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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#101
Arthur Rudolph
#2854
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. After World War II, the United States government's Office of Strategic Services brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S.
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Karlheinz Brandenburg
#3277
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser , Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp , he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brande...
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C. Kumar N. Patel
#4940
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Chandra Kumar Naranbhai Patel is an electrical engineer. He developed the carbon dioxide laser in 1963; it is now widely used in industry for cutting and engraving a wide range of materials like plastic and wood. Because the atmosphere is quite transparent to infrared light, CO2 lasers are also used for military rangefinding using LIDAR techniques.
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Kengo Kuma
#3148
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kengo Kuma is a Japanese architect and emeritus professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo. Frequently compared to contemporaries Shigeru Ban and Kazuyo Sejima, Kuma is also noted for his prolific writings. He is the designer of the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo, which was built for the 2020 Summer Olympics. He is married to architect Satoko Shinohara, and they have one son, Taichi, also an architect. He is an advisor for Kitakyushu-city in Japan.
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Parviz Moin
#6452
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Parviz Moin is a fluid dynamicist. He is the Franklin P. and Caroline M. Johnson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Moin has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited author in engineering.
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Guion Bluford
#4443
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. is an American aerospace engineer, retired United States Air Force officer and fighter pilot, and former NASA astronaut, in which capacity he became the first African American to go to space. While assigned to NASA, he remained a USAF officer rising to the rank of colonel. He participated in four Space Shuttle flights between 1983 and 1992. In 1983, as a member of the crew of the Orbiter Challenger on the mission STS-8, he became the first African American in space as well as the second black person in space, after Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez.
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Arthur Butz
#3555
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University and a Holocaust denier, best known as the author of the pseudohistorical book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and digital signal processing.
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Maya Lin
#1927
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and sculptor. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale University, she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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John R. Pierce
#2063
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Robinson Pierce , was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
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Tom Kilburn
#1527
Overall Influence
1921 - 2001 (80 years)
Tom Kilburn was an English mathematician and computer scientist. Over his 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance. With Freddie Williams he worked on the Williams–Kilburn tube and the world's first electronic stored-program computer, the Manchester Baby, while working at the University of Manchester. His work propelled Manchester and Britain into the forefront of the emerging field of computer science.
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Frank P. Incropera
#12536
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Frank P. Incropera is an American mechanical engineer and author on the subjects of mass and heat transfer. Incropera is the Clifford and Evelyn Brosey Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. A Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Incropera is known for his contributions to the field of heat transfer, especially in the context of radiation transfer in scattering-absorbing media and double diffusive convection. He has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
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Herman Hertzberger
#4873
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Herman Hertzberger is a Dutch architect, and a professor emeritus of the Delft University of Technology. In 2012 he received the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Biography Herman Hertzberger was born on 6 July 1932 in Amsterdam.
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Max Bill
#1160
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith during 1924–1927, Bill took up studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau under many teachers including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer from 1927 to 1929, after which he moved to Zurich.
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Seth Lloyd
#1100
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum biology, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduct...
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Henry Petroski
#4918
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Henry Petroski was an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor both of civil engineering and history at Duke University, he was also a prolific author. Petroski has written over a dozen books – beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, toothpicks, and silverware. His first book was made into the film When Engineering Fails. He was a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist a...
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Andrew P. Sage
#7673
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Andrew Patrick Sage was an American systems engineer and Emeritus Professor and Founding Dean Emeritus at the School of Information Technology and Engineering of the George Mason University. Biography Born in Charleston, South Carolina Sage received his BA in 1955 in Electrical Engineering at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, his MA in 1956 in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his PhD also in Electrical Engineering in 1960 at the Purdue University.
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Hannes Alfvén
#852
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics . He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of auroraee, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial...
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Terry Farrell
#4225
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sir Terence Farrell , known as Terry Farrell, is a British architect and urban designer. In 1980, after working for 15 years in partnership with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Farrell founded his own firm, Farrells. He established his reputation with three completed projects in London in the late 1980s: Embankment Place, 125 London Wall aka Alban Gate and SIS Building aka Vauxhall Cross.
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Gernot Zippe
#7087
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Gernot Zippe was an Austrian born German mechanical engineer and a nuclear physicist who is widely credited with leading the team which developed the Zippe-type centrifuge, a centrifuge machine for the enrichment and collection of Uranium-235, during his time in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons.
