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,
#10051
Walker Evans
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large format, 8×10-inch view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".
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Ximen Bao
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Ximen Bao was a Chinese hydraulic engineer, philosopher, and politician. He was a government minister and court advisor to Marquis Wen of Wei during the Warring States period of ancient China. He was known as an early rationalist, who had the State of Wei abolish the practice of sacrificing people to the river god He Bo. Although the earlier statesman Sunshu Ao is credited as China's first hydraulic engineer , Ximen Bao is nonetheless credited as the first engineer in China to create a large canal irrigation system.
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Max M. Frocht
1894 - 1974 (80 years)
Max Mark Frocht was a Polish-American engineer and educator. He was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and founder of the Laboratory for Experimental Stress Analysis. Education Max Mark Frocht had moved from Congress Poland to the United States in 1912, settling in Detroit where he worked as a machinist and tool maker. In 1916 he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, earning his B.S. in 1920. He received an M.S. in physics in 1925 from the University of Pittsburgh, before retiring to the University of Michigan to earn a Ph.D. in 1931 with Stephen ...
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Domenico Fontana
1543 - 1607 (64 years)
Domenico Fontana was an Italian architect of the late Renaissance, born in today's Ticino. He worked primarily in Italy, at Rome and Naples. Biography He was born at Melide, a village on Lake Lugano, at that time joint possession of some Swiss cantons of the old Swiss Confederacy, and presently part of Ticino, Switzerland, and died at Naples. He went to Rome in 1563, to join his elder brother. He began his career as a plasterer, and then as a mason and master builder, with particular expertise in measuring and technical skills.
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Arthur Blomfield
1829 - 1899 (70 years)
Sir Arthur William Blomfield was an English architect. He became president of the Architectural Association in 1861; a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1867 and vice-president of the RIBA in 1886. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Architecture.
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Eugenio Peschard
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
Eugenio Peschard Delgado was a Mexican architect. Prior to joining the faculty of the National University in 1940, Peschard was an architect in the Ministry of Communications and Public Works and a member of the Council of Architecture of the Federal District. He translated a number of architectural books, including works by Hardy Cross, S. Timoshenko, and Vanden Broek.
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Rudolf Schwarz
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Rudolf Schwarz was a German architect known for his work on Kirche St. Fronleichnam, Aachen. He also played a decisive part in the reconstruction of Cologne after the Second World War. He took a leading role with Cologne's reconstruction authority between 1947 and 1952, contributing to the rebuilding of the city with some of his own designs. Among these is the Wallraf-Richartz Museum , which now houses the Museum of Applied Art. He also reconstructed the pilgrimage church of Saint Anne in Düren, near Aachen, which is probably his most famous work.
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Mário Gerla
#10059
Robert Rowand Anderson
1834 - 1921 (87 years)
Sir Robert Rowand Anderson, was a Scottish Victorian architect. Anderson trained in the office of George Gilbert Scott in London before setting up his own practice in Edinburgh in 1860. During the 1860s his main work was small churches in the 'First Pointed' style that is characteristic of Scott's former assistants. By 1880 his practice was designing some of the most prestigious public and private buildings in Scotland.
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E. W. Pugin
1834 - 1875 (41 years)
Edward Welby Pugin was an English architect, the eldest son of architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and Louisa Barton and part of the Pugin & Pugin family of church architects. His father was an architect and designer of Neo-Gothic architecture, and after his death in 1852 Edward took up his successful practice. At the time of his own early death in 1875, Pugin had designed and completed more than one hundred Catholic churches.
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Johann Gottfried Tulla
1770 - 1828 (58 years)
Johann Gottfried Tulla was a German engineer who accomplished the straightening of the Rhine, improving navigation and alleviating the effects of flooding. His measures gave the Upper Rhine a completely new appearance. The river was deepened and channelled between embankments which narrowed the channels to a width of ; new sections were dug to straighten out its meandering course, and numerous small islands were removed. The effect was to reduce the river's length between Basel and Worms from . However, the straightening of the Upper Rhine had increased the streaming speed and thus permanentl...
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François Blondel
1618 - 1686 (68 years)
François Blondel was a soldier, engineer of fortifications, mathematician, diplomat, military and civil engineer and architect, called "the Great Blondel", to distinguish him in a dynasty of French architectss. He is remembered for his Cours d'architecture which remained a central text for over a century. His precepts placed him in opposition with Claude Perrault in the larger culture war known under the heading Querelle des anciens et des modernes. If François Blondel was not the most highly reputed among the académiciens of his day, his were the writings that most generally circulated among...
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Robert Durrer
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Robert Durrer was a Swiss engineer who invented the basic oxygen steelmaking process during his career in Nazi Germany. The process was successfully tested by Durrer in 1948. A team led by Dr Theodor Eduard Suess in Austria adapted the process and scaled it to industrial size, after which it was commercialized by VÖEST and ÖAMG.
