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,
#9951
Peter W. Jones
#9952
Minor White
1908 - 1976 (68 years)
Minor Martin White was an American photographer, theoretician, critic, and educator. He had an intense interest in how people viewed and thought about photographs and a personal vision guided by several spiritual and intellectual philosophies.
Go to Profile#9953
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard
1802 - 1872 (70 years)
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard was a French inventor, photographer and photo publisher. Being a cloth merchant by trade, in the 1840s he developed interest in photography and focused on technical and economical issues of mass production of photo prints.
Go to Profile#9954
Karl Weißbach
1841 - 1905 (64 years)
Johann Karl Robert Weißbach was a German architect and Professor. Life and work After graduating from secondary school, he completed an apprenticeship in the building trade, while attending the local Baugewerkschule . Following that, he spent some time working in the studios of Bernhard Krüger , the Court Architect. He completed his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts with Georg Hermann Nicolai. In 1863, he was awarded an academic travel grant, which he used to visit Italy and study Renaissance architecture. He was able to extend his stay there by participating in the preparation of T...
Go to Profile#9955
Gibb Gilchrist
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Gibb Gilchrist was an American engineer, highway development expert and academic administrator. Gilchrist served as a Texas state highway engineer, president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas and the first chancellor of the Texas A&M University System. Gilchrist received numerous awards and honorary degrees. He is the namesake for several transportation-related entities.
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Gertrude Sawyer
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Gertrude Sawyer was one of the earliest American women architects to practice in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., area. Early life and education Sawyer was born April 2, 1895, in Tuscola, Illinois. She knew she wanted to be an architect from an early age. Sawyer graduated high school in Norborne, Missouri in 1913 and graduated from Tudor Hall School in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1914. She received a Bachelor of Science in landscape architecture from the University of Illinois in 1918 and went on to become one of the first students at the Cambridge School of Domestic and Landscape Architecture for Women, where she met landscape architect Rose Greely.
Go to Profile#9957
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
1893 - 1953 (60 years)
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker. Early life Kuniyoshi was born on September 1, 1889, in Okayama, Japan. He immigrated to the United States in 1906 at 17, choosing not to attend military school in Japan. Kuniyoshi originally intended to study English and return to Japan to work as a translator.
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Pavel Florensky
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor, polymath, neomartyr and folk saint. During the later twentieth century, statements had appeared noting a recognition by the Russian Orthodox Church of him as a saint, though it was later firmly noted that no such decision had been made.
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L. R. G. Treloar
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Professor Leslie Ronald George Treloar, OBE was a leading figure in the science of rubber and elasticity, and writer of a number of influential texts. Leslie Treloar graduated in Physics from University College, Reading, in 1927 and subsequently joined GEC. He gained his PhD from the University of London in 1938. After working for GEC he moved to the British Rubber Producers Research Association. He worked briefly at the Telecommunications Research Establishment during World War II.
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Christian Møller
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Christian Møller was a Danish chemist and physicist who made fundamental contributions to the theory of relativity, theory of gravitation and quantum chemistry. He is known for Møller–Plesset perturbation theory and Møller scattering.
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Warren P. Mason
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Warren Perry Mason was an American electrical engineer and physicist at Bell Labs. A graduate of Columbia University, he had a prolific output, publishing four books and nearly a hundred papers. He was issued over two hundred patents, more than anyone else at Bell Labs. His work included acoustics, filters, crystals and ceramics, materials science, polymer chemistry, ultrasonics, bonding to semiconductors, internal friction, and viscoelasticity.
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Ernst Giese
1832 - 1903 (71 years)
Ernst Friedrich Giese was a German architect and university professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and at the Technical University of Dresden. Early life Giese grew up in Bautzen. There he attended the high school. He then studied at the Dresden Polytechnic and at the Dresden Art Academy with Hermann Nicolai. From 1855 to 1858, Giese was on a grant in Italy for study purposes.
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Carl August Benjamin Siegel
1757 - 1832 (75 years)
Carl August Benjamin Siegel was a German architecture professor and chief of works, active in Leipzig and Dresden. Life and Work Siegel received his education in Dresden as a student of Friedrich August Krubsacius and Gottlob August Hölzer. This was followed in Leipzig from 1785 by employment as a teacher of architectural drawing at the Academy of Art . He then became a full professor and was head of the Department of Architectural Art until 1823. He also served as a university architect in Leipzig. After 1823, he became a professor and head of the building school at the Dresden Academy of Art.
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Bruno Schulz
1865 - 1932 (67 years)
Bruno Schulz was a German architectural historian. From 1893 onward, he was employed as a Regierungsbaumeister in Berlin. In 1897-98 he accompanied Friedrich Sarre on a research trip to Persia, and after his return to Europe, lived and worked in Venice during the years 1899–1900. He then served as technical director of the German archaeological excavation at Baalbek . Later on, he taught classes on the morphology of classical and Renaissance architecture at the Technical University of Hannover, and in 1912 was appointed professor of architecture at the Technical University of Berlin.
