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,
#10101
Frederick John Kiesler
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Frederick Jacob Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, theoretician, theater designer, artist and sculptor. Biography Kiesler was born Friedrich Jacob Kiesler in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire .
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William Wilkins
1778 - 1839 (61 years)
William Wilkins was an English architect, classical scholar and archaeologist. He designed the National Gallery and University College London, and buildings for several Cambridge colleges. Life Wilkins was born in the parish of St Giles, Norwich, the son of William Wilkins , a successful builder who also managed the Norwich Theatre Circuit, a chain of theatres. His younger brother George Wilkins became Archdeacon of Nottingham.
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Max Cetto
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Max Ludwig Cetto was a German-Mexican architect, historian of architecture, and professor. Life Born in Koblenz, Germany, Max Cetto studied at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Munich and Berlin. At the latter he studied with Hans Poelzig, graduating as an engineer–architect in 1926 and worked then for the New Frankfurt project. After 1929 he taught also some years at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach.
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William Strickland
1788 - 1854 (66 years)
William Strickland was a noted architect and civil engineer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Nashville, Tennessee. A student of Benjamin Latrobe and mentor to Thomas Ustick Walter, Strickland helped establish the Greek Revival movement in the United States. A pioneering engineer, he wrote a seminal book on railroad construction, helped build several early American railroads, and designed the first ocean breakwater in the Western Hemisphere. He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1820.
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Simon Stevin
1548 - 1620 (72 years)
Simon Stevin , sometimes called Stevinus, was a Flemish mathematician, scientist and music theorist. He made various contributions in many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it one of the few European languages in which the word for mathematics, wiskunde , was not a loanword from Greek but a calque via Latin. He also replaced the word chemie, the Dutch for chemistry, by scheikunde , made in analogy with wiskunde.
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Uno Åhrén
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Uno Åhrén was a Swedish architect and city planner, and a leading proponent of functionalism in Sweden. Biography Uno Emrik Åhrén was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He graduated as an architect at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1918. He was City Planning Manager in Gothenburg 1932-1943 and head of the Riksbyggen 1943-1945. He was appointed professor of urban construction at the Royal Institute of Technology from 1947 through 1963.
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Heydar Ghiai
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Heydar-Gholi Khan Ghiaï-Chamlou was an Iranian architect. He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1952, and was known as a pioneer of modern architecture in Iran. He designed the Senate House, the Royal Tehran Hilton Hotel, several train stations, cinemas, various civic and government buildings and the first series of state of the art hospitals. In France, he designed the Cité Universitaire aka Avicenne Foundation, amongst others.
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Lucio Fontana
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Lucio Fontana was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism. Early life Born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina, to Italian immigrant parents, he was the son of the sculptor Luigi Fontana . Fontana spent the first years of his life in Argentina and then was sent to Italy in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor with his father, and then on his own. Already in 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentine artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé.
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Frigyes Schulek
1841 - 1919 (78 years)
Frigyes Schulek was a Hungarian architect, a professor at József Technical University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Life Education Schulek was born in Pest and began school in Buda. His mother was Auguszta Zsigmondy. His father Ágost Schulek held a position in the Finance Ministry of Lajos Kossuth. The Schulek family accompanied Kossuth's government on its flight to Debrecen during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, then returned to the capital. After the suppression of the struggle for independence, Ágost Schulek was declared persona non grata, and the family returned ...
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Robert Eberan von Eberhorst
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Robert Eberan von Eberhorst , later known as Robert Eberan-Eberhorst, was a noted Austrian engineer, who designed the Auto Union Type D Grand Prix motor racing car. Early life Born into Austrian nobility, the family shortened its name when the nobility was abolished in Austria in 1918. He studied at the Vienna Technical University until in 1927, where he earned an engineering master's degree. Later that year he joined the Institute for Automotive Engineering at Dresden Technical University as a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate. In 1933 Ferdinand Porsche persuaded him to join Auto Union.