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Martín Domínguez Esteban
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Martín Domínguez Esteban was a Spanish architect. Biography Son of Concepción Esteban Guerendián and Martín Domínguez Barros. At seven years Martín Domínguez exhibited a fascination with drawing, he registered in the School of Arts and Offices of San Sebastián which he attended at night while finishing high school. At 17 years of age and after taking his school examinations, he moved to Madrid, passing the entrance exam at the Higher School of Architecture in 1922. He stayed at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid which housed students from different disciplines. There he made friends with Miguel Prados, José Antonio Rubio Sacristán, José Moreno Villa and Federico García Lorca.
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Bohdan Pniewski
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Bohdan Wiktor Kazimierz Pniewski was a Polish modernist architect, professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He is mostly known as a designer of state buildings in pre-war and post-war Poland, though the working conditions of an architect, in these eras, palpably varied. Pniewski, popular amongst the Polish political interwar elite , remained prominent in Communist Poland. Surprisingly, "Beck's of court architect" , as he was called by his enemies after 1945 due to his role in designing the palace of the hated minister, constructed his most known...
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Gabriel Guevrekian
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Gabriel Guevrekian was an Armenian architect, who designed buildings, interiors and gardens, and taught architecture. He worked in Europe, Iran and the USA. Biography Guevrekian was born by some accounts in 1900 , by others in 1892 to Armenian parents. He was born in Constantinople, present day Istanbul, and then moved with his family to Tehran where he grew up. In 1910 he moved to Vienna where he lived with his uncle, architect Alex Galoustian. He studied architecture at the Kunstgewerbeschule with Oskar Strnad and Josef Hoffmann from 1915, and received his diploma in 1919. He then worked with Strnad and Hoffmann until he moved to Paris in 1922.
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Joseph Locke
1805 - 1860 (55 years)
Joseph Locke FRSA was a notable English civil engineer of the nineteenth century, particularly associated with railway projects. Locke ranked alongside Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel as one of the major pioneers of railway development.
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Parry Moon
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Parry Hiram Moon was an American electrical engineer who, with Domina Eberle Spencer, co-wrote eight scientific books and over 200 papers on subjects including electromagnetic field theory, color harmony, nutrition, aesthetic measure and advanced mathematics. He also developed a theory of holors.
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William Pole
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
William Pole was an English engineer, astronomer, musician and an authority on Whist. Life He was born in Birmingham on 22 April 1814, the son of Thomas Pole. Pole was apprenticed as an engineer to Charles H. Capper in Birmingham around 1828. He then went to India in 1844 as professor of engineering at Elphinstone College, Bombay, where he had organized a course of instruction for Indian students; his health obliged him to return to England in 1848. For the next ten years he worked in London under James Simpson and James Meadows Rendel, and was appointed in 1859 to the chair of civil engineering at University College, London.
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Max Klinger
1857 - 1920 (63 years)
Max Klinger was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints and graphics, as well as writing a treatise articulating his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmaking in relation to painting. He is associated with symbolism, the Vienna Secession, and Jugendstil the German manifestation of Art Nouveau. He is best known today for his many prints, particularly a series entitled Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove and his monumental sculptural installation in homage to Beethoven at the Vienna Secession in 1902.
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Donát Bánki
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Donát Bánki was a Hungarian mechanical engineer and inventor of Jewish heritage. In 1893 he invented the carburetor for the stationary engine, together with János Csonka . The invention is often, incorrectly credited to the German Wilhelm Maybach, who submitted his patent half a year after Bánki and Csonka. Bánki also greatly contributed to the design of compressors for combustion engines.
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Nicéphore Niépce
1765 - 1833 (68 years)
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825 . In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.
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Benjamin Ferrey
1810 - 1880 (70 years)
Benjamin Ferrey FSA FRIBA was an English architect who worked mostly in the Gothic Revival. Family Benjamin Ferrey was the youngest son of Benjamin Ferrey Snr , a draper who became Mayor of Christchurch, and his wife Ann Pillgrem . He was educated at Wimborne Grammar School.
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Tex Avery
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Frederick Bean "Tex" Avery was an American animator, cartoonist, director, and voice actor. He was known for directing and producing animated cartoons during the golden age of American animation. His most significant work was for the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, where he was crucial in the creation and evolution of famous animated characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, The Wolf, Red Hot Riding Hood, and George and Junior.
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Tsumaki Yorinaka
1859 - 1916 (57 years)
Tsumaki Yorinaka was a Japanese architect and Head of the Japanese Ministry of Finance building section in the later Meiji period. Credited with the design of many significant Meiji era structures in Japan, notably the Nihonbashi Bridge.
