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
Anton Rosen
1859 - 1928 (69 years)
Anton Rosen was a Danish architect, furniture designer, decorative artist and professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In his architecture, he combined a free Historicist style with inspiration from contemporary English architecture and details influenced by Jugendstil.
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Jacob van Campen
1596 - 1657 (61 years)
Jacob van Campen was a Dutch artist and architect of the Golden Age. Life He was born into a wealthy family at Haarlem, and spent his youth in his home town. Being of noble birth and with time on his hands, he took up painting mainly as a pastime. In 1614, he became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke , and studied painting under Frans de Grebber - a number of Van Campen's oils survive. About 1616 to 1624 he is thought to have lived in Italy. On his return to the Netherlands, Van Campen turned to architecture, applying ideas borrowed from Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi and classical influences from Vitruvius.
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Daniel W. Mead
1862 - 1948 (86 years)
Daniel Webster Mead was an American engineering consultant and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is remembered for designing hydroelectric plants and writing early textbooks on hydraulic engineering and engineering ethics.
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Ivar Bentsen
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Ivar Bentsen was a Danish architect and educator. He was a central figure in the Bedre-Byggeskik movement and succeeded Carl Petersen as a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts's School of Architecture in 1923. He was awarded the C. F. Hansen Medal in 1943.
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John Loughborough Pearson
1817 - 1897 (80 years)
John Loughborough Pearson was a British Gothic Revival architect renowned for his work on churches and cathedrals. Pearson revived and practised largely the art of vaulting, and acquired in it a proficiency unrivalled in his generation. He worked on at least 210 ecclesiastical buildings in England alone in a career spanning 54 years.
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Walter Liberty Vernon
1846 - 1914 (68 years)
Colonel Walter Liberty Vernon was an English architect who migrated to Australia and pursued his career as an architect in Sydney, New South Wales. In his role as the New South Wales Government Architect he is noted for designing multiple government buildings, many of which are extant with listings on national and state heritage registers.
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Louis Dunn
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Louis Gerhardus Dunn was a South African-born engineer who played a key role in the development of early American missiles and launch vehicles. Caltech Dunn received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. During that time the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech , a prestigious aeronautical engineering research facility, was led by Theodore von Kármán. By 1943 Dunn had joined the Caltech faculty and become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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Wilson Eyre
1858 - 1944 (86 years)
Wilson Eyre, Jr. was an American architect, teacher and writer who practiced in the Philadelphia area. He is known for his deliberately informal and welcoming country houses, and for being an innovator in the Shingle Style.
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Hermann Schlichting
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Hermann Schlichting was a German fluid dynamics engineer. Life and work Hermann Schlichting studied from 1926 till 1930 mathematics, physics and applied mechanics at the University of Jena, Vienne and Göttingen. In 1930 he wrote his PhD in Göttingen titled Über das ebene Windschattenproblem and also in the same year passed the state examination as teacher for higher mathematics and physics. His meeting with Ludwig Prandtl had a long-lasting effect on him. He worked from 1931 till 1935 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research in Göttingen. His main research area was fluid flows with viscous effects.
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Friedrich von Thiersch
1852 - 1921 (69 years)
Friedrich Maximilian Thiersch, after 1897 Ritter von Thiersch , was a German architect and painter in the late Historicist style. Life and work His father, H. W. J. Thiersch, was a prominent theologian and his uncle, Ludwig, was a painter. His older brother, , and his nephew, Paul, were also architects. From 1868 to 1873, he studied architecture at the Technical College of Stuttgart. He then worked for the firm of and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli, in Frankfurt-am-Main. Following a series of professional disputes, he became a free-lance architect in 1878.
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Carl Schlechter
1874 - 1918 (44 years)
Carl Schlechter was a leading Austro-Hungarian chess master and theoretician at the turn of the 20th century. He is best known for drawing a World Chess Championship match with Emanuel Lasker. Early life Schlechter was born into a Catholic family in Vienna. He is sometimes deemed to be Jewish, although others dispute this. He began playing chess at the age of 13. His first and only teacher was an Austria-Hungarian chess problemist, Dr. Samuel Gold.
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John Campbell
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
John Campbell was a New Zealand architect, responsible for many government buildings in New Zealand, among them the Dunedin Law Courts, the Public Trust Building in Wellington, and Parliament House. From 1909 until his retirement in 1922 he held the position of government architect.
