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
John Calvin Stevens
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
John Calvin Stevens was an American architect who worked in the Shingle Style, in which he was a major innovator, and the Colonial Revival style. He designed more than 1,000 buildings in the state of Maine.
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Ian Nairn
1930 - 1983 (53 years)
Ian Douglas Nairn was a British architectural critic who coined the word "Subtopia" to indicate drab suburbs that look identical through unimaginative town-planning. He published two strongly personalised critiques of London and Paris, and collaborated with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered his reports to be too subjective, but acknowledged him as the better writer.
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Donald Appleyard
1928 - 1982 (54 years)
Donald Sidney Appleyard was an English-American urban designer and theorist, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in England, Appleyard studied first architecture, and later urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation, he taught at MIT for six years, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked on neighbourhood design in Berkeley and Athens and citywide planning in San Francisco and Ciudad Guayana. Appleyard gave lectures at over forty universities and acted in a professional capacity in architecture and planning firms in the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States.
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Max Mayer
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Max Mayer was a German civil engineer. Biography Mayer received his doctorate in 1913 from the TU Munich . From 1914 Mayer spoke and published on reforming construction in line with the scientific management ideas set out by the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. From 1926 to 1930 he was a professor at the state building college in Weimar and then a consulting engineer in Munich.
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Józef Pius Dziekoński
1844 - 1927 (83 years)
Józef Pius Dziekoński was a Polish architect and heritage conservator, a representative of the 19th-century historicism. He became the first dean at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology and co-founded the Society for the Protection of Historical Monuments .
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Hilyard Robinson
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Hilyard Robert Robinson , was a prominent African-American architect and engineer. Biography Hilyard Robinson was born in Washington, D.C., where his mother was a seamstress and his grandfather had a shoe-shining business. Robinson graduated from M Street High School and then studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts . During World War I Robinson served as a U.S. Army artillery officer where he spent time in Paris at the Armistice and observed the style of the buildings there. Upon his return to the United States, Robinson transferred to the University of Pennsylvania be...
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Paul Zucker
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Paul Zucker was a German-born architect, art historian, art critic and author. Between 1919 and 1935, he practiced architecture in Berlin. Education Paul Zucker studied architecture and art history in Berlin and Munich; he graduated with the degree of Diplom-Ingenieur from the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg. The same institution awarded him a doctorate in engineering in 1913. He wrote his thesis under Richard Borrmann's supervision.
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Ferdinand von Arnim
1814 - 1866 (52 years)
Heinrich Ludwig Ferdinand von Arnim was a German architect and watercolour-painter. He was a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and mainly worked in Berlin and Potsdam. Life Arnim was born in Treptow an der Rega in Pomerania , the son of Prussian Captain Friedrich Ludwig von Arnim and his wife Henriette, née Gadebusch. He trained as a land surveyor and studied architecture at the Royal Prussian Building School in Berlin between 1833 and 1838. Having completed his studies, he joined the Berlin Architects' Association in 1839, from 1840 he worked as site foreman under Friedrich Ludwig Persius ...
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Morris Asimow
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Morris Asimow was an American educator. Professor of Engineering Systems at the University of California in Los Angeles Career and published work He developed and taught the discipline of engineering design and published one of the early texts on the subject:
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Guo Yonghuai
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
Guo Yonghuai, or Yung-Huai Kuo, , was a Chinese aerospace engineer and aerodynamics scientist. Biography Guo was born in Rongcheng, Shandong. He started his undergraduate education at Nankai University in 1930, transferred to the department of physics at Peking University in 1933, and graduated from Peking University in 1935. He enrolled in an oversea program in 1939 and entered the University of Toronto in Canada in 1940 and obtained a master's degree there. From 1941 to 1945, Guo studied compressible hydrodynamics at the California Institute of Technology. After obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy degree in aeronautics, he stayed there as a research fellow.
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Jacob Jordaens
1593 - 1678 (85 years)
Jacob Jordaens was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and a designer of tapestries and prints. He was a prolific artist who created biblical, mythological, and allegorical compositions, genre scenes, landscapes, illustrations of Flemish sayings and portraits. After the death of Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, he became the leading Flemish Baroque painter of his time. Unlike those illustrious contemporaries he never travelled abroad to study the Antique and Italian painting and, except for a few short trips to locations elsewhere in the Low Countries, he resided in Antwerp his entire life. He also remained largely indifferent to Rubens and van Dyck's intellectual and courtly aspirations.
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Robert Capa
1913 - 1954 (41 years)
Robert Capa was a Hungarian–American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history. Friedman had fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with his professional partner Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 ...
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Thomas Roger Smith
1830 - 1903 (73 years)
Thomas Roger Smith was an English architect and academic. He is now best known for his views and writings on public buildings, in terms of their style and acoustics, and their influence on other architects, particularly in relation to British imperial architecture.
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László Hudec
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
László Ede Hudec or Ladislav Hudec , Chinese name Wu Dake , was a Hungarian–Slovak architect active in Shanghai from 1918 to 1945 and responsible for some of that city's most notable structures. Major works include the Park Hotel, the Grand Theatre, the Joint Savings and Loan building, the combined Baptist Publications and Christian Literature Society buildings, and the post-modern "Green House". Hudec's style evolved during his active period, from the eclectic neo-classicism popular in the early 20th century to art deco and modern buildings toward the later part of his career. Although some ...