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Lev Kekushev
1862 - 1917 (55 years)
Lev Nikolayevich Kekushev was a Russian architect, notable for his Art Nouveau buildings in Moscow, built in the 1890s and early 1900s in the original, Franco-Belgian variety of this style. Kekushev's buildings are notable for his skillful use of metal ornaments and his signature with a lion ornament or sculpture.
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Pedro Benoit
1836 - 1897 (61 years)
Pedro Benoit was an Argentine architect, engineer, and urbanist best known for designing the layout of La Plata City. Life and times Pedro Benoit was born in Buenos Aires in 1836 to María Josefa de las Mercedes Leyes and ', a French émigré who had left his homeland following the Bourbon Restoration. His father, a trained architect, engineer and topographer instilled his interests in his son, who enrolled in 1850 at the Topography and Geodesics School of the Department of Engineering of the Province of Buenos Aires.
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Patrick Abercrombie
1879 - 1957 (78 years)
Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie was an English regional and town planner. Abercrombie was an academic during most of his career, and prepared one city plan and several regional studies prior to the Second World War. He came to prominence in the 1940s for his urban plans of the cities of Plymouth, Hull, Bath, Bournemouth, Hong Kong, Edinburgh, Clyde Valley and Greater London.
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Paul Schmitthenner
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Paul Schmitthenner was a German architect, city planner and Professor at the University of Stuttgart. During Nazi Germany, Schmitthenner was one of Adolf Hitler's architects. Early life and education He studied at the technical universities of Karlsruhe and Munich and later became a Professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he formed together with Paul Bonatz the architectural style of the Stuttgart School.
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Henrik Kreüger
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Henrik Kreüger was born in Kalmar, Sweden, and obtained his M.Sc. in civil engineering in 1904 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After graduating, he worked for the construction company Fritz Söderbergh in Stockholm until 1908, when he went back to the university to work as an employed teacher at the faculty for civil engineering. In parallel he also worked as a consulting engineer for the construction company Kreuger & Toll that started their business in 1908, a couple of months after Ivar Kreuger had returned from America. Henrik Kreüger and Ivar Kreuger formed an affiliate...
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Friedrich von Schmidt
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Friedrich von Schmidt was an architect who worked in late 19th century Vienna. Life and career Von Schmidt was born in Frickenhofen, Gschwend, Württemberg, Germany. After studying at the technical high school in Stuttgart under Breymann and Mauch, he became, in 1845, one of the guild workers employed in building Cologne Cathedral, on which he worked for fifteen years. Most of the working drawings for the towers were made by Schmidt and Vincenz Statz. In 1848 he attained the rank of master-workman and in 1856 passed the state examination as architect. After becoming a Catholic in 1858, he went to Milan as professor of architecture and began the restoration of the cathedral of Sant'Ambrogio.
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Asher Benjamin
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Asher Benjamin was an American architect and author whose work transitioned between Federal architecture and the later Greek Revival architecture. His seven handbooks on design deeply influenced the look of cities and towns throughout New England until the Civil War. Builders also copied his plans in the Midwest and in the South.
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Charles Dalziel
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Charles Dalziel was a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. According to volume 54 of UCB's Blue and Gold, Dalziel graduated with a Mechanics degree in 1927 and was from Santa Maria, CA. He was a member of: Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, De Molay Club , and Engineers Council.
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Hermann Föttinger
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Hermann Föttinger was a German engineer and inventor. In the course of his life he submitted over 100 patent applications, but he is most notable for inventing fluid coupling. Career From 1895 to 1899 Hermann Föttinger studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Munich.
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William Henry Playfair
1790 - 1857 (67 years)
William Henry Playfair FRSE was a prominent Scottish architect in the 19th century who designed the Eastern, or Third, New Town and many of Edinburgh's neoclassical landmarks. Life Playfair was born on 15 July 1790 in Russell Square, London to Jessie Graham and James Playfair. His father was also an architect, and his uncles were the mathematician John Playfair and William Playfair, an economist and pioneer of statistical graphics. After his father's death he was sent to Edinburgh to be educated by his uncle John Playfair. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1809.