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Herbert Akroyd Stuart
1864 - 1927 (63 years)
Herbert Akroyd-Stuart was an English inventor who is noted for his invention of the hot bulb engine, or heavy oil engine. Life Akroyd-Stuart was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, but lived in Australia for a period in his early years. He was educated at Newbury Grammar School and Finsbury Technical College in London. He was the son of Charles Stuart, founder of the Bletchley Iron and Tinplate Works, joining his father in the business in 1887.
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Arthur Blok
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Arthur Blok was the British-born first administrative head of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel , from 1924 to 1925. Biography Blok was born in Hornsey, North London, and attended Owen's School. He was an electrical engineering graduate of University College London . He was personal assistant to Professor Ambrose Fleming.
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Dorothea Lange
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration . Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.
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Bohdan Lachert
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Bohdan Lachert was a Polish architect, member of Praesens group. He designed a lot of buildings with his friend Józef Szanajca, like modern villas ast Saska Kępa or Polish pavilon at EXPO Paris 1937. After World War II he designed part of Muranów and Warsaw cemetery of soldiers of Red Army. Author of Józef Szanajca monument.
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Ninian Comper
1864 - 1960 (96 years)
Sir John Ninian Comper was a Scottish architect; one of the last of the great Gothic Revival architects. His work almost entirely focused on the design, restoration and embellishment of churches, and the design of ecclesiastical furnishings, stained glass and vestments. He is celebrated for his use of colour, iconography and emphasis on churches as a setting for liturgy. In his later works, he developed the subtle integration of Classical and Gothic styles, an approach he described as 'unity by inclusion'.
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Alister MacKenzie
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Alister MacKenzie was a golf course architect whose course designs span four continents. Originally trained as a surgeon, MacKenzie served as a civilian physician with the British Army during the Boer War where he first became aware of the principles of camouflage. During the First World War, MacKenzie made his own significant contributions to military camouflage, which he saw as closely related to golf course design.
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Engelbert Arnold
1856 - 1911 (55 years)
Engelbert Arnold was a Swiss-born electrical engineer. He was the first professor of the electrotechnical institute at the TH Karlsruhe , which was founded under his supervision from 1896 until 1898.
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Hermann Aron
1845 - 1913 (68 years)
Hermann Aron was a German researcher of electrical engineering. Background Aron was born in Kempen , in modern-day Poland, at the time a shtetl in the Province of Posen. His father was a chazzan and merchant. The family wanted him to train as a Jewish scholar or scrivener, however wealthy relatives made it possible for him to attend from 1862 the high school at Kölln, Berlin and after graduating in 1867, to study at the University of Berlin. Aron began by studying medicine, but changed in the 3rd term to mathematics and natural sciences. From 1870 he studied at the University of Heidelberg, with such notable physics lecturers as Helmholtz and Kirchhoff.
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Otto Rudolf Salvisberg
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Otto Rudolf Salvisberg was a Swiss architect. Between 1905 and 1930 Salvisberg worked in Germany. He worked with Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning to design the "White City" housing settlement in Berlin.
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Walter Peterhans
1897 - 1960 (63 years)
Walter Peterhans was a German photographer best known as a teacher and course leader of photography at the Bauhaus from 1929 until 1933, and at the Reimann School in Berlin under Hugo Häring. In the 1930s Peterhans was a proponent of the Neues Sehen movement, taking close-up, still-life photographs of everyday objects and images that played with unusual angles and lighting. At the Bauhaus, Peterhans' teaching involved using the theories of Kant, Plato and Pythagoras to show how beauty is constructed in the mind, and how it can be created in works of art.
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Thomas Henry Wyatt
1807 - 1880 (73 years)
Thomas Henry Wyatt was an Anglo-Irish architect. He had a prolific and distinguished career, being elected President of the Royal Institute of British Architects 1870–73 and being awarded its Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 1873. His reputation during his lifetime was largely as a safe establishment figure, and critical assessment has been less favourable more recently, particularly in comparison with his younger brother, the better known Matthew Digby Wyatt.
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Alan W. Bishop
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Alan Wilfred Bishop was a British geotechnical engineer and academic, working at Imperial College London. He was known for the Bishop's method of analysing soil slopes. After his graduation from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Bishop worked under Alec Skempton and obtained his PhD in 1952 with his thesis title being: The stability of earth dams. He worked extensively in the field of experimental Soil mechanics and developed apparati for soil testing, such as the triaxial test and the ring shear.
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Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo was born on 10 January 1887 in the country estate of Vista Bella, province of Aija, Peru, department of Áncash. He was an engineer, physicist and mathematician. Early years He studied at Colegio Nacional de la Libertad and later Colegio Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe , where he met Peruvian writer Abraham Valdelomar. In 1905 he was admitted into the Mathematical Sciences faculty of the San Marcos National University in Lima. At the end of the 1906 academic year , he received a distinction from President José Pardo, receiving a gold medal. After this, he traveled to France to get his degree in Electrical Engineering in the University of Grenoble.
