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,
#10151
Maxwell Fry
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry , was an English modernist architect, writer and painter. Originally trained in the neo-classical style of architecture, Fry grew to favour the new modernist style, and practised with eminent colleagues including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Fry was a major influence on a generation of young architects. Among the younger colleagues with whom he worked was Denys Lasdun.
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Viktor Kaplan
1876 - 1934 (58 years)
Viktor Kaplan was an Austrian engineer and the inventor of the Kaplan turbine. Life Kaplan was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria into a railroad worker's family. He graduated from high school in Vienna in 1895, after which he attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied mechanical engineering and specialised in diesel engines. From 1900 to 1901 he was drafted into military service in Pula.
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Vladimir Shchuko
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Vladimir Alekseyevich Shchuko was a Russian architect, member of the Saint Petersburg school of Russian neoclassical revival notable for his giant order apartment buildings "rejecting all trace of the moderne". After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Shchuko gradually embraced modernist ideas, developing his own version of modernized neoclassicism together with his partner Vladimir Gelfreikh. Shchuko and Gelfreikh succeeded through the prewar period of Stalinist architecture with high-profile projects like the Lenin Library, Moscow Metro stations and co-authored the unrealized Palace of Soviets....
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Filippo Brunelleschi
1377 - 1446 (69 years)
Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi , commonly known as Filippo Brunelleschi and also nicknamed Pippo by Leon Battista Alberti, was an Italian architect, designer, goldsmith and sculptor. He is considered to be a founding father of Renaissance architecture. He is recognized as the first modern engineer, planner, and sole construction supervisor. In 1421, Brunelleschi became the first person to receive a patent in the Western world. He is most famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, and for the mathematical technique of linear perspective in art which governed pictorial depictions of space until the late 19th century and influenced the rise of modern science.
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Constantin Brâncuși
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought ...
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Julius Weisbach
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Julius Ludwig Weisbach was a German mathematician and engineer. Life and work Weisbach was born on 10 August 1806 in Mittelschmiedeberg . He studied at the Bergakademie in Freiberg from 1822 to 1826. After that, he studied with Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen and with Friedrich Mohs in Vienna.
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Bernard Maybeck
1862 - 1957 (95 years)
Bernard Ralph Maybeck was an American architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was an instructor at University of California, Berkeley. Most of his major buildings were in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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James Gibbs
1682 - 1754 (72 years)
James Gibbs was one of Britain's most influential architects. Born in Aberdeen, he trained as an architect in Rome, and practised mainly in England. He is an important figure whose work spanned the transition between English Baroque architecture and Georgian architecture heavily influenced by Andrea Palladio. Among his most important works are St Martin-in-the-Fields , the cylindrical, domed Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University, and the Senate House at Cambridge University.
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Jacob Pieter Den Hartog
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Jacob Pieter Den Hartog was a Dutch-American mechanical engineer and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Biography J. P. Den Hartog was born in 1901 in Ambarova, the Dutch East Indies. In 1916 his family moved to Holland. After attending high school in Amsterdam, he enrolled at Delft University of Technology in 1919 and received his MSc degree in electrical engineering in 1924. Unable to find suitable work in the Netherlands, he emigrated to the United States in 1924.
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Joseph Lyman Silsbee
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
Joseph Lyman Silsbee was a significant American architect during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was well known for his facility of drawing and gift for designing buildings in a variety of styles. His most prominent works ran through Syracuse, Buffalo and Chicago. He was influential as mentor to a generation of architects, most notably architects of the Prairie School including the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Nicholas Hawksmoor
1661 - 1736 (75 years)
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Part of his work has been correctly attributed to him only relatively recently, and his influence has reached several poets and...
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William Pereira
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
William Leonard Pereira was an American architect from Chicago, Illinois, who was noted for his futuristic designs of landmark buildings such as the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Remarkably prolific, he worked out of Los Angeles, and was known for his love of science fiction and expensive cars, but mostly for his unmistakable style of architecture, which helped define the look of mid-20th century America.
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Hassan Fathy
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Hassan Fathy was a noted Egyptian architect who pioneered appropriate technology for building in Egypt, especially by working to reestablish the use of adobe and traditional mud construction as opposed to western building designs, material configurations, and lay-outs. Fathy was recognized with the Aga Khan Chairman's Award for Architecture in 1980. In 2017, Google celebrated Fathy with a Google Doodle for "pioneering new methods [in architecture], respecting tradition [Egyptian heritage and tradition], and valuing all walks of life".
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Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban
1633 - 1707 (74 years)
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Seigneur de Vauban, later Marquis de Vauban , commonly referred to as Vauban , was a French military engineer and Marshal of France who worked under Louis XIV. He is generally considered the greatest engineer of his time, and one of the most important in European military history.