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Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio
1330 - 1388 (58 years)
Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio , also known as Giovanni de' Dondi, was an Italian physician, astronomer and mechanical engineer in Padua, now in Italy. He is remembered today as a pioneer in the art of clock design and construction. The Astrarium, which he designed and built over a period of 16 years, was a highly complex astronomical clock and planetarium, constructed only 60 or so years after the very first all-mechanical clocks had been built in Europe, and demonstrated an ambitious attempt to describe and model the planetary system with mathematical precision and technological sophistication...
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John Taylor
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
Sir John Taylor, KCB, FRIBA was a British architect working for the Office of Works. Early life The son of a joiner, Taylor first trained in the service of the Duke of Northumberland and under Anthony Salvin, who, from 1852, remodelled the duke's Alnwick Castle.
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William Campbell
1876 - 1936 (60 years)
William Campbell, D.Sc., Ph.D., M.A. was an English metallurgist, born at Newcastle on Tyne, England. He graduated from the Durham College of Science of Durham University in 1898, and from Columbia University . He lectured on geology and metallurgy at Durham, and on geology at Columbia University where he became full professor of metallurgy in 1917.
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George Webster
1797 - 1864 (67 years)
George Webster was an English architect who practised in Kendal, which was at the time in Westmorland, and later in Cumbria. All of his works were executed near his practice, and were located in Cumbria, in north Lancashire, and in the adjacent parts of Yorkshire. Most of his work was carried out on domestic buildings, but he also designed churches, and public and commercial buildings.
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Reginald Otto Kapp
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Reginald Otto Kapp was a professor of electrical engineering at UCL. He was appointed to the Pender chair in 1935. External links www.reginaldkapp.orgPortrait in the National Portrait Gallery
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Branislav Kojić
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Branislav Đ. Kojić was a Serbian architect, ruralist and painter. Biography He was born on 5 June 1899 to a family of teachers in Smederevo, Serbia. Kojić's early schooling was completed in Belgrade. In 1915, he found himself in France as a war refugee. He entered the French lycée in Poitiers, and later moved to the southern city of Nice, completing his studies there in 1917. He then moved north and enrolled in the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, where he was awarded a degree in architecture in 1921. He then obtained a position in the Ministry of Infrastructure in Belgrade and received his architectural license in 1926.
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Ludwig Lange
1808 - 1868 (60 years)
Ludwig Lange was a German architect and landscape designer. Life He was the son of a court official and began his training as an architect in 1823 under church designer Georg August Lerch. From 1826 to 1830, he attended the University of Gießen where he studied with Georg Moller. His studies continued in Munich, where he was a pupil of the landscape painter Carl Rottmann, with whom he undertook a study trip to Greece in 1834.
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James S. Meditch
#9973
Boris Rosing
1869 - 1933 (64 years)
Boris Lvovich Rosing was a Russian scientist and inventor of television. Biography Boris Rosing was born in Saint Petersburg into the family of a government official. His father, Lev Nikolaevich Rozing, served on the commission for military service under Czar Alexander II. Rozing was a descendant of the noble Rozing family, founded by Dutch immigrant Peter Rozing. Lev developed an interest mathematics and technology, including recent inventions, which he communicated to his son. From 1879 to 1887, Boris studied at St. Petersburg's Vvdensky gymnasium, from which he graduated with a gold medal.
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Melanie M. Hartmann
#9975
Otto Seitz
1846 - 1912 (66 years)
Otto Seitz, was a 19th-century German painter; born 3 September 1846 in Munich. As a professor with the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, he was the mentor of many major artists. Works His primary subjects were genre scenes, floral still life and landscapes. in works with titles such as:"Boozers and Ruffians in a Rural Tavern""Old Farmer at the Table with a Beer Bottle""Street Musicians in the Backyard,""Young Waitress"Woodland and Rocks"The Wedding Procession of Neptune and Amphitrite"The Love Letter""Portrait of a Young Italian Woman"Some of his most famous works are small, sometimes even mini...
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John Hubley
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
John Kirkham Hubley was an American animated film director, art director, producer, and writer known for his work with the United Productions of America and his own independent studio, Storyboard, Inc. . A pioneer and innovator in the American animation industry, Hubley pushed for more visually and emotionally complex films than those being produced by contemporaries like the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers Animation. He and his second wife, Faith Hubley , who he worked alongside from 1953 onward, were nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning three.
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John Shaw Jr.
