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,
#10301
Laurynas Gucevičius
1753 - 1798 (45 years)
Laurynas Gucevičius was an 18th-century architect from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and all of his designs were built there. In his youth he travelled to Italy and Paris and other countries in Western Europe, where he studied architecture under the notable contemporary neo-classical French architects, Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Later he was appointed professor at the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius, the predecessor of the University of Vilnius. Among the best known of his works are the Vilnius Cathedral, the Vilnius Town Hall and the summer palace of bishops in Verkiai. Th...
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Friedrich Zander
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
Georg Arthur Constantin Friedrich Zander , was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.
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Otto Krause
1856 - 1920 (64 years)
Otto Krause was an Argentine engineer and educator. Early life Krause was born in the Buenos Aires Province town of Chivilcoy to Leopoldina and Carl August Krause, both German Argentine immigrants arrived in 1851. Tending his farm with implements he brought from Germany, Carl Krause instilled an interest in machinery to his five children, though the family eventually relocated to Buenos Aires in 1870. Otto subsequently finished his secondary school studies at the prestigious Buenos Aires National College, a public college preparatory school.
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Lazare Carnot
1753 - 1823 (70 years)
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription , were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.
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Samuel Jefferson Mason
1921 - 1974 (53 years)
Samuel Jefferson Mason was an American electronics engineer. Mason's invariant and Mason's rule are named after him. He was born in New York City, but he grew up in a small town in New Jersey. It was so small, in fact, that it only had a population of 26. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1942, and after graduation, he joined the Antenna Group of MIT Radiation Laboratory as a staff member. Mason went on to earn his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1947 and 1952, respectively. After World War II, the Radiation Laboratory was renamed the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he became the associate director in 1967.
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Luigi Vanvitelli
1700 - 1773 (73 years)
Luigi Vanvitelli , known in Dutch as , was an Italian architect and painter. The most prominent 18th-century architect of Italy, he practised a sober classicising academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism.
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Gustav Niemann
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Gustav Niemann was a mechanical engineering professor who is regarded as an expert in machine elements. Biography Niemann studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt from 1919 to 1923. In 1928 he was promoted at the Technische Hochschule Berlin with the doctoral dissertation Über Wippkrane mit wagrechtem Lastwippweg . He taught at the Braunschweig University of Technology from 1934 to 1950, and at the Technische Universität München from 1951 to 1968. He was a recipient of the Grashof medal from the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure and the E. P. Connell medal from the Ame...
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Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
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Joseph Paxton
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Sir Joseph Paxton was an English gardener, architect, engineer and Member of Parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace and for cultivating the Cavendish banana, the most consumed banana in the Western world.
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William Robert Ware
1832 - 1915 (83 years)
William Robert Ware , born in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a family of the Unitarian clergy, was an American architect, author, and founder of two important American architectural schools. He received his own professional education at Milton Academy, Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1859, he began working for Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of the first American architectural school, the AIA, and the first American to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward Ware formed a partnership with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick, Philbrick and Ware, a...
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Hermann Ende
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Hermann Gustav Louis Ende was a German architect noted for his work in Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Biography Ende was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Province of Brandenburg,Prussia . In 1836 he moved with family to Berlin, where, after graduating from the Köllnisches Gymnasium in 1852, he studied architecture at the Bauakademie, a Berlin architectural school housed in what is considered one of the forerunners of modern architecture due to its theretofore uncommon use of red brick and a relatively streamlined façade. His studies were interrupted for a year by military service, and by another year spent travelling abroad with his friend Wilhelm Böckmann.
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Berenice Abbott
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
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Louis Le Vau
1613 - 1670 (57 years)
Louis Le Vau was a French Baroque architect, who worked for Louis XIV of France. He was an architect that helped develop the French Classical style in the 17th century. Early life and career Born Louis Le Veau, he was the son of Louis Le Veau , a stonemason, who was active in Paris. His younger brother François Le Vau also became an architect. The father and his two sons worked together in the 1630s and 1640s. The two brothers later changed the spelling of their surname from "Le Veau" to "Le Vau" to avoid its association with the French word veau .
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Philipp Forchheimer
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Philipp Forchheimer was an Austrian engineer, a pioneer in the field of civil engineering and practical hydraulics, who also contributed to the archaeological study of Byzantine water supply systems. He was professor in Istanbul, Aachen and Graz.
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Egon Eiermann
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Egon Eiermann was one of Germany's most prominent architects in the second half of the 20th century. He was also a furniture designer. From 1947, he was Professor for architecture at the Technical University of Karlsruhe.
