theodor Christoph Heinrich Rehbock was a German hydraulics engineer, and professor at the University of Karlsruhe. Theodor Rehbock's father was an overseas merchant. Rehbock studied at the Technical University Munich and Berlin Institute of Technology during 1884–90, receiving his MSc degree in 1892.
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Steen Eiler Rasmussen
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Hon. FAIA was a Danish architect and urban planner who was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and a prolific writer of books and poetry. He was made a Royal Designer for Industry by the British Royal Society of Arts in 1947.
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Tanabe Sakuro
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Tanabe Sakuro was a Japanese civil engineer and early pioneer in the development of hydro electric power. Tanabe’s most famous achievement was the Lake Biwa Canal that runs from Lake Biwa to Kyoto city. For his work as Chief Engineer directing the project and paper entitled “The Lake Biwa - Kyoto Canal” published in 1894, Tanabe was awarded a Telford Medal by the British Institution of Civil Engineers. The canal passes through a series of tunnels and was the site of Japan's first Hydro-electric power station.
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Walter T. Bailey
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Walter Thomas Bailey was an American architect from Kewanee, Illinois. He was the first African American graduate with a bachelor of science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the first licensed African-American architect in the state of Illinois. He worked at the Tuskegee Institute, and practiced in both Memphis and Chicago. Walter T. Bailey became the second African American that graduated from the University of Illinois.
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Zay Jeffries
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Zay Jeffries was an American mining engineer, metallurgist, consulting engineer and recipient of the 1946 John Fritz Medal. Biography Jeffries was born in Willow Lake, South Dakota as one of the nine children of Johnston Jeffries and Florence Jeffries. He obtained his BSc in mining engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1910. Three years later, he also obtained his MSc in metallurgical engineering from the same school, and in 1918 Harvard University awarded him his Doctor of Science degree.
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Gregory Ain
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Gregory Samuel Ain was an American architect active in the mid-20th century. Working primarily in the Los Angeles area, Ain is best known for bringing elements of modern architecture to lower- and medium-cost housing. He addressed "the common architectural problems of common people".
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