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Friedrich August Stüler
1800 - 1865 (65 years)
Friedrich August Stüler was an influential Prussian architect and builder. His masterpiece is the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as the dome of the triumphal arch of the main portal of the Berliner Schloss.
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Theodor Fischer
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Theodor Fischer was a German architect and teacher. Career Fischer planned public housing projects for the city of Munich beginning in 1893. He was the joint founder and first chairman of the Deutscher Werkbund , as well as member of the German version of the Garden city movement. In 1909, Fischer accepted a position as professor for architecture at the Technical University of Munich.
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Nikolay Dollezhal
1899 - 2000 (101 years)
Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal was a Russian engineer of Czech origin whose career was spent in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and later played an influential role in developing the commercial nuclear power industry of Russia.
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Ernesto Basile
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Ernesto Basile was an Italian architect and an exponent of modernisme and Liberty style, the Italian variant of Art Nouveau. His style was known for its eclectic fusion of ancient, medieval and modern elements.
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Stanford White
1853 - 1906 (53 years)
Stanford White was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the wealthy, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. His temporary Washington Square Arch was so popular that he was commissioned to design a permanent one. His design principles embodied the "American Renaissance".
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Nikolai Kolli
1894 - 1966 (72 years)
Nikolai Dzhemsovich Kolli was a Soviet and Russian Modernist—Constructivist architect, architectural functionary, and city planner in the Soviet Union. History Kolli was born in Moscow, and studied at the Imperial Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and then at the Leninist VKhUTEMAS in Moscow.
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Walter Burley Griffin
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect and landscape architect. He designed Canberra, Australia's capital city, the New South Wales towns of Griffith and Leeton, and the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.
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Richard Norman Shaw
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
Richard Norman Shaw RA , also known as Norman Shaw, was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings. He is considered to be among the greatest of British architects; his influence on architectural style was strongest in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Oskar Kokoschka
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.
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Mikhail Tikhonravov
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov was a Soviet engineer who was a pioneer of spacecraft design and rocketry. Mikhail Tikhonravov was born in Vladimir, Russia. He attended the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy from 1922 to 1925, where he was exposed to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's ideas of spaceflight. After graduation and until 1931 worked in several aircraft industries and was engaged in developing gliders. From 1931 and on, devoted himself to the development of the field of rocketry. In 1932, he joined Group for the Study of Reactive Motion , as one of the four brigade leaders. His brigade built the G...
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Henry Hornbostel
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Henry Hornbostel was an American architect and educator. Hornbostel designed more than 225 buildings, bridges, and monuments in the United States. Twenty-two of his designs are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Oakland City Hall in Oakland, California and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum and University Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Richard Trevithick
1771 - 1833 (62 years)
Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his most significant contributions were the development of the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway steam locomotive. The world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place on 21 February 1804, when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ...
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Theo van Doesburg
1883 - 1931 (48 years)
Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, who practiced painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He was married to artist, pianist and choreographer Nelly van Doesburg.
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Vedat Tek
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Mehmet Vedat Tek was a Turkish architect. The last court architect of the Ottoman Empire, Vedat Tek was one of two leading figures of the First Turkish National Architectural Movement, alongside Mimar Kemaleddin.
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Tony Garnier
1869 - 1948 (79 years)
Tony Garnier was a noted French architect and city planner. He was most active in his home city of Lyon, where he notably designed the Halle Tony Garnier and Stade de Gerland. Garnier is considered one of the forerunners of 20th-century French architects.
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Nicolas Minorsky
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Nicolas Minorsky was a Russian American control theory mathematician, engineer and applied scientist. He is best known for his theoretical analysis and first proposed application of PID controllers in the automatic steering systems for U.S. Navy ships.
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Giles Gilbert Scott
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was a British architect known for his work on the New Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Battersea Power Station, Liverpool Cathedral, and designing the iconic red telephone box.
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Tadeusz Kościuszko
1746 - 1817 (71 years)
Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko was a Polish-Lithuanian military engineer, statesman, and military leader who became a national hero in Poland, the United States, Lithuania, and Belarus. He fought in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's struggles against Russia and Prussia, and on the U.S. side in the American Revolutionary War. As Supreme Commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, he led the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising.
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Conde McCullough
1887 - 1946 (59 years)
Conde Balcom McCullough was an American civil engineer who is primarily known for designing many of Oregon's coastal bridges on U.S. Route 101. The native of South Dakota worked for the Oregon Department of Transportation from 1919 to 1935 and 1937 until he died in 1946. McCullough also was a professor at Oregon State University.
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Reinhold Rudenberg
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Reinhold Rudenberg was a German-American electrical engineer and inventor, credited with many innovations in the electric power and related fields. Aside from improvements in electric power equipment, especially large alternating current generatorss, among others were the electrostatic-lens electron microscope, carrier-current communications on power lines, a form of phased array radar, an explanation of power blackouts, preferred number series, and the number prefix "Giga-".