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George B. Post
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
George Browne Post was an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. Active from 1869 almost until his death, he was recognized as a master of several prominent contemporary American architectural genres, and instrumental in the birth of the skyscraper.
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Francisco J. Serrano
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Francisco J. Serrano y Alvarez de la Rosa was a Mexican civil engineer and architect. Serrano studied civil engineering and afterwards architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , where later taught as professor of civil engineering and architecture, and researched influences of climatic phenomenons on architecture. His son J. Francisco Serrano Cacho became also a notable architect.
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Beatrix Farrand
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden , and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
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Gilmore David Clarke
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Gilmore David Clarke was an American civil engineer and landscape architect who designed many parks and public spaces in and around New York City. Biography Born in New York, Clarke went to Cornell University to study landscape architecture and civil engineering, graduating in 1913 with a B.S. degree. After World War I, during which he served as an engineer in the U.S. Army, he served on several architectural commissions, ranging from local to federal level. Amongst others, he was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board for the U.S. Capitol and of the New York State Council of Parks. He ...
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Carlo Maderno
1556 - 1629 (73 years)
Carlo Maderno was an Italian architect, born in today's Ticino, who is remembered as one of the fathers of Baroque architecture. His façades of Santa Susanna, St. Peter's Basilica and Sant'Andrea della Valle were of key importance in the evolution of the Italian Baroque. He is often referred to as the brother of sculptor Stefano Maderno, but this is not universally agreed upon.
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Clemens Holzmeister
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Clemens Holzmeister was a prominent Austrian architect and stage designer of the early twentieth century. The Austrian Academy of Fine Arts listed his life's work as containing 673 projects. He was the father of Judith Holzmeister.
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Aston Webb
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Sir Aston Webb, was a British architect who designed the principal facade of Buckingham Palace and the main building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other major works around England, many of them in partnership with Ingress Bell. He was President of the Royal Academy from 1919 to 1924. He was also the founding Chairman of the London Society.
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Herbert A. Wagner
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Herbert Alois Wagner was an Austrian scientist who developed numerous innovations in the fields of aerodynamics, aircraft structures and guided weapons. He is most famous for Wagner's function describing unsteady lift on wings and developing the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb.
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel
1788 - 1827 (39 years)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and i...
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Ansel Adams
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
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Wilhelm Nusselt
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Ernst Kraft Wilhelm Nußelt was a German engineer. Nusselt studied mechanical engineering at the Munich Technical University , where he got his doctorate in 1907. He taught in Dresden from 1913 to 1917.
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Emery Roth
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Emery Roth was an American architect of Hungarian-Jewish descent who designed many New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, incorporating Beaux-Arts and Art Deco details. His sons continued in the family enterprise, largely expanding the firm under the name Emery Roth & Sons.
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Piero Portaluppi
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Piero Portaluppi was an Italian architect. Biography Pietro Portaluppi was born in Milan, son of the engineer Oreste Portaluppi and wife Luisa Gadda. He graduated in 1905 from the Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo and registered at the Politecnico, studying with and Carlo Calzecchi. During this time, he worked as a caricaturist with the satirical newspapers Il Babau, A quel paese, and Guerin Meschino.
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Karl Schwanzer
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
Karl Schwanzer was an Austrian architect. He was an important figure of post-war architecture. Life As early as high school, the architecture enthusiast Karl Schwanzer and his uncle planned and built an allotment garden house for his family on Vienna's Schafberg in 1935. After his graduation from high school at the Bundesrealgymnasium Wien 7 in 1936, he completed his mandatory service in the Austrian national guard.
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Louis George Carpenter
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Louis George Carpenter , was a college Professor and later the Dean of Engineering & Physics at Colorado State University formerly known as the Colorado Agricultural College. He was also a mathematician and an irrigation and consulting engineer.
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Mustafa İnan
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Mustafa İnan was a Turkish civil engineering academic. Life He was born in Adana. His mother was Rabia and father was Hüseyin Avni. At the end of the First World War Adana was occupied by the French forces and his family had to move to Konya. At the end of the Turkish War of Independence the family returned to Adana and Mustafa continued his secondary education in Adana. In 1931 he took the first place in the entrance examinations of the Istanbul Technical University . Later he was sent to Switzerland for advanced studies in the ETH Zurich . After his doctorate thesis 1941, he returned to Turkey to continue academic studies in the Engineering School.