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Sandford Fleming
1827 - 1915 (88 years)
Sir Sandford Fleming was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor. Born and raised in Scotland, he emigrated to colonial Canada at the age of 18. He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time. He designed Canada's first postage stamp, produced a great deal of work in the fields of land surveying and map making, engineered much of the Intercolonial Railway and the first several hundred kilometers of the Canadian Pacific Railway, an...
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Tachū Naitō
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Tachū Naitō was a Japanese architect, engineer, and professor. He was a father of earthquake-proof design and built many broadcasting and observation towers, including the Tokyo Tower. Biography Naitō was born on 12 June 1886, in Minami-Alps, Yamanashi Prefecture.
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Richard Söderberg
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Carl Richard Söderberg was a power engineer and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Background Söderberg was born in the fishing village of Ulvöhamn, in Örnsköldsvik Municipality, Västernorrland County, Sweden. He enrolled at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. In 1919 he graduated with a degree in naval architecture. On a fellowship from The American-Scandinavian Foundation, he came to MIT, where he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science in June 1920.
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William Jessop
1745 - 1814 (69 years)
William Jessop was an English civil engineer, best known for his work on canals, harbours and early railways in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early life Jessop was born in Devonport, Devon, the son of Josias Jessop, a foreman shipwright in the Naval Dockyard. Josias Jessop was responsible for the repair and maintenance of Rudyerd's Tower, a wooden lighthouse on the Eddystone Rock. He carried out this task for twenty years until 1755, when the lighthouse burnt down. John Smeaton, a leading civil engineer, drew up plans for a new stone lighthouse and Josias became responsible for the overseeing the building work.
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Frederick Gibberd
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Sir Frederick Ernest Gibberd CBE was an English architect, town planner and landscape designer. He is particularly known for his work in Harlow, Essex, and for the BISF house, a design for a prefabricated council house that was widely adopted in post-war Britain.
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Richard Beeching
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Richard Beeching, Baron Beeching , commonly known as Dr Beeching, was a physicist and engineer who for a short but very notable time was chairman of British Railways. He became a household name in Britain in the early 1960s for his report The Reshaping of British Railways, commonly referred to as The Beeching Report, which led to far-reaching changes in the railway network, popularly known as the Beeching Axe.
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Imre Steindl
1839 - 1902 (63 years)
Imre Ferenc Károly Steindl was a Hungarian architect. Steindl was the designer of the Hungarian Parliament Building, an associate professor and correspondent of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Around the end of the 19th century, along with Miklós Ybl and Frigyes Schulek, Steindl was the most significant architect within the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen. His most famous work, the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest, is regarded as a symbol of the capital city.
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John Stone Stone
1869 - 1943 (74 years)
John Stone Stone was an American mathematician, physicist and inventor. He initially worked in telephone research, followed by influential work developing early radio technology, where he was especially known for improvements in tuning. Despite his often advanced designs, the Stone Telegraph and Telephone Company failed in 1908, and he spent the remainder of his career as an engineering consultant.
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Robert Mills
1781 - 1855 (74 years)
Robert Mills was a South Carolina architect known for designing both the first Washington Monument, located in Baltimore, Maryland, as well as the better known monument to the first president in the nation's capital, Washington, DC. He is sometimes said to be the first native-born American to be professionally trained as an architect. Charles Bulfinch of Boston perhaps has a clearer claim to this honor.
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David Bryce
1803 - 1876 (73 years)
David Bryce FRSE FRIBA RSA was a Scottish architect. Life Bryce was born at 5 South College Street in Edinburgh, the son of David Bryce a grocer with a successful side interest in building. He was educated at the Royal High School and joined the office of the architect William Burn in 1825, at the age of 22. By 1841, Bryce had risen to be Burn's partner. Burn and Bryce formally dissolved their partnership in 1845, with disputes over the building of St Mary's Church, Dalkeith, Midlothian, for the Duke of Buccleuch.
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Eadweard Muybridge
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name "Eadweard" as the original Anglo-Saxon form of "Edward", and the surname "Muybridge", believing it to be similarly archaic. A noted photographer in the 19th century American West, he photographed Yosemite, San Francisco, the newly acquired Alaskan Territory, subjects involved in the Modoc War, and lighthouses on the West Coast. He also made his early "moving" picture studies in California.
