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,
#10201
Victor Fürth
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Victor Fürth , was a Czech-Jewish architect working in Prague until 1939. Life His firm designed the Te-Ta department Store in Prague. This 7-story building can be seen at Jungmannova Street 747/28 110 00 Praha-Nové Město . It was renovated in 1997 at which time underground parking was added, and an apartment wing was included in the rear. The reinforced concrete building contains a parterre which allows passage between Jungmannova Street and the Franciscan Garden.
Go to Profile#10202
Geoffrey de Havilland
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Captain Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, was an English aviation pioneer and aerospace engineer. The aircraft company he founded produced the Mosquito, which has been considered the most versatile warplane ever built, and his Comet was the first jet airliner to go into production.
Go to Profile#10203
Silston Cory-Wright
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Silston Cory-Wright was an English-born New Zealand engineer, university lecturer, soldier, and company director. Early life Silston Cory-Wright was born at Sigglesthorne Hall, Hornsea, Yorkshire, England, on 22 September 1888. He was the son of George Henry Cory Wright and his wife, Ellen Green Wade. The grandson of Sir William Wright, the double-barrelled surname came about as a result of a disagreement between George's side of the family and his half-siblings.
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John Muir
1918 - 1977 (59 years)
John Muir was a structural engineer who worked for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , who "dropped out," 1960s-style, to become a writer and long-haired car mechanic with a garage in Taos, New Mexico, specializing in maintenance and repair of Volkswagens. He was a distant relative of the naturalist John Muir.
Go to Profile#10205
Henry Payne
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Henry Payne FRAeS M.Inst.C.E. was dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Melbourne. He was also the first occupant of the Corporation Chair of Engineering, South African College, Cape Town where he designed and equipped the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Departments. Payne's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as 'Dignified in manner and precise in speech, he was respected as a man of principle'.
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Fritz Kortner
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Fritz Kortner was an Austrian stage and film actor and theatre director. Life and career Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn into a Jewish family. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. After his breakthrough performance in Ernst Toller's Transfiguration in 1919, he became one of Germany's best-known character actors and the nation's foremost performer of Expressionist works. He also appeared in over ninety films beginning in 1916.
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Joseph Henry Keenan
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.
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Edward B. Durham
1875 - Present (151 years)
Edward Benjamin Durham was an American mining engineer and Professor at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, especially known for his work on mine surveying. Biography Durham received his MA in mining at the Columbia University in 1893, where he was classmate of Halbert Powers Gillette.
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Charles Stark Draper
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landingss possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.
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Bill Wittrick
1922 - 1986 (64 years)
Professor William Henry Wittrick FAA FRS was a British engineer and academic who spent 20 years in Australia, including 10 years as Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Sydney . He was Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Birmingham , and Beale Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham .
Go to Profile#10211
Rufus Oldenburger
1908 - 1969 (61 years)
Rufus Oldenburger was an American mathematician and mechanical engineer. Education and career Oldenburger received an A.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1928, a master's degree in mathematics in 1930, and a Ph.D. in 1934. After teaching mathematics at the University of Michigan, at the Case Institute of Technology, at Illinois Institute of Technology, and at DePaul University, he changed the focus of his research from pure mathematics to mechanical engineering and automatic control. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1936 at Oslo. For the a...
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Frederick Terman
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Frederick Emmons Terman was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.
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William B. Kouwenhoven
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
William Bennet Kouwenhoven , also known as the "Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation," is famous for his contributions to the development of the closed-chest cardiac massage and his invention of the cardiac defibrillator. After obtaining his doctorate degree in engineering from the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Germany, Kouwenhoven began his career as the dean at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Kouwenhoven focused his research mainly on improving and saving lives of patients through the application of electricity. With the help and cooperation of the Johns Hopkins School of ...
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Harry Platt
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Sir Harry Platt, 1st Baronet, FRCS, KStJ was an English orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He was a founder of the British Orthopaedic Association, of which he became president in 1934–1935.
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Harry Bolton Seed
1922 - 1989 (67 years)
Harry Bolton Seed was an educator, scholar, former professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was regarded as the founding father of geotechnical earthquake engineering. Biography Early life Harry Bolton Seed was born in Bolton, England, on August 19, 1922, into a family of a cotton mill manager. His father was Arthur Bolton Seed, and his mother's maiden name was Annie Wood; his sister Dorothy was nine years older than he was. He spent his childhood in Lancashire and attended Farnworth Grammar School, where he exhibited talent both at sports and academics. At the age of eighteen he chose a scholarship to King's College London over a possible professional soccer career.