1803 - 1870 (67 years)
John Shaw Jr. was an English architect of the 19th century who was complimented as a designer in the "Manner of Wren". He designed buildings in the classical Jacobean fashion and designed some of London's first semi-detached homes in the area close to Chalk Farm. Shaw retired in the early 1860s and moved to Kensington where he died in 1870. He is buried with the Shaw and Hardwick families at Kensal Green Cemetery.
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Ferdinand Porsche
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Ferdinand Porsche was an Austro-Bohemian automotive engineer and founder of the Porsche AG. He is best known for creating the first gasoline–electric hybrid vehicle , the Volkswagen Beetle, the Auto Union racing cars, the Mercedes-Benz SS/SSK, and several other important developments and Porsche automobiles.
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Nico Lansdorp
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Nico Lansdorp was a Dutch architect. His work was part of the architecture event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
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Frederick Alexander Cuthbert
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Frederick Alexander Cuthbert was an American landscape architect who worked primarily in the U.S. state of Oregon. Biography He was born in Essex, Ontario, Canada where his father was a Baptist minister. In 1908, the family moved to Muskegon, Michigan. Cuthbert graduated from the University of Michigan in 1928 with a Masters of Landscape Design and began teaching at Oregon Agricultural College. He was hired by the University of Oregon as the landscape architect in 1932, and when the landscape program was transferred to the University of Oregon, Cuthbert founded the Department of Landscape Architecture in 1934.
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Jay Robert McColl
1867 - 1936 (69 years)
Jay Robert McColl was the dean of Engineering for University of Detroit starting in 1911. A Detroit elementary school is named after him. Biography The son of Robert McColl, he received his general education at Ann Arbor High School and graduated in 1890 from Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing, Michigan. He was appointed to the U.S. Geological Survey in 1890 but did not accept this post. Instead, he took special post-graduate courses at Michigan Agricultural College and Cornell University.
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Florence Bell Robinson
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Florence Bell Robinson was a prominent American educator in landscape architecture and a pioneer in introducing women into the field. Life Born in Lapeer, Michigan, Robinson received her undergraduate degree in science from Kalamazoo College in 1908, and the BArch and MID in 1924 from the University of Michigan. She ran her own landscape firm from 1916 to 1926 and worked as a draftsperson for J.W. Case in Detroit.
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Elmer E. Kirkpatrick
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Kirkpatrick, Jr., was a United States Army Quartermaster Corps and Army Corps of Engineers officer who worked on the Alaska Highway, the Canol project, and the Manhattan Project during World War II.
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Gottlieb Bindesbøll
1800 - 1856 (56 years)
Michael Gottlieb Birckner Bindesbøll was a Danish architect active during the Danish Golden Age in the first half of the 19th century. Most known for his design of Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, he was a key figure in the stylistic shift in Danish architecture from late classicism to Historicism. He was the father of the designer Thorvald Bindesbøll and the textile artist Johanne Bindesbøll.
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Ruth Maxon Adams
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Ruth Maxon Adams was an American architect. Biography Adams grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the only child of Yale professor George Burton Adams. As a child, she visited England with her father, where she was first exposed to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. She graduated from Vassar College in 1904, with no intention of practicing architecture.
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John F. McCarthy Jr.
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
John Francis McCarthy Jr. was an American scientist and engineer. He worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as director of its Center for Space Research; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as the director of its Lewis Research Center; the United States Air Force, where he served with the Strategic Air Command and as a member of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; North American Rockwell, where he oversaw the design and development of the Apollo command and service module that took the first men to the Moon, and the S-II of the Saturn V rocket.
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Theophilus P. Chandler Jr.
1845 - 1928 (83 years)
Theophilus Parsons Chandler Jr. was an American architect of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He spent his career at Philadelphia, and is best remembered for his churches and country houses. He founded the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania , and served as its first head.
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David Joy
1825 - 1903 (78 years)
#9989
John Newton
1823 - 1895 (72 years)
John Newton was a career officer in the United States Army, a Union general in the American Civil War, and Chief of the Corps of Engineers. Early life Newton was born in Norfolk, Virginia, a city his father Thomas Newton, Jr. represented in the U.S. Congress for 31 years. He ranked second in the United States Military Academy class of 1842 and was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers. He taught engineering at the Military Academy and constructed fortifications along the Atlantic coast and Great Lakes . He was a member of a special Gulf Coast defense board and Chief Engineer, Utah Expediti...
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Montgomery Knight
1901 - 1943 (42 years)
Montgomery Knight was an aeronautical engineer who specialized in rotary-wing aircraft. He was the first director of the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a founder of and long-time researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
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Everard Mott Williams
1915 - 1972 (57 years)
Everard Mott Williams , noted scientist and educator, was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the son of Cecil Hayward Williams of Detroit, Michigan and Phyllis Hope Hason of London, England. His paternal grandfather was Rev. Gershom Mott Williams, paternal great-grandfather was General Thomas Williams, and his paternal 2nd great-grandfather was John Biddle, making him a part of the Biddle family.
