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,
#10351
Stanley Adshead
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Stanley Davenport Adshead was an English architect. Born in Bowdon, Cheshire and raised in Buxton, Derbyshire, Adshead trained in Manchester and London before establishing an independent practice in London in 1898. His early work included a survey and plans for the development of Kennington, London, for the Duchy of Cornwall. In 1912 he was appointed Lever Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool University, and in September 1914 he became the first Professor of Town Planning at University College, London. His published works include York: A plan for progress and preservation. He died on 11 April 1946 at Chapel Cottage, Lower Ashley, New Milton, Hampshire.
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Henry Lee Graves
1813 - 1881 (68 years)
Henry Lee Graves was the president of Baylor University from 1846 to 1851. Biography Henry Lee Graves, son of Thomas Graves, was born in Yanceyville, North Carolina in 1813. He married Rebecca Williams Graves on February 3, 1836. Rebecca, from Caswell County, North Carolina, was Graves's first cousin once-removed. Graves and Rebecca had four daughters as well as two sons . Rebecca died in 1865. Seven years later, Graves married Myra Lusk Crumpler, a wealthy widow who survived him by twenty-one years.
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John Brown
1805 - 1876 (71 years)
John Brown was a 19th-century architect working in Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, England. His buildings include churches and workhouses. Life He was the pupil of the architect William Brown of Ipswich, a close relative. He was, along with his two sons, the surveyor for Norwich Cathedral, where his work there included a restoration of the crossing tower, undertaken during the 1830s. He was appointed county surveyor for Norfolk in 1835.
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Milton W. Humphreys
1844 - 1928 (84 years)
Milton W. Humphreys was an American Confederate sergeant during the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and an early scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin in the United States. He was the first professor to introduce the Roman pronunciation of Latin in the United States while teaching at Washington and Lee University. Additionally, he was the first Professor of Latin and Greek at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Virginia. He also served as the President of the American Philological Association in 1882–1883.
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Charles Mitchell
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Charles Mitchell was a Scottish engineer from Aberdeen who founded major shipbuilding yards on the Tyne. He became a public benefactor who funded notable buildings that still survive today. Career He attended Aberdeen University. After an engineering apprenticeship in London, he became a ship designer working for John Coutts' Newcastle upon Tyne yard in 1842. He became a shipbuilder in his own right at the Low Walker yard on the Tyne in 1852. The cable ship Hooper, second in size only to SS Great Eastern and the first ship designed specifically to lay trans-Atlantic cable, was launched for Hooper's Telegraph Works at the yard on 29 March 1873 after four and a half months construction.
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Edward A. Kracke Jr.
1908 - 1976 (68 years)
Edward A. Kracke Jr. was an American historian of China at the University of Chicago, specializing in Song dynasty history. He was president of the American Oriental Society in 1972–73. His father-in-law was the idealist philosopher William Ernest Hocking.
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Alfred Benjamin Butts
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Alfred Benjamin Butts was an American political scientist and university administrator. He served as the Chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1935 to 1946. Early life Alfred Benjamin Butts was born in 1890 in Durham, North Carolina. In 1911, he received a B.S. degree from Mississippi A&M College, now known as Mississippi State University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1920. He received a law degree from Yale Law School in 1930.
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F. Curtis Canfield
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Fayette Curtis Canfield was an American theater director, drama professor, and the first dean of the Yale School of Drama. Career A member of the 1925 class of Amherst College, Canfield took a teaching job there in 1927, eventually becoming Stanley King Professor of dramatic arts and, from 1938, director of the college's Kirby Memorial Theater. In 1954, he was appointed as the first dean of the Yale School of Drama, remaining there until 1967. At Yale, he produced the premieres of several major plays, including Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer-winning J.B., and staged revivals at Yale and off-Broadway, such as Stephen Vincent Benét's dramatic poem, John Brown's Body.
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John Alden
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
John Gale Alden was an American naval architect and the founder of Alden Designs. Early life Alden was born in Troy, New York, in 1884, one of eight children, only four of whom survived. His family's summer holidays were spent on the Sakonnet in Rhode Island and on the Narragansett Bay, where he first learned about boats. He sailed his sister's flat-bottomed rowing boat using an umbrella as a sail and was said to be inspired by the local fisherman and regattas.
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James Valentine
1815 - 1879 (64 years)
James Valentine was a Scottish photographer. Valentine's of Dundee produced Scottish topographical views from the 1860s, and later became internationally famous as the producers of picture postcards.
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Czesław Zakaszewski
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Czesław Zakaszewski was a Polish hydro-technician and meliorator. Professor of the Warsaw University of Technology, member of the Warsaw Scientific Society. He was an author of numerous technical projects, thesis and textbooks.
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Samuel N. Spring
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Samuel Newton Spring attended Yale University, receiving his A.B. degree in 1898; and M.F. degree in 1903 from the Yale School of Forestry after service in the Bureau of Forestry, predecessor to the USFS.