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Nathan M. Newmark
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Nathan Mortimore Newmark was an American structural engineer and academic, who is widely considered one of the founding fathers of earthquake engineering. He was awarded the National Medal of Science for engineering.
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Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff
1897 - 1992 (95 years)
Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff , who published as S. A. Schelkunoff, was a distinguished mathematician, engineer and electromagnetism theorist who made noted contributions to antenna theory. Biography Schelkunoff was born in Samara, Russia in 1897, attended the University of Moscow before being drafted in 1917. He crossed Siberia into Manchuria and then Japan before settling in Seattle in 1921. There he received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the State College of Washington, now Washington State University, and in 1928 received his Ph.D. from Columbia University for his diss...
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William Grey Walter
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
William Grey Walter was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the only child of Minerva Lucrezia Hardy , an American journalist and Karl Wilhelm Walter , a British journalist who was working on the Kansas City Star at the time. His parents had met and married in Italy, and during the First World War the family moved from to Britain. Walter's ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to Engl...
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Frank Benford
1883 - 1948 (65 years)
Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.
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Abel Wolman
1892 - 1989 (97 years)
Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.
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Theodore Theodorsen
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Theodore Theodorsen was a Norwegian-American theoretical aerodynamicist noted for his work at NACA and for his contributions to the study of turbulence. Early years Theodorsen was born at Sandefjord in Vestfold, Norway to parents Ole Christian Theodorsen, a chief engineer in the Norwegian merchant marine, and his wife Andrea Larsen. He was the oldest of six children. When Theodore’s father took the examinations for a merchant marine engineer's license, he was the only applicant who correctly answered a particularly difficult question. To his father’s surprise his then 12-year-old son was als...
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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Hans Albert Einstein
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Hans Albert Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of physicists Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. He was a long-time professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Horst Rittel
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.
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Alan Mara Bateman
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.
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Herbert Reich
1900 - 2000 (100 years)
Herbert Reich was a pioneering figure in electrical engineering. Reich made substantial contributions towards the design of early oscilloscopes as a graduate student at Cornell University. Reich later taught as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Yale University . From 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University with Frederick Terman. After his retirement from Yale, he periodically taught courses at Deep Springs College.
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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John Harbeson
1888 - 1986 (98 years)
John Frederick Harbeson was a Philadelphia architect and a long-time architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a principal in the Philadelphia design firm, Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson, successors to the office of Paul Cret.
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George William Osborn Howe
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
George William Osborn Howe D.Sc. LL.D. was a British electrical engineer. After education at the Roan School, Greenwich, Howe was apprenticed to Siemens Brothers, at Woolwich, where he worked for seven years. During that time he attended evening classes at Woolwich Polytechnic and, as an outstanding student, received an Whitford Exhibition scholarship and a senior county scholarship. With this financial aid, Howe studied for three years at Armstrong College, graduating with honours in 1900. He was then employed for two years by Siemens & Halske, at Charlottenburg .
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William Penn Cresson
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
William Penn Cresson was an American architect, author, diplomat, and husband of sculptor Margaret French Cresson . Education Born in Claymont, Delaware, Cresson studied at the University of Pennsylvania from 1895 until graduation in 1897. Shortly after graduation, Cresson moved to France to study at the influential École des Beaux-Arts until 1902, when he went on to become a student at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.
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Frank Wattendorf
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Frank Wattendorf was an American physicist specializing in wind tunnels for research in aerodynamics. Wattendorf is recalled for his report on the wind tunnel at Ötztal that was under construction in Austria during World War II. Wattendorf's report, and one by Theodore von Kármán, spurred on renewed research in aerodynamics.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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James Friauf
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
James Byron Friauf was an American electrical engineer who first determined the crystal structure of MgZn2 in 1927. Friauf was a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He had received training in the determination of the structure of crystals as a student at California Institute of Technology where he studied with Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson.
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Sturgis Elleno Leavitt
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Sturgis Elleno Leavitt was the Kenan Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, the author of many books on Spanish language and literature, the president of several Spanish language teaching organizations, an adviser to the U.S. State Department and for many years the chairman of the Southern Humanities Conference as well as editor of the Hispanic Review.