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Christoph Hehl
1847 - 1911 (64 years)
Christoph Carl Adolf Hehl was a German architect and academic teacher who focused on church buildings. He was professor of medieval architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. Life and career Born in Kassel, Hehl was the son of the inspector of the Höhere Gewerbeschule there, Johannes Hehl . His brother was Maximilian Emil Hehl. He attended the Gewerbeschule from 1862 to 1866, focused on building . Among his teachers were Georg Gottlob Ungewitter and Paul Zindel. After military service, he studied in England. When he returned, he worked in the architect's office of Edwin Oppler in Hanover, who had been a student of Conrad Wilhelm Hase and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.
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Theodore D. Wilson
1840 - 1896 (56 years)
Theodore Delavan Wilson was an American naval ship designer, constructor and instructor of naval architecture and shipbuilding. As chief constructor for the Bureau of Construction and Repair from 1882 to 1892, he was in charge of all new warship design for the United States Navy. Through his efforts, the Navy began its transition out of a post–Civil War slump to become a modern naval power. Warships he designed include the pre-dreadnought battleship , whose destruction in Havana, Cuba, in 1898 precipitated the Spanish–American War.
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Peter Joseph Krahe
1758 - 1840 (82 years)
Peter Joseph Krahe was a German architect. He was instrumental in converting the old city walls and fortifications of Braunschweig into a series of parks and other public spaces. Life He was the son of the well-known historical painter Lambert Krahe. In 1775, he became a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which his father had helped to create. At the age of twenty-two, he became the Academy's youngest professor. Thanks to a grant from Elector Karl Theodor in 1782, he was able to spend a year studying in Rome. Upon returning, he set himself up as an architect. The years 1785 and 1786 wer...
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Friedrich Pützer
1871 - 1922 (51 years)
Friedrich Pützer was a German architect and urban planner. Pützer was born in Aachen. He was known mainly as a Protestant church architect, making numerous constructions or renovations of churches in the Rhine-Main area, particularly in Darmstadt. In 1910 he designed Lutherkirche in Wiesbaden. In 1912 he designed Darmstadt Hauptbahnhof. He died in Frankfurt.
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H. E. Merritt
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Henry Edward Merritt MBE was a British mechanical engineer who invented the Merritt–Brown triple differential tank transmission that provided greater manoeuvrability to a generation of British tanks, starting with the Churchill in 1939 and continuing into the 1980s. It allowed a tracked vehicle to change direction while on the move with less loss of power than under other steering systems, and to perform a neutral turn on the spot by rotating its tracks in opposite directions. Merritt's invention suited the faster pace of tank warfare of the Second World War, which contrasted with the more st...
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Reinhold Persius
1835 - 1912 (77 years)
Ernst Ludwig Reinhold Persius was a German architect and Prussian building official. Life and work He was the fourth of six children born to the Royal Architect, Ludwig Persius, and his wife Charlotte, née Sello. From 1854 to 1856, he studied at the Bauakademie with Ferdinand von Arnim, graduating as a construction site manager. During that same period, he took classes at the Prussian Academy of Arts with Heinrich Strack and Karl Bötticher. From 1856 to 1860, he worked as a manager for Friedrich August Stüler.
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Robert Seyfarth
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Robert Seyfarth was an American architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He spent the formative years of his professional career working for the noted Prairie School architect George Washington Maher. A member of the influential Chicago Architectural Club, Seyfarth was a product of the Chicago School of Architecture.
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F. B. Hinsley
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Frederick Baden Hinsley left school at the age of 13 and worked in Desford Colliery near Leicester. Encouraged by his mother, he studied at night school and was eventually admitted to study engineering at Birmingham University in 1920. On graduation, he worked in the mining industry, initially in Staffordshire before returning to academia. He worked at Cardiff University and then founded the School of Mining Engineering at the University of Nottingham. He stayed at Nottingham until retirement and remained actively involved as emeritus professor there. His specific area of expertise was mine ventilation and for which his expertise was much in demand around the world.
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Victor Luntz
1840 - 1903 (63 years)
Victor Luntz, was an Austrian architect and Professor. Life and work His father, Andreas Luntz, was a local official. In 1847, the family moved to Vienna where, from 1856 to 1860, he studied at the Polytechnic Institute then, from 1860 to 1864, at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was awarded the academy's Gundel-Prize for excellence in 1862. His primary instructors there were August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll. Later, he worked with Friedrich von Schmidt, who was building the new Vienna City Hall. He also completed an apprenticeship as a stonemason.
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