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E. E. Smith
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Edward Elmer Smith was an American food engineer and science-fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera. Biography Family and education Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1890, to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, both staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington, the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith was working as a contractor in 1900.
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Thomas Turner
1861 - 1951 (90 years)
Thomas Turner Sc., A.R.S.M., F.R.I.C. was the first Professor of Metallurgy in Britain, at the University of Birmingham. The University was created in 1900 and the department founded in 1902. He was instrumental in the early development of the sclerometer for testing hardness of metals. He retired in 1926. He was also a leading member of the Christadelphian church.
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Harry B. Greenberg
#9966
Bill Mitchell
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
William L. Mitchell was an American automobile designer. Mitchell worked briefly as an advertising illustrator and as the official illustrator of the Automobile Racing Club of America before being recruited by Harley Earl to join the Art and Color Section of General Motors in 1935.
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Nikolay Dobrokhotov
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Dobrokhotov was a Soviet scientist and metallurgist, Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the Ukrainian SSR, Academician of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences. Biography Nikolay Dobrokhotov was born on March 27, 1889, in Arzamas in Nizhny Novgorod Guberniya in the Russian Empire. His father Nikolay Nikanorovich Dobrokhotov was a telegraphist. His mother — Maria Fedorovna Vladimirskaya, graduate of Smolny Institute — was from the Vladimirskie family, many of whose members were engaged in social activities , were friends of Maxim Gorky. Nikolay Dobrokhotov was the eldest son in a family of 12 children.
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Bennett Lewis
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Wilfrid Bennett Lewis, was a Canadian nuclear scientist and administrator, and was centrally involved in the development of the CANDU reactor. Born in Castle Carrock, Cumberland, England, he earned a doctorate in physics at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge in 1934, and continued his research in nuclear physics there until 1939. From 1939 until 1946, he was with the Air Ministry, becoming Chief Superintendent of the Telecommunications Research Establishment. In 1946, he moved to Canada, to become director of the division of Atomic Energy Research at the National Research Council of Canada in Chalk River, Ontario.
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Gifford Pinchot
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Gifford Pinchot was an American forester and politician. He served as the fourth chief of the U.S. Division of Forestry, as the first head of the United States Forest Service, and as the 28th governor of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his life, though he joined the Progressive Party for a brief period.
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Grigory Petrovich Peredery
1871 - 1953 (82 years)
Grigory Peredery was a Russian civil engineer whose career spanned both the Imperial and the Soviet eras. He became known, in particular, as the pioneering designer of a series of major railway bridges. Peredery enjoyed a distinguished parallel career as a university teacher, becoming rector at the Petrograd State Transport University in 1921. He was the author of over 80 published pieces of academic work, including a detailed course on bridge design and construction.
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Aldus Manutius
1449 - 1515 (66 years)
Aldus Pius Manutius was an Italian printer and humanist who founded the Aldine Press. Manutius devoted the later part of his life to publishing and disseminating rare texts. His interest in and preservation of Greek manuscripts mark him as an innovative publisher of his age dedicated to the editions he produced. Aldus Manutius introduced the small portable book format with his enchiridia, which revolutionized personal reading and are the predecessor of the modern paperback book. He also helped to standardize use of punctuation including the comma and the semicolon.
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Kim Swoo-geun
1931 - 1986 (55 years)
Kim Swoo Geun was a prominent South Korean architect, educator, publisher and patron of artists. Along with architect Kim Joong Up , he is recognised as a significant contributor in the history of Korean architecture. With his support for diverse art genres of Korean culture, he was referred to as Lorenzo de Medici of Seoul by TIME in 1977.
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Lancelot Law Whyte
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Lancelot Law Whyte was a Scottish philosopher, theoretical physicist, historian of science and financier. Early life and career Lancelot Law Whyte, the son of Dr. Alexander Whyte, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland into the privileged childhood of a great house; Alexander Whyte was at the time a renowned Presbyterian minister. Lancelot received his education at Bedales School in England. He was a soldier during the First World War, returning to enter Trinity College, Cambridge and studying physics under Ernest Rutherford. Subsequently, he studied at Göttingen University in Germany. Whyte’s inter...
