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,
#10251
Raymond Hood
1881 - 1934 (53 years)
Raymond Mathewson Hood was an American architect who worked in the Neo-Gothic and Art Deco styles. He is best known for his designs of the Tribune Tower, American Radiator Building, and Rockefeller Center. Through a short yet highly successful career, Hood exerted an outsized influence on twentieth century architecture.
Go to Profile#10252
Gordon Bunshaft
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Gordon Bunshaft, , was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century. A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill , Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years. His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway , and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York.
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Marian Mazur
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Marian Mazur was a Polish scientist who specialized in electrothermics and cybernetics, and the founding father of the Polish school of cybernetics. Scientific work In 1937 Mazur pioneered work on automatic telephone switchboards, and developed a working prototype just before World War II. After the war he established a thermoelectrical laboratory and researched infrared heating. Mazur attained professorship in 1954 and later worked on standardizing terminology related to electrical engineering and wrote numerous of articles and a book on the subject. Mazur was a member of numerous Polish and...
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John Nash
1752 - 1835 (83 years)
John Nash was one of the foremost British architects of the Georgian and Regency eras, during which he was responsible for the design, in the neoclassical and picturesque styles, of many important areas of London. His designs were financed by the Prince Regent and by the era's most successful property developer, James Burton. Nash also collaborated extensively with Burton's son, Decimus Burton.
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Mimar Sinan
1490 - 1588 (98 years)
Mimar Sinan also known as Koca Mi'mâr Sinân Âğâ, was the chief Ottoman architect, engineer, mathematician for sultans Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II and Murad III. He was responsible for the construction of more than 300 major structures such as the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, the Kanuni Sultan Suleiman Bridge in Büyükçekmece, the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad, and other more modest projects such as madrasa's, külliyes, bridges, etc. His apprentices would later design the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul and Stari Most bridge in Mostar.
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Man Ray
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
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Kurt H. Debus
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Kurt Heinrich Debus was a German-American rocket engineer and NASA director. Born in Germany, he was a member of the Schutzstaffel during World War II, where he served as a V-weapons flight test director. Following the war, he was brought to the United States via Operation Paperclip, and directed the design, development, construction and operation of NASA's Saturn launch facilities. He became the first director of NASA's Launch Operations Center , and, under him, NASA conducted 150 launches of military missiles and space vehicles, including 13 launches of the Saturn V rocket as part of the A...
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Calvert Vaux
1824 - 1895 (71 years)
Calvert Vaux FAIA was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protégé and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York City's Central Park.
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Félix Vallotton
1865 - 1925 (60 years)
Félix Édouard Vallotton was a Swiss and French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as . He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He painted portraits, landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and other subjects in an unemotional, realistic style.
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William Burges
1827 - 1881 (54 years)
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
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Lee de Forest
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Lee de Forest was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first practical electronic amplifier, the three-element "Audion" triode vacuum tube in 1906. This helped start the Electronic Age, and enabled the development of the electronic oscillator. These made radio broadcasting and long distance telephone lines possible, and led to the development of talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
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Wunibald Kamm
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Wunibald Kamm was an automobile designer, engineer, and aerodynamicist. He is best known for his breakthrough in reducing car turbulence at high speeds; the style of car bodywork based on his research has come to be known as a Kammback or a Kamm-tail.
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Kaare Klint
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Kaare Klint was a Danish architect and furniture designer, known as the father of modern Danish furniture design. Style was epitomized by clean, pure lines, use of the best materials of his time and superb craftsmanship.
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Aurel Stodola
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Aurel Boleslav Stodola was a Slovak engineer, physicist, and inventor. He was a pioneer in the area of technical thermodynamics and its applications and published his book Die Dampfturbine in 1903. In addition to the thermodynamic issues involved in turbine design the book discussed aspects of fluid flow, vibration, stress analysis of plates, shells and rotating discs and stress concentrations at holes and fillets. Stodola was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Swiss Polytechnical Institute in Zurich. He maintained friendly contact with Albert Einstein. In 1892, Stodola founded t...
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Alexander Jackson Davis
1803 - 1892 (89 years)
Alexander Jackson Davis was an American architect known particularly for his association with the Gothic Revival style. Education Davis was born in New York City and studied at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Drawing Association, and from the antique casts of the National Academy of Design. Dropping out of school, he became a lithographer and from 1826 he worked as a draftsman for Josiah R. Brady, a New York architect who was an early exponent of the Gothic Revival style. Brady's Gothic 1824 St. Luke's Episcopal Church is the oldest surviving structure in Rochester, New York.
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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was a Russian and Soviet rocket scientist who pioneered astronautics. Along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Hermann Oberth, Fritz von Opel and Robert H. Goddard, he is one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics. His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineerss Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, who contributed to the success of the Soviet space program. Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about southwest of Moscow. A recluse by nature, his unusual habits made him seem bizarre to his fe...
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Decimus Burton
1800 - 1881 (81 years)
Decimus Burton was one of the foremost English architects and landscapers of the 19th century. He was the foremost Victorian architect in the Roman revival, Greek revival, Georgian neoclassical and Regency styles. He was a founding fellow and vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and from 1840 architect to the Royal Botanic Society, and an early member of the Athenaeum Club, London, whose clubhouse he designed and which the company of his father, James Burton, the pre-eminent Georgian London property developer, built.
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Herbert Baker
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Sir Herbert Baker was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades, and a major designer of some of New Delhi's most notable government structures. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.
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Tatsuno Kingo
1854 - 1919 (65 years)
Tatsuno Kingo was a Japanese architect born in Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, Kyushu. Doctor of Engineering. Conferred Jusanmi and Kunsanto . Former dean of Architecture Department at Tokyo Imperial University.
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Charles Follen McKim
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Charles Follen McKim was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White, he provided the architectural expertise as a member of the partnership McKim, Mead & White.
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Max Ernst
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages.
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Edward Durell Stone
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Edward Durell Stone was an American architect known for the formal, highly decorative buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, The Keller Center at the University of Chicago, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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Franz Reuleaux
1829 - 1905 (76 years)
Franz Reuleaux , was a German mechanical engineer and a lecturer of the Berlin Royal Technical Academy, later appointed as the president of the academy. He was often called the father of kinematics. He was a leader in his profession, contributing to many important domains of science and knowledge.
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Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Nikolai Ladovsky
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Ladovsky was a Russian avant-garde architect and educator, leader of the rationalist movement in 1920s architecture, an approach emphasizing human perception of space and shape. Ladovsky is known as the founder of modern Soviet and Russian schools of architectural training; his classes of 1920–1932 in VKhUTEMAS shaped the generation of Soviet architects active throughout the period of Stalinist architecture and subsequent decades.
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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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