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Roque Ruaño
1877 - 1935 (58 years)
Roque Ruaño Garrido, O.P. was a Spanish priest and civil engineer. He was known after he drew up plans for University of Santo Tomas Main Building, the first earthquake-shock resistant building in Asia, which was constructed at the Sulucan property of the Dominican order in city of Manila.
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Ernest Hébrard
1875 - 1933 (58 years)
Ernest Hébrard was a French architect, archaeologist and urban planner, best known for his urban plan for the center of Thessaloniki, Greece, after the great fire of 1917. Background Hebrard studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1904 won the Grand Prix de Rome, allowing him to study at the Académie de France in Rome, located in the Villa Medici. It was here that he chose to study Diocletian's palace at Split, eventually leading to the 1912 publication of a monograph containing what is still regarded as the most accurate image of the original appearance of the Palace. At the Academie, he...
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Tytus Maksymilian Huber
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Tytus Maksymilian Huber was a Polish mechanical engineer, educator, and scientist. He was a member of the pre-war Polish scientific foundation, Kasa im. Józefa Mianowskiego. His career began as a professor at Lwów Polytechnic in 1908, later serving as rector from 1922 to 1923. In the late 1920s he was professor and department chair of Warsaw University of Technology. After the Second World War he helped organize the Gdańsk University of Technology.
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Rufino Tamayo
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, born in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. Tamayo was active in the mid-20th century in Mexico and New York, painting figurative abstraction with surrealist influences.
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Martin Elsaesser
1884 - 1957 (73 years)
Martin Elsaesser was a German architect and professor of architecture. He is especially well known for the many churches he built. Life From 1901 to 1906, Elsaesser studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich under Friedrich von Thiersch and the Technical University of Stuttgart under Theodor Fischer. In 1905 he won the competition for the Lutheran church of Baden-Baden and started to be active as a freelance architect.
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William Hubert Burr
1851 - 1934 (83 years)
William Hubert Burr C.E. was an American civil engineer, born at Watertown, Connecticut. He received his education at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Over several decades, he worked at various places. In 1884 he became assistant engineer to the Phoenix Bridge Company. After 1893 he was consulting engineer to New York departments, especially in connection with the Catskill Aqueduct work. In 1892–1893 he had been Professor at Harvard University and 1893–1916 Professor for Civil Engineering at Columbia University. In 1904 he was appointed a member of the Isthmian Canal Commission.
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Alajos Hauszmann
1847 - 1926 (79 years)
Alajos Hauszmann was a Hungarian architect, professor, and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Life Hauszmann was born in Buda in 1847 into a family of Bavarian origin as the son of Ferenc Hauszmann and Anna Maár . He studied painting from 1861, then became a bricklayer's apprentice. In 1864 he attended Technical University of Budapest, and in 1866 he continued architecture studies at the Bauakademie in Berlin, along with Ödön Lechner.1868 Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Budapest1869–1870. Grand tour of Italy to study renaissance architecture1872 Professor at the...
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Panteleimon Golosov
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Panteleimon Alexandrovich Golosov was a Constructivist architect from the Soviet Union and brother of Ilya Golosov. Career Golosov graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1911. From 1918 he taught at the State Free Artist Studios , then at VKhUTEMAS and at the Moscow Architectural Institute. He later became a member of the OSA Group.
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Carl Culmann
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Carl Culmann was a German structural engineer. Born in Bad Bergzabern, Rhenish Palatinate, in modern-day Germany, Culmann's father, a pastor, tutored him at home before enrolling him at the military engineering school at Metz to prepare for entry to the École Polytechnique. Culmann's ambitions were frustrated by an attack of typhoid and, after a long convalescence, he attended the Karlsruhe Polytechnic School. He joined the Bavarian civil service in 1841 as an apprentice engineer in the design of railroad bridges.