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Arthur Peabody
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Arthur Peabody was the campus architect for the University of Wisconsin from 1905 to 1915 and the state architect of Wisconsin from 1915 to 1938. Peabody was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1882. He designed or directed a number of Madison landmarks, including the Wisconsin State Office Building and the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union. He died in Madison, Wisconsin on September 6, 1942.
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Axel Hultgren
1886 - 1974 (88 years)
Axel Gustaf Emanuel Hultgren, was a Swedish metallurgist. Hultgren is perhaps most famous for his work on tungsten steels, and the transformation of Austenite. Hultgren was born near Kalmar, Sweden and studied metallurgy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Following his MSc and some temporary positions in teaching, industry and a research visit in Berlin under Prof. H. Hanemann, Hultgren joined SKF bearing company in Gothenburg as a manager for the heat treatment and later as a metallurgist. In 1920 he published his monograph on tungsten steels. Later, in 1937 he became...
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John Webb
1611 - 1672 (61 years)
John Webb was an English architect and scholar, who collaborated on some works with Inigo Jones. Life He was born in Little Britain, Smithfield, London, and died in Butleigh in Somerset. He had a close association with fellow architect and theatre designer Inigo Jones, for whom he worked as an assistant from 1628. In the 1640s and 1650s, Jones and Webb jointly designed Wilton House with its distinctive Single and Double Cube rooms.
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Okada Shinichirō
1883 - 1932 (49 years)
Okada Shinichirō was a prominent Japanese architect who practiced in the early twentieth century. Okada taught at Waseda University and Tokyo School of Fine Arts. While he was well-known for tendency for European styles, he also produced work in the Imperial Crown style . One example is the Biwako Otsukan in Yanagasaki Lakeside Park, Shiga Prefecture.
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George S. Wise
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
George Schneiweis Wise was an American sociologist who served as the first president of Tel Aviv University in Ramat Aviv, Israel from 1963 to 1971. Early life George Schneiweis was born in Pinsk, White Russia, Russian Empire in 1906. He emigrated to the United States in 1926. He graduated from Furman University in 1928 and got his advanced studies at Columbia University.
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Robert White McFarland
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
Robert White McFarland was an American engineer who served as a university professor, president and Civil War officer. McFarland was born in Champaign County, Ohio, to Robert and Eunice McFarland. He received his A.B and M.A. degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University. In 1856 he received a teaching appointment at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he remained until the university closed in 1873. On leave from Miami, McFarland became an officer in the 86th Ohio Infantry during the American Civil War and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
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Cornelius Gurlitt
1850 - 1938 (88 years)
Cornelius Gustav Gurlitt was a German architect and art historian. Life Gurlitt was born in Nischwitz in Thallwitz, Saxony, the son of the landscape painter Louis Gurlitt and nephew of his namesake, the composer Cornelius Gurlitt. He left the gymnasium of Gotha before graduation and became a carpenter's apprentice. After studying in Stuttgart and Vienna he worked as an architect, then obtained a position at the Arts and Crafts Museum in Dresden.
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August Volberg
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
August Volberg was an Estonian architect and educator. In 1927 he graduated from Tallinn Technical School. 1950-1960 he worked at the architectural bureau Eesti Projekt. From 1946 until 1954, he worked as a lecturer at the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute. From In 1964 until 1981, he was a lecturer at the Estonian SSR State Art Institute; from 1971, he was the institute's head of the department of architecture.
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Kahlil Gibran
1883 - 1931 (48 years)
Gibran Khalil Gibran , usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran , was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist; he was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.
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Guillermo González Camarena
1917 - 1965 (48 years)
Guillermo González Camarena was a Mexican electrical engineer who was the inventor of a color-wheel type of color television. Early life González Camarena was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. His parents were from the town of Arandas,Porto. He was the youngest of seven siblings. One of his brothers, Jorge González Camarena, is a famous Mexican muralist.
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Alar Kotli
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Alar Kotli was an Estonian architect. He studied sculpture at the art school Pallas in Tartu during 1922–1923 and mathematics at the University of Tartu. He graduated from the University of technology in Gdańsk in 1927 as an architect.
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William Playfair
1759 - 1823 (64 years)
William Playfair , a Scottish engineer and political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As a secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency.
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Harris J. Ryan
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Harris J. Ryan was an American electrical engineer and a professor first at Cornell University and later at Stanford University. Ryan is known for his significant contributions to high voltage power transmission, for which he received the IEEE Edison Medal. Ryan was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1920 and served as president of the AIEE during 1923-1924.