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Sedad Hakkı Eldem
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Sedad Hakkı Eldem , was a Turkish architect and one of the pioneers of nationalized modern architecture in Turkey. Biography Eldem was born in Istanbul in 1908. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts department of Architecture. Between 1931 and 1932 he travelled to France, England and Germany with a scholarship from the academy. In 1932 he opened his own office and started teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, which he continued until his retirement in 1978. In 1934 he worked for the National Architecture Seminar in Turkey, which was disaster for him, because of the discussions between modern architecture and traditional architecture.
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George Edmund Street
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
George Edmund Street , also known as G. E. Street, was an English architect, born at Woodford in Essex. Stylistically, Street was a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Though mainly an ecclesiastical architect, he is perhaps best known as the designer of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London.
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Michel Bakhoum
1913 - 1981 (68 years)
Michel Bakhoum was an Egyptian consulting civil engineer, university professor, and a researcher in concrete structures. Education and early years Michel Bakhoum was born in June 1913 in Cairo. He graduated from the Civil Engineering Department at Cairo University in 1936 . He completed his M.Sc. in 1942, and his first Ph.D. in 1945. He was the second person in Egypt to receive a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University. In 1945, he traveled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his second Ph.D. He then spent one year at Columbia University in N...
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Ludwig Förster
1797 - 1863 (66 years)
Ludwig Christian Friedrich Förster was a German-born Austrian architect. While he was not Jewish, he is known for building Jewish synagogues and churches. Ludwig Förster studied in Munich and Vienna. He founded the Allgemeine Bauzeitung in 1836. From 1842 to 1845 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and influenced a generation of Viennese architects through his architectural studio.
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Vincenzo Scamozzi
1548 - 1616 (68 years)
Vincenzo Scamozzi was an Italian architect and a writer on architecture, active mainly in Vicenza and Republic of Venice area in the second half of the 16th century. He was perhaps the most important figure there between Andrea Palladio, whose unfinished projects he inherited at Palladio's death in 1580, and Baldassarre Longhena, Scamozzi's only pupil.
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Lucas Cranach the Elder
1472 - 1553 (81 years)
Lucas Cranach the Elder was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker in woodcut and engraving. He was court painter to the Electors of Saxony for most of his career, and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, whose cause he embraced with enthusiasm. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. Cranach also painted religious subjects, first in the Catholic tradition, and later trying to find new ways of conveying Lutheran religious concerns in art. He continued throughout his career to paint nude subjects drawn from mythology an...
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Sutemi Horiguchi
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
was an architect and a historian of Japanese architecture, and an expert of sukiya-zukuri architecture. In addition to designing modern buildings, he designed buildings in sukiya-zukuri, and buildings that fused both modern architectural and traditional Japanese architectural motifs.
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Anthony Salvin
1799 - 1881 (82 years)
Anthony Salvin was an English architect. He gained a reputation as an expert on medieval buildings and applied this expertise to his new buildings and his restorations. He restored castles and country houses, and built a number of new houses and churches.
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Arthur E. Kennelly
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Arthur Edwin Kennelly was an American electrical engineer. Biography Kennelly was born December 17, 1861, in Colaba, in Bombay Presidency, British India, and was educated at University College School in London. He was the son of Irish naval officer Captain David Joseph Kennelly and Catherine Gibson Heycock . His mother died when he was three years old. In 1863, his father retired from the navy and later Arthur and his father returned to England. In 1878, his father married Ellen L.Spencer and moved the family to Sydney, Nova Scotia, when he took over the Sydney and Louisbourg Coal and Railway Company Limited.
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Itō Chūta
1867 - 1954 (87 years)
Itō Chūta was a Japanese architect, architectural historian, and critic. He is recognized as the leading architect and architectural theorist of early 20th-century Imperial Japan. Biography Second son of a doctor in Yonezawa, present-day Yamagata Prefecture, Itō was educated in Tokyo. From 1889 to 1892 he studied under Tatsuno Kingo in the Department of Architecture at the Imperial University. Josiah Conder was still teaching in the department, while Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō were also influential in the formation of Itō's ideas. For graduation he designed a Gothic cathedral and wrote a dissertation on architectural theory.
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Friedrich Weinbrenner
1766 - 1826 (60 years)
Friedrich Weinbrenner was a German architect and city planner admired for his mastery of classical style. Birth and education Weinbrenner was born in Karlsruhe, and began his career apprenticed to his father, a carpenter. He worked as a builder in Zürich and Lausanne starting from 1788. He arrived to Vienna in 1790 and began his study of architecture, largely self-taught. In 1790–91 he studied at the Bauakademie of Vienna and Dresden, then, in 1791–92, spent several months in Berlin where he was exposed to Palladian architecture. Carl Gotthard Langhans , David Gilly and Hans Christian Genelli were influential in the formation of Weinbrenner's architectural thought.
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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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