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John Alexander Low Waddell
1854 - 1938 (84 years)
Dr. John Alexander Low Waddell was a Canadian-American civil engineer and prolific bridge designer, with more than a thousand structures to his credit in the United States, Canada, as well as Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, and New Zealand. Waddell’s work set standards for elevated railroad systems and helped develop materials suitable for large span bridges. His most important contribution was the development of the steam-powered high-lift bridge. Waddell was a widely respected writer on bridge design and engineering theory, as well as an advocate for quality in higher education engineering programs.
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Carl Benz
1844 - 1929 (85 years)
Carl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and automotive engineer. His Benz Patent Motorcar from 1885 is considered the first practical modern automobile and first car put into series production. He received a patent for the motorcar in 1886, the same year he first publicly drove the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.
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Luis Huergo
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Luis Augusto Huergo was an Argentine engineer prominent in the development of his country's ports. Life and times Early career Luis Huergo was born in Buenos Aires, in 1837, to a family of prosperous retailers. He was sent to the Jesuit Mount St. Mary's University previously known as Mount St. Mary's College, where he obtained his secondary education from 1852 to 1857. Returning to Argentina, he assisted urbanist Pedro Benoit plan the first road to Ensenada and earned a degree as a surveyor from the Topography and Geodesics School of Buenos Aires, in 1862. Huergo was among the first class t...
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John Hopkinson
1849 - 1898 (49 years)
John Hopkinson, FRS, was a British physicist, electrical engineer, Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the IEE twice in 1890 and 1896. He invented the three-wire system for the distribution of electrical power, for which he was granted a patent in 1882. He also worked in many areas of electromagnetism and electrostatics, and in 1890 was appointed professor of electrical engineering at King's College London, where he was also director of the Siemens Laboratory.
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Marcin Knackfus
1740 - 1821 (81 years)
Marcin Knackfus , also known in Lithuanian as Martynas Knakfusas, was an architect, professor, and military captain from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was first person to introduce Neoclassical architecture in Lithuania. He designed several important buildings in Vilnius, the capital and largest city of Lithuania.
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Carlo Fontana
1638 - 1714 (76 years)
Carlo Fontana was an Italian architect originating from today's Canton Ticino, who was in part responsible for the classicizing direction taken by Late Baroque Roman architecture. Biography There seems to be no proof that he belonged to the family of famous architects of the same name, which included Domenico Fontana, although he is sometimes called his great nephew.
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Gisbert Kapp
1852 - 1922 (70 years)
Gisbert Johann Eduard Kapp was an Austrian-English electrical engineer. His parents were an Austrian counselor Gisbert Kapp and Luisa Kapp-Young. After finishing his studies in Austria, Kapp moved to England where he was naturalized in 1881. He was awarded a Telford Medal in 1885/6. In 1904 he was offered the position as the first Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, a post he held until 1919. In 1909 he was elected the president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
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Helena Syrkus
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Helena Syrkus was a Polish architect, urban planner and educator. She was born Helena Eliasberg in Warsaw and studied architecture at the Warsaw Technical Academy from 1918 to 1923. In 1922, she changed her last name to Niemirowska. Syrkus also studied drawing with Roman Kramsztyk and philosophy at the University of Warsaw. She was a co-founder of the avant-garde Praesens group. She was also a member of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne and served as vice-chairperson from 1945 to 1954. In 1950, she began lecturing on architecture at the Polish Technical Academy.
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Akira Nakashima
Akira Nakashima was a Japanese electrical engineer of the NEC. He got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Imperial University of Tokyo. Nakashima introduced switching circuit theory in papers from 1934 to 1936, laying the foundations for digital circuit design, in digital computers and other areas of modern technology. This is considered to be an achievement on a par with Claude Shannon, who presented a similar theory at the same time.
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Nicolai Eigtved
1701 - 1754 (53 years)
Nicolai Eigtved , also known as Niels Eigtved, was a Danish architect. He introduced and was the leading proponent of the French rococo or late baroque style in Danish architecture during the 1730s–1740s. He designed and built some of the most prominent buildings of his time, a number of which still stand to this day. He also played an important role in the establishment of the Royal Danish Academy of Art , and was its first native-born leader.
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