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Paul Strand
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
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Stanley William Hayter
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Stanley William Hayter was an English painter and master printmaker associated in the 1930s with surrealism and from 1940 onward with abstract expressionism. Regarded as one of the most significant printmakers of the 20th century, in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris. Since his death in 1988, it has been known as Atelier Contrepoint. Among the artists who frequented the atelier were Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Nemesio Antúnez, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Wassily Kandinsky, Mauricio Lasansky, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Fl...
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Giorgio Bidone
1781 - 1839 (58 years)
Giovanni Giorgio Bidone was an Italian engineer, mathematician and an experimenter in the field of hydraulics. Giorgio Bidone's parents were Alessandro Antonio Bidone and Margherita Malaspina. In 1782, when Giorgio was one year old, the family moved to Voghera where he was educated.
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Alfred Ewing
1855 - 1935 (80 years)
Sir James Alfred Ewing MInstitCE was a Scottish physicist and engineer, best known for his work on the magnetic properties of metals and, in particular, for his discovery of, and coinage of the word, hysteresis.
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Harold Marion Crothers
1887 - Present (139 years)
Harold Marion Crothers was an American professor of electrical engineering at South Dakota State University where he also served as president for three periods . He was dean of Engineering 1925-55 and gave name to the Crothers Engineering Hall . Earlier, he was instrumental in the establishment of the university's first radio station .
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Edmund Kesting
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Edmund Kesting was a German photographer, painter and art professor. He studied until 1916 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before participating as a soldier in the First World War, upon returning his painting teachers were Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann and in 1919 he began to teach as a professor at the private school Der Weg. In 1923 he had his first exposition in the gallery Der Sturm in which he showed photograms. When Der Weg opened a new academy in Berlin in 1927, he moved to the capital.
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Peter Bredsdorff
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Christian Erhardt Bredsdorff, commonly known as Peter Bredsdorff, was a Danish architect and urban planner who is remembered for his Finger Plan for the development of Copenhagen. In this connection, his name is included in the Danish Culture Canon.
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Bill Brandt
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Bill Brandt was a British photographer and photojournalist. Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his images of British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.
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Magnus Maclean
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Prof Magnus Maclean FRSE MIEE MICE LLD was an electrical engineer who assisted Lord Kelvin in his electrical experiments and later became Professor of Electrical Engineering in Glasgow . The Magnus Maclean Memorial Prize given to students of electrical engineering is named in his honour. A native speaker of Scottish Gaelic, he also lectured in Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow, delivering the MacCallum lectures, in English between 1901 and 1093. These lectures constituted the first official lectures in Celtic studies at the University.
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Wilhelm Neumann
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Carl Johann Wilhelm Neumann was a Baltic German architect and art historian. Neumann's family moved to Kreutzburg during Wilhelm's childhood. When he was 15 years old, he worked as an apprentice at Paul Max Bertschy's engineering office during the construction of the Riga–Dünaburg Railway. After this he studied at the Riga Polytechnicum, and beginning 1875 at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.
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Franjo Hanaman
1878 - 1941 (63 years)
Franjo Hanaman was a Croatian inventor, engineer, and chemist, who gained world recognition for inventing the world's first applied electric light-bulb with a metal filament with his assistant Alexander Just, independently of his contemporaries.
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Sequoyah
1770 - 1843 (73 years)
Sequoyah , also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and neographer of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821, he completed his independent creation of the Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. His achievement was one of the few times in recorded history that an individual who was a member of a pre-literate group created an original, effective writing system. His creation of the syllabary allowed the Cherokee nation to be one of the first North American Indigenous groups to have a written language. Sequoyah was also an important representative for the Cherokee nation, by going to Washington, D.C.
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Johann Rihosek
1869 - 1956 (87 years)
Johann Rihosek was an Austrian engineer and locomotive designer. He was born in Maków Podhalański, in Austro-Hungarian Galicia on 5 June 1869. Rihosek attended the middle school at Olmütz and later studied mechanical engineering at the Vienna Technical University.
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Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz was a Polish architect and conservator of monuments, a leading representative of historicism and modernism in Poland. Life and career He was born on 1 September 1883 in Narva, Russian Empire to parents Polikarp Szyszko-Bohusz and mother Marcelina .
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