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Mordecai Gorelik
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Mordecai Gorelik was an American theatrical designer, producer and director. Life and work Born August 25, 1899, in Shchedrin near Minsk, Russia, Mordecai Gorelik immigrated with his family to the United States in 1905 to escape the pogroms that killed most of his family. After graduating from the Pratt Institute of Fine Arts in Brooklyn in 1920, he worked for a time with Robert Edmond Jones, the pioneer American set designer who became his mentor.
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Robert Engels
1866 - 1926 (60 years)
Robert Engels was a German painter, illustrator, lithographer, designer, and art teacher. Biography He was the eldest son of a dealer in steel goods, also named Robert Engels, and his wife Auguste, née Kirschbaum. He was trained to take over the family business, but had little interest in it so, after his father's death in 1885, he left it to his younger siblings and enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied until 1889.
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John Browning
1831 - 1925 (94 years)
John Browning was an English inventor and manufacturer of precision scientific instruments in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He hailed from a long line of English instrument makers and transformed the family business from one dealing in nautical instruments to one specialising in scientific instruments. Browning was particularly well known for his advances in the fields of spectroscopy, astronomy, and optometry.
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Regina Gerlecka
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Regina Gerlecka was a Polish chess player. In January 1935, she won the Warsaw championships. In June, Gerlecka won the inaugural Polish women's championship, which took place in Warsaw. Two months later, she finished second, behind Vera Menchik, in the 5th Women's World Chess Championship, held alongside the 6th Chess Olympiad , also held in Warsaw.
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Victor Hasselblad
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Victor Hasselblad was a Swedish inventor and photographer, known for inventing the Hasselblad 6x6 cm medium format camera. Life and work Hasselblad was born in Gothenburg. In 1940 Swedish Air Force officers requested Hasselblad to construct a camera that rivaled the one found in a German reconnaissance aircraft shot down over Sweden. Hasselblad founded the Victor Hasselblad AB company in 1941 to produce cameras for the Swedish Air Force.
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Bob Anderson
1931 - 1967 (36 years)
Robert Hugh Fearon Anderson was a British Grand Prix motorcycle road racer and racing driver. He competed in Grand Prix motorcycle racing from 1958 to 1960 and in Formula One from 1963 to the 1967 seasonss. He was also a two-time winner of the North West 200 race in Northern Ireland. Anderson was one of the last independent privateer drivers in Formula One before escalating costs made it impossible to compete without sponsorship.
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Gustav Heyer
1826 - 1883 (57 years)
Friedrich Casimir Gustav Heyer was a German forestry professor and son of Karl Heyer who was also a famous forester. He was a professor of forestry at the University of Giessen. Gustav was the first son of Karl Heyer and was born in Giessen where his father taught forestry. After school he went to study science under the guidance of his father. He graduated in 1847 with a D. Phil and worked briefly at Darmstadt. In 1849 he joined Giessen University to teach forest science. He became a full professor in 1857. He stayed on despite offers from the Polytechnic at Zurich. His principal contributions were in forest value estimation and statistics.
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Harley Granville-Barker
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Harley Granville-Barker was an English actor, director, playwright, manager, critic, and theorist. After early success as an actor in the plays of George Bernard Shaw, he increasingly turned to directing and was a major figure in British theatre in the Edwardian and inter-war periods. As a writer his plays, which tackled difficult and controversial subject matter, met with a mixed reception during his lifetime but have continued to receive attention.
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Herbert Windsor Mumford I
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
Herbert Windsor Mumford I was a professor of agriculture from 1901 to 1938 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Biography He was born in 1871. He had a brother, Frederick Blackmar Mumford . He worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was the department head for animal husbandry from 1901 to 1922. He was dean of the UIUC College of Agriculture and the director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and the cooperative extension service from 1922 till his death. He died in 1938.
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Hermann Board
1867 - 1918 (51 years)
Hermann Board was a German architect and art historian. Life Born in Essen, Board was the son of the master mason Hermann Board and attended the municipal Realschule in Essen. He then completed a four-year apprenticeship as an architect and attended the municipal further education school in Essen, the commercial technical school in Cologne and the Technical University of Berlin. Afterwards, he worked for seven years in the construction office of the mining company and also taught in the construction classes of the municipal technical and further education schools in Essen. This was followed...
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Charles Kean
1811 - 1868 (57 years)
Charles John Kean , was an Irish-born English actor and theatre manager, best known for his revivals of Shakespearean plays. Life Kean was born at Waterford, Ireland, a son of actor Edmund Kean and actress Mary Kean . After preparatory education at Worplesdon and at Greenford, near Harrow, he was sent to Eton College, where he remained three years. In 1827, he was offered a cadetship in the East India Company's service, which he was prepared to accept if his father would settle an income of £400 on his mother. The elder Kean refused to do this, and his son determined to become an actor. He mad...
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Allan Pinkerton
1819 - 1884 (65 years)
Allan J. Pinkerton was a Scottish-American cooper, abolitionist, detective, and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United States and his claim to have foiled a plot in 1861 to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he provided the Union Army – specifically General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac – with military intelligence, including extremely inaccurate enemy troop strength numbers. After the war, his agents played a significant role as strikebreakers – in particular during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ...