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Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner
1877 - 1969 (92 years)
Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was a Polish engineer and a pioneer of sound-on-film technology. In 1921 he became the first research professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Within a year of his arrival at the University, he conducted the first sound-on-film motion picture recordings at a physics demonstration that showed how pictures and sound could be synchronized to produce a "talkie", a motion picture with sound.
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Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker was a Dutch architect who designed several distinguished Art Deco buildings in Bandung, Indonesia, including the Villa Isola and Hotel Preanger. He has been described as "the Frank Lloyd Wright of Indonesia," and Wright had a considerable influence on Schoemaker's modernist designs. Although he was primarily known as an architect, he was also a painter and sculptor.
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Johann Albert Eytelwein
1764 - 1848 (84 years)
Johann Albert Eytelwein was a German engineer who was among the first to examine mechanical problems dealing with friction, pulleys, and hydraulics. Eytelwein was born in Frankfurt to Christian Philipp and Anna Elisabeth Katharina née Hung. He joined the Prussian army in 1779 and became a bombardier in the 1st Artillery Regiment later serving under General von Tempelhoff who kindled an interest in engineering. He then trained as a surveyor and in 1790 became an inspector of buildings. His building department published the first German journal of civil engineering, Sammlung nützlicher Aufsätze...
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Charles Metcalf Allen
1871 - 1950 (79 years)
Charles Metcalf Allen was a hydraulic engineer known particularly for his inventions and development of the Allen Salt-Velocity Method for measuring water discharge in situations where other methods or instruments could not be easily used. In 1936, Allen received the ASME Warner Medal, and in 1949, he received the John Fritz Medal. From 1906 to 1945, Charles Metcalf Allen served as professor of hydraulic engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. During that period he also performed research at the Alden Hydraulic Laboratory
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Carl Georg Brunius
1793 - 1869 (76 years)
Carl Georg Brunius was a classical scholar, art historian, archaeologist and architect. He served as a professor and rector at Lund University. During 1833-59, he led the restoration work of Lund Cathedral.
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William F. Durand
1859 - 1958 (99 years)
William Frederick Durand was a United States naval officer and pioneer mechanical engineer. He contributed significantly to the development of aircraft propellers. He was the first civilian chair of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA.
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Nevil Shute
1899 - 1960 (61 years)
Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers or from fellow engineers that he was "not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.
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Marcel Janco
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Marcel Janco was a Romanian and Israeli visual artist, architect and art theorist. He was the co-inventor of Dadaism and a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s, he co-edited, with Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara, the Romanian art magazine Simbolul. Janco was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Futurism and Expressionism before contributing his painting and stage design to Tzara's literary Dadaism. He parted with Dada in 1919, when he and painter Hans Arp founded a Constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben.
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Josef Maria Eder
1855 - 1944 (89 years)
Josef Maria Eder was an Austrian chemist who specialized in the chemistry of photography, and who wrote a comprehensive early history of the technical development of chemical photography. Life and work Eder was born in Krems an der Donau in 1855. He studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology and at the University of Vienna. In 1876, he received his PhD and in 1879, after his habilitation, became lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology.
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Charles A. Platt
1861 - 1933 (72 years)
Charles Adams Platt was an American architect, garden designer, and artist of the "American Renaissance" movement. His garden designs complemented his domestic architecture. Early career Painting and etching Platt was born in New York City, the son of Mary Elizabeth and John Henry Platt. Platt trained as a landscape painter, and as an etcher with Stephen Parrish in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1880. He attended the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York, and later, the Académie Julian in Paris, with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. At the Paris Salon of 1885, he exhibited his paintings and etchings and gained his first audience.
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Henry Holland
1745 - 1806 (61 years)
Henry Holland was an architect to the English nobility. He was born in Fulham, London, where his father, also Henry, ran a building firm constructing several of Capability Brown's designs. His younger brother was Richard Holland, who later changed his surname to Bateman-Robson and became an MP. Although Henry would learn a lot from his father about the practicalities of construction, it was under Capability Brown that he would learn about architectural design.
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George Jackson Churchward
1857 - 1933 (76 years)
George Jackson Churchward was an English railway engineer, and was chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway in the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1922. Early life Churchward was born at Rowes Farm, Stoke Gabriel, Devon, where his ancestors had been squires since 1457. He was the first son in a family of three sons and two daughters, brothers John and James and sisters Mary and Adelina . His father, George Churchward, a farmer, married his cousin, Adelina Mary, daughter of Thomas Churchward, of Paignton, Devon, a corn and cider merchant. He was educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School, contained within the Mansion House on Fore Street, Totnes, Devon.
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