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Charles Inglis
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Sir Charles Edward Inglis, was a British civil engineer. The son of a medical doctor, he was educated at Cheltenham College and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he would later forge a career as an academic. Inglis spent a two-year period with the engineering firm run by John Wolfe-Barry before he returned to King's College as a lecturer. Working with Professors James Alfred Ewing and Bertram Hopkinson, he made several important studies into the effects of vibration on structures and defects on the strength of plate steel.
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Hans Reissner
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Hans Jacob Reissner, also known as Jacob Johannes Reissner , was a German aeronautical engineer whose avocation was mathematical physics. During World War I he was awarded the Iron Cross second class for his pioneering work on aircraft design.
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John Ambrose Fleming
1849 - 1945 (96 years)
Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS was an English electrical engineer and physicist who invented the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, designed the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic radio transmission was made, and also established the right-hand rule used in physics.
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Heinrich Hencky
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Heinrich Hencky was a German engineer. Born in Ansbach, he studied civil engineering in Munich and received his PhD from the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. In 1913, he joined a railway company in Kharkiv, Ukraine. On the outbreak of World War I he was interned. After the war he taught at Darmstadt, Dresden and at Delft in the Netherlands.
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Franz Maria Feldhaus
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Franz Maria Feldhaus was a German engineer, historian of science, and scientific writer. He was known in the late 1950s as "Germany's most well-known and most prolific writer on the history of technology."
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Alexandre Lézine
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Alexandre Lézine was a French architect, historian and archaeologist of Russian origin. Career Lézine graduated with a degree in archeology in 1937. He was the main architect of the historical monuments of Tunisia. As a historian and archaeologist, he published numerous works on ancient monuments and monuments of the Muslim period, taking an interest in the ancient palaces of Cairo.
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Ludwig Hilberseimer
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at Armour Institute of Technology , in Chicago, Illinois.
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Kiyoshi Mutō
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Kiyoshi Mutō was a Japanese architect and structural engineer. He is considered the "father of the Japanese skyscraper" for his contributions to earthquake engineering. Earthquake engineering research Mutō was born in Toride, Ibaraki, Japan. He entered the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University in 1922 and graduated in 1925. He was immediately appointed Lecturer, and obtained a Dr of Engineering degree in 1931. In 1935 he was appointed Professor of Structural Engineering, a post which he held for almost 30 years, developing and teaching the principles of earthquake-resistant ...
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Henri Gabriel Marceau
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Henri Gabriel Marceau was an American architect, teacher, art historian and museum curator. He served as Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1955–1964. Career He studied architecture at Columbia University, but his education was interrupted by military service in World War I. He graduated from Columbia in 1921, and spent that summer in France rebuilding war-damaged buildings. He won the 1922 Prix de Rome in architecture, studying for the next three years at the American Academy in Rome. In 1926, he was named assistant curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, a vast collection of Old...
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Hans Tropper
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Hans Tropper was an Austrian Professor of Electrical Engineering with research interest in breakdown strength of liquid insulation. The ‘Hans Tropper Memorial Lecture’ is held in his honour to open each IEEE International Conference on Dielectric Liquids. He also briefly worked for Elin Aktiengesellschaft fur Elektrische Industrie.
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Henri Coandă
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Henri Marie Coandă was a Romanian inventor, aerodynamics pioneer, and builder of an experimental aircraft, the Coandă-1910, which never flew. He invented a great number of devices, designed a "flying saucer" and discovered the Coandă effect of fluid dynamics.
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Ladislaus von Rabcewicz
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Ladislaus von Rabcewicz was an Austrian engineer and university professor at the Vienna University of Technology. He is notable for being one of three men who developed the New Austrian Tunneling method.
Go to Profile#10248
Harry Thomas Cory
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Harry Thomas Cory was an American engineer and professor. Biography Harry Thomas Cory was born in Montmorenci, Indiana, the son of Thomas and Carrie Cory. Cory received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1889 and advanced degrees in 1893 and 1896 from Cornell University. He married Ida Judd Hiller on October 4, 1911, and they had three children.
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Henry S. Graves
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Henry Solon Graves was a forest administrator in the United States. He co-founded the Yale Forest School in 1900, the oldest continuous forestry school in the United States. He was appointed Chief of the United States Forest Service in 1910 and served in this position until 1920.
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Moritz Weber
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Moritz Weber , was a professor of naval mechanics at the Polytechnic Institute of Berlin. The dimensionless numbers Reynolds number , and Froude number was coined by Moritz Weber. Moreover, the dimensionless number Weber number was coined after him. Weber was also responsible in coining the term similitude to describe model studies that were scaled both geometrically and using dimensionless parameters for forces.
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