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Red Whittaker
#3804
Overall Influence
Red Whittaker is an American roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, placing second and third place simultaneously in the Grand Challenge Races.
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Veysel Eroğlu
#8797
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Veysel Eroğlu is a Member of Parliament for Afyonkarahisar of the ruling Justice and Development Party and a former Minister of Forestry and Water of Turkey. Early life Eroğlu was born on 18 August 1948 in the Şuhut district of Turkey's Afyonkarahisar Province. His father's name was İbrahim and his mother's name was Emine.
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Francis Heylighen
#1789
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel , where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their pro...
Go to Profile#123
Klaus-Jürgen Bathe
#10613
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Klaus-Jürgen Bathe is a civil engineer, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founder of ADINA R&D, who specializes in computational mechanics. Bathe is considered to be one of the pioneers in the field of finite element analysis and its applications.
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Woodie Flowers
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#8999
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Woodie Claude Flowers was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His specialty areas were engineering design and product development; he held the Pappalardo Professorship and was a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.
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Henry N. Cobb
#4008
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Henry Nichols Cobb was an American architect and founding partner with I.M. Pei and Eason H. Leonard of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, an international architectural firm based in New York City. Early life Henry N. Cobb was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Elsie Quincy and Charles Kane Cobb, an investment counselor. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
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Robert G. Gallager
#3865
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Robert Gray Gallager is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks. Gallager was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 for contributions to coding and communications theory and practice. He was also elected an IEEE Fellow in 1968, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.
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Barbara Oakley
#4280
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Barbara Ann Oakley is an American professor of engineering at Oakland University and McMaster University whose online courses on learning are some of the most popular massive open online course classes in the world. She is involved in multiple areas of research, ranging from STEM education, to learning practices.
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Jared Cohon
#2756
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jared Leigh Cohon served as the eighth president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. he is a University Professor in the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.
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Robert Seamans
#5138
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Robert Channing Seamans Jr. was an MIT professor who served as NASA Deputy Administrator and 9th United States Secretary of the Air Force. Birth and education He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to Pauline and Robert Channing Seamans. His great-great-grandfather was Otis Tufts. Seamans attended Lenox School, in Lenox, Massachusetts; earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Harvard University in 1939 or 1940; a Master of Science degree in aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1942; and a Doctor of Science degree in instrumentation from MIT in 1951. Seaman...
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Hans Hollein
#7510
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Hans Hollein was an Austrian architect and designer and key figure of postmodern architecture. Some of his most notable works are the Haas House and the Albertina extension in the inner city of Vienna.
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Ross Brawn
#2000
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ross James Brawn is a British Formula One managing director, motor sports and technical director. He is a former motorsport engineer and Formula One team principal, and has worked for a number of Formula One teams. Serving as the technical director of the championship-winning Benetton and Ferrari teams, he earned fame as the "mastermind" behind Michael Schumacher's seven world championship titles. He took a sabbatical in 2007 and returned to F1 for the 2008 season as team principal of Honda. He acquired the Honda team in early 2009 to form the Brawn GP team, which won the Formula One Constructors' and Drivers' Championships in that year.
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Daniel C. Drucker
#13160
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Daniel Charles Drucker was American civil and mechanical engineer and academic, who served as president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1960–1961, as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1973–74, and as president of the American Academy of Mechanics in 1981–82.
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Tung-Yen Lin
#7870
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Tung-Yen Lin was a Chinese-American structural engineer who was the pioneer of standardizing the use of prestressed concrete. Biography Born in Fuzhou, Republic of China , as the fourth of eleven children, he was raised in Beijing where his father was a justice of the ROC's Supreme Court. He did not begin formal schooling until age 11, and only so because his parents forged his birth year to be 1911 so that he would qualify. At only 14, entered Jiaotong University's Tangshan Engineering College , having earned the top score in math and the second best score overall in the college entrance exams for his entering class.
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Glenn Murcutt
#6153
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Glenn Marcus Murcutt AO is an Australian architect and winner of the 1992 Alvar Aalto Medal, the 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2009 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the 2021 Praemium Imperiale. Glenn Murcutt works as a sole practitioner without staff, builds only within Australia and is known to be very selective with his projects. Being the only Australian winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, he is often referred to as Australia's most famous architect.