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Giovanni Muzio
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Giovanni Muzio was an Italian architect. Muzio was born and died in Milan. He was closely associated with the Novecento Italiano artists group. Biography The son of Virginio Muzio, an accomplished architect, Muzio studied in Milan, and after participation in the war and a trip to Europe, in 1920 he opened in Milan a study with Giuseppe De Finetti, Gio Ponti, Emilio Lancia and Mino Fiocchi and actively participated in the cultural life of Milan.
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Samuel H. Caldwell
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Samuel Hawks Caldwell was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers. Early life and education Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier . In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique ...
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Louis A. Simon
1867 - 1958 (91 years)
Louis A. Simon was an American architect. He spent almost his entire career with the Office of the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury. He served as the last supervising architect from 1934 to 1939 and thereafter of the Public Buildings Branch of the Federal Works Agency until 1941. He was also principal architect for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.
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Wilhelm Cauer
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specific...
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Yoshirō Taniguchi
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Yoshirō Taniguchi was a Japanese architect. He was born in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He was a graduate of Tokyo University Department of Architecture and professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1929–1965. As an architect, he created over 50 buildings and 10 memorials and participated in many professional activities as a statesman of Japanese modern architecture. “Yoshirō Taniguchi must be regarded as one of the most widely known, and, in the best sense, popular architects in Japan. Taniguchi is also well known for his writings and has made a name for himself as ...
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Thomas Rickman
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Thomas Rickman was an English architect and architectural antiquary who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival. He is particularly remembered for his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture , which established the basic chronological classification and terminology that are still in widespread use for the different styles of English medieval ecclesiastical architecture.
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John Eisenmann
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
John Eisenmann was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. As part of Eisenmann & Smith he designed the Cleveland Arcade in downtown Cleveland. He also designed the Main building for Case School of Applied Science, present-day Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the school's first professor of civil engineering. He pioneered structural steel construction in the United States and is credited with co-designing Cleveland's Arcade, "the first commercial building in the state designated an historic landmark in architecture." Eisenmann is also credited with designing the flag of Ohio in 19...
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Dugald C. Jackson
1865 - 1951 (86 years)
Dugald Caleb Jackson was an American electrical engineer. He received the IEEE Edison Medal for "outstanding and inspiring leadership in engineering education and in the field of generation and distribution of electric power".
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Józef Szanajca
1902 - 1939 (37 years)
Józef Szanajca was a Polish architect. Founder and member of PRAESENS group: "The Praesens group played a pioneering role in the development of modern architecture in Poland. From 1927 a link with Le Corbusier was established. Its members participated in all the main meetings".
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Jo van den Broek
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, was a Dutch architect influential in the rebuilding of Rotterdam after World War II. Van den Broek was born in Rotterdam. He joined with Johannes Brinkman in 1936, after the death of Brinkman's partner Leendert van der Vlugt. The firm's work during this time including a new terminal building for the Holland-America cruise line.
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Alessandro Antonelli
1798 - 1888 (90 years)
Alessandro Antonelli was an Italian architect of the 19th century. His most famous works are the Mole Antonelliana in Turin and both the Novara Cathedral and the Basilica of St. Gaudenzio in Novara.
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Fiske Kimball
1888 - 1955 (67 years)
Sidney Fiske Kimball was an American architect, architectural historian and museum director. A pioneer in the field of architectural preservation in the United States, he played a leading part in the restoration of Monticello and Stratford Hall Plantation in Virginia.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Jonathan Zenneck
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Jonathan Adolf Wilhelm Zenneck was a German physicist and electrical engineer who contributed to researches in radio circuit performance and to the scientific and educational contributions to the literature of the pioneer radio art.
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Cecil Beaton
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
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Nicolas-Henri Jardin
1720 - 1799 (79 years)
Nicolas-Henri Jardin was a French architect. Born in St. Germain des Noyers, Seine-et-Marne, Jardin worked seventeen years in Denmark–Norway as an architect to the Danish royal court. He introduced neoclassicism to Denmark–Norway.
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Giacomo della Porta
1532 - 1602 (70 years)
Giacomo della Porta was an Italian architect and sculptor, who worked on many important buildings in Rome, including St. Peter's Basilica. He was born at Porlezza, Lombardy and died in Rome. Biography Giacomo Della Porta was born in the Duchy of Genoa into a family of sculptors. He was influenced by and collaborated with Michelangelo, and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, his teacher of architecture. With these two great masters, he became one of the most important architects in the history of the Roman Renaissance. In fact, after 1563 he carried out Michelangelo's plans for the rebuilding of the C...
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Alwin Seifert
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Alwin Seifert was a German horticultural architect, architect, university teacher, landscape designer, local curator, and conservationist. He is considered to be one of the most important representatives of the early ecological movement and biodynamic agriculture.
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