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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RAH Livett
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Richard Alfred Hardwick Livett, OBE , known as R.A.H. Livett, was an architect and pioneer of modernist social housing. Early life Livett was born at 59 Sistova Road, Balham, London in early 1898, the only son of undertaker and valuer Harry Clayton Livett and his wife, Ada , who had married in Edmonton in 1893. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London before working for a number of private firms; for while, he was employed as an assistant by Paul and Michael Waterhouse. He later served as Chief Housing Assistant to TC Howitt in Nottingham.
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John G. Trump
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
John George Trump was an American electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1973, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Trump was noted for developing rotational radiation therapy. Together with Robert J. Van de Graaff, he developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators.
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George Roger Clemo
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
George Roger Clemo FRS was a British organic chemist. He was born in Slapton, Devon, the eldest son of farmer George and Blanche Ellen Clemo. He attended Kingsbridge Grammar School and went on to study science at the Royal Albert Memorial College Exeter, a forerunner of Exeter University, gaining a Bachelor of Science in 1910. He then commenced training to be a teacher and in 1911 was appointed deputy master at Penzance County School. In 1916, as part of the war effort, he joined the laboratory of William Henry Perkin, Jr. to work on dyestuffs. In 1922 he entered Queen's College, Oxford and gained an Oxford B.Sc.
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Edward Percy Stebbing
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Edward Percy Stebbing FRSE FRGS FZS was a pioneering English forester and forest entomologist in India. He was among the first to warn of desertification and desiccation and wrote on "The encroaching Sahara".
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Joseph Paul Robinson
1900 - Present (126 years)
J. Paul Robinson is an Australian/American educator, biologist, biomedical engineer, and expert in the applications of flow cytometry. He is a Distinguished Professor of Cytometry in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Basic Medical Sciences, a professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, a professor of Computer and Information Management at Purdue University, an adjunct professor of Microbiology & Immunology at West Lafayette Center for Medical Education, Indiana University School of Medicine, and the Director of Purdue U...
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Doc Edgerton
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton , also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
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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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Norbert Wiener
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
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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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Jesse Francis McClendon
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.
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Gerald T. Heydt
Gerald Thomas Heydt is an American electrical engineer and Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Heydt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to the technology of electric power quality.
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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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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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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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Geoffrey Raynor
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Geoffrey Vincent Raynor FRS was an English metallurgist and university academic. Life Raynor was educated at Nottingham High School before studying Chemistry at Keble College, Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in 1936. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, working with William Hume-Rothery, and carried out metallurgical research for the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow, with the course that he taught in structural and theoretical metallurgy becoming "the forerunner for the development of metallurgical teaching all over the world".
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Lan Jen Chu
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Lan Jen Chu was a noted electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Chu is noted for his work on the fundamental limitations for small antennas, also known as Chu's limit.
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Harold Barlow
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Harold Everard Monteagle Barlow FRS was a British engineer. He was born in Islington, London, the son of Leonard Barlow, an electrical engineer. He entered University College, London where, apart from the World War II years , he spent most of his working life. He was taught by Ambrose Fleming, who held the Pender Chair there. Barlow went on to succeed Fleming in that chair, and hence also in the post of head of department. Among his students, Barlow supervised Charles Kao, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Physics, for a doctoral degree.
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Paul Davidoff
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Paul Davidoff was an American planner, planning educator, and planning theoretician who conceptualized "advocacy planning" with his wife, Linda Stone Davidoff. In legal scholarship, he is known as the primary litigant in the Mount Laurel decision, which established a state-constitutional basis for inclusionary zoning in New Jersey, a doctrine which has been accepted in other United States jurisdictions. Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute and the urban planning department at Hunter College, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University during his career...
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Hardy Cross
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Hardy Cross was an American structural engineer and the developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures. The method was in general use from c. 1935 until c. 1960 when it was gradually superseded by other methods.
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Ernest Edwin Sechler
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Ernest Edwin Sechler was an aerospace engineer and scientist who specialized in thin-shell structures. He earned his doctorate in 1934 at Caltech as one of the early students of Theodore von Kármán with a dissertation on the mechanics of thin-plate compression.
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Edward C. Molina
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Edward Charles Dixon Molina was an American engineer, known for his contributions to teletraffic engineering. Biography Edward Molina was born on December 13, 1877. After completing high school, he went to work, and was self-taught in mathematics. He began working for the Western Electric Company in 1898 at the age of 21 and entered the AT&T research department in 1901. His invention of relay translators in 1906 resulted in the panel dial systems. In his studies of telephone traffic, Molina independently rediscovered the Poisson distribution in 1908. It was briefly named in his honor among American telephone engineers until the prior art was recovered.
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Rudolf Kompfner
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Rudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born inventor, physicist and architect, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube . Life Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England , where he worked as an architect until 1941. He had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943.
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