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Juhani Pallasmaa
#8208
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology. Among the many academic and civic positions he has held are those of Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture 1978–1983, and head of the Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki. He established his own architect's office – Arkkitehtitoimisto Juhani Pallasmaa KY – in 1983 in Helsinki. From 2001 to 2003, he was Raymond E. Maritz Visiting Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2013 he received an honorary doctorate from that university.
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Benjamin S. Blanchard
#6573
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Benjamin Seaver Blanchard, Jr. was an American systems engineer and Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, who was awarded the INCOSE Pioneer Award jointly with Wolt Fabrycky as "practitioner, teacher, and advocate of Systems Engineering."
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James Van Allen
#2724
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
James Alfred Van Allen was an American space scientist at the University of Iowa. He was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space. The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following his discovery using Geiger–Müller tube instruments on the 1958 satellites during the International Geophysical Year. Van Allen led the scientific community in putting scientific research instruments on space satellites.
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Mamoru Mohri
#4884
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
, AM is a Japanese scientist, a former NASDA astronaut, and a veteran of two NASA Space Shuttle missions. He is the first Japanese astronaut who was part of an official Japanese space program. The first Japanese person in space, Toyohiro Akiyama, was a journalist who was trained in the Soviet Union.
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Jean-Lou Chameau
#7541
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jean-Lou Chameau is a French civil engineer who served as the president of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology from 2013 to 2017, and California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2013. In addition, he previously served as a Dean of Engineering and provost of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Mohsen Mostafavi
#7280
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mohsen Mostafavi is an Iranian-American architect and educator. Mostafavi is currently the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 2008 through 2019, Mostafavi served as the school's dean.
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Eric Reissner
#7619
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Max Erich Reissner was a German-American civil engineer and mathematician, and Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was recipient of the Theodore von Karman Medal in 1964, and the ASME Medal in 1988
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Félix Candela
#7809
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Félix Candela Outeriño was a Spanish and Mexican architect who was born in Madrid and at the age of 26, emigrated to Mexico, acquiring double nationality. He is known for his significant role in the development of Mexican architecture and structural engineering. Candela's major contribution to architecture was the development of thin shells made out of reinforced concrete, popularly known as cascarones.
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Harry Seidler
#6118
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Harry Seidler was an Austrian-born Australian architect who is considered to be one of the leading exponents of Modernism's methodology in Australia and the first architect to fully express the principles of the Bauhaus in Australia.
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Dominique Perrault
#4458
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dominique Perrault is a French architect and urban planner. He became world known for the design of the French National Library, distinguished with the Silver medal for town planning in 1992 and the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 1996. In 2010 he was awarded the gold medal by the French Academy of Architecture for all his work. He was named as the 2015 Praemium Imperiale Laureate for Architecture.
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Otto Schmitt
#5971
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Otto Herbert Schmitt was an American inventor, engineer, and biophysicist known for his scientific contributions to biophysics and for establishing the field of biomedical engineering. Schmitt also coined the term biomimetics and invented or co-invented the Schmitt trigger, the differential amplifier, and the chopper-stabilized amplifier.
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Mary Barra
#2586
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Mary Teresa Barra is an American businesswoman who has been the chair and chief executive officer of General Motors since January 15, 2014. She is the first female CEO of a 'Big Three' automaker. In December 2013, GM named her to succeed Daniel Akerson as CEO. Prior to being named CEO, Barra was executive vice president of global product development, purchasing, and supply chain.
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Stephanie Wilson
#8206
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison. her 42 days in space are the second most of any female African American astronaut, having been surpassed by Jessica Watkins in 2022.
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Hans Kollhoff
#5994
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Hans Kollhoff is a German architect and professor. He is a representative of Postmodern and New Classical Architecture, as well as a protagonist of New Urbanism. Early life Kollhoff spent the first six years of his life on the family farm in Thuringia at the southern tip of the newly established DDR. In 1953 the family escaped to West Germany and settled in Northern Baden.
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Dan Shechtman
#3024
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals.
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Simon Sze
#4981
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Simon Min Sze, or Shi Min , was a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer. He is best known for inventing the floating-gate MOSFET with Korean electrical engineer Dawon Kahng in 1967. Early life and education Simon Min Sze was born in Nanjing, Jiangsu, and grew up in Taiwan. After graduating from the National Taiwan University in 1957, he received a master's degree from the University of Washington in 1960 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1963.
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