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James Miller
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
James Miller was a Scottish architect, recognised for his commercial architecture in Glasgow and for his Scottish railway stations. Notable among these are the American-influenced Union Bank building at 110–20 St Vincent Street; his 1901–1905 extensions to Glasgow Central railway station; and Wemyss Bay railway station on the Firth of Clyde. His lengthy career resulted in a wide range of building types, and, with the assistance of skilled draughtsmen such as Richard M Gunn, he adapted his designs to changing tastes and new architectural materials and technologies.
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Alfred Pippard
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Alfred John Sutton Pippard MBE FRS was a British civil engineer and academic. Pippard was the son of a carpenter and joiner and spent much of his early life helping his father on construction sites. Initially supposed to follow his father into the family business, Pippard instead decided to study for a bachelor's degree in civil engineering at the University of Bristol, supporting himself with an Exhibition award. Pippard worked for a Bristol based consulting engineer and for the Pontypridd and Rhondda Valley Joint Water Board in his early career. He also completed his master's degree duri...
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Hermann Jansen
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Hermann Jansen was a German architect, urban planner and university educator. Early life, study and work Hermann Jansen was born in 1869, the son of the pastry chef Francis Jansen and his wife Maria Anna Catharina Arnoldi. After visiting the humanistic Kaiser-Karls-Gymnasium in Aachen, Jansen studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen University in Karl Henrici . After graduation in 1893, Jansen worked in an architectural office in Aachen.
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Josep Antoni Coderch
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
José Antonio Coderch y de Sentmenat , Spanish architect recognized as one of the most important post-World War II architects. Early life and career In 1932 Coderch started studying architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture, which he graduated in 1940. He started his office with Manual Valls in 1942. After graduating he worked in Madrid with Pedro Muguruza and Secundino Zuazo. Years later, he was appointed city architect of Sitges, where he designed the Civil Guard garrison. After joining the CIAM, he became a member of Team 10 in 1960.
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Robert Hallowell Richards
1844 - 1945 (101 years)
Robert Hallowell Richards was an American mining engineer, metallurgist, and educator, born at Gardiner, Maine. In 1868, with the first class to leave the institution, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and there he taught for 46 years, becoming professor of mineralogy and assaying in 1871, head of the department of mining engineering in 1873, and in 1884 professor also of metallurgy. The laboratories which he established at the Institute were the first of their kind in the world. He retired in 1914.
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William Hosking
1800 - 1861 (61 years)
William Hosking was an English writer, lecturer, and architect who had an important influence on the growth and development of London in Victorian times. He became the first Professor of Architecture at King's College London, and associated this discipline in a scholarly fashion with interests in town planning, civil engineering, history and antiquities.
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Dudley Allen Buck
1927 - 1959 (32 years)
Dudley Allen Buck was an electrical engineer and inventor of components for high-speed computing devices in the 1950s. He is best known for invention of the cryotron, a superconductive computer component that is operated in liquid helium at a temperature near absolute zero. Other inventions were ferroelectric memory, content-addressable memory, non-destructive sensing of magnetic fields, and writing printed circuits with a beam of electrons.
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Hermann Baagøe Storck
1839 - 1922 (83 years)
Hermann Baagøe Storck was a Danish architect and heraldist. As an architect, he is mainly known for the restoration of historic buildings. Among his own designs, his building for the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen is the most widely known.
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Francis Palmer Smith
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Francis Palmer Smith was an architect active in Atlanta and elsewhere in the Southeastern United States. He was the director of the Georgia Tech College of Architecture from 1909–1922. After working in Cincinnati, Ohio and then Columbus, Georgia, Smith was hired as a professor of Georgia Tech's new architecture school in 1908. He transferred the curriculum of the University of Pennsylvania which emphasized Beaux-Arts architecture. He met Robert Smith Pringle and formed a partnership with him in 1922, Pringle and Smith.
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Milan Zloković
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Milan Zloković was a Serbian architect. His works epitomised two epochs of architecture in Belgrade. Biography Zloković studied in Graz and Belgrade , as well as Paris . He pioneered modernism in Yugoslav architecture, animating from 1928 to 1934 together with B. Kojić, J. Dubovi and D. Babić the Group of Architects of the Modern Style . From 1923 till 1963 he was a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, exerting a great influence on several generations of Yugoslav architects.
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Bernhard Pankok
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Bernhard Wilhelm Maria Pankok was a German painter, graphic artist, architect, and designer. His works are characterized by the transition between Art Nouveau and the International Style. His furniture and book design, such as the catalog for the German section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, have garnered him the most recognition.
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Michael J. Adams
1930 - 1967 (37 years)
Michael James Adams was an American aviator, aeronautical engineer, and USAF astronaut. He was one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA.
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Daniel Gooch
1816 - 1889 (73 years)
Sir Daniel Gooch, 1st Baronet was an English railway locomotive and transatlantic cable engineer. He was the first Superintendent of Locomotive Engines on the Great Western Railway from 1837 to 1864 and its chairman from 1865 until his death in 1889.
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John Wood, the Younger
1728 - 1782 (54 years)
John Wood, the Younger was an English architect, working principally in the city of Bath, Somerset. He was the son of the architect John Wood, the Elder. His designs were highly influential during the 18th century and the Royal Crescent is considered to be one of the best examples of Georgian Neo-Classical architecture in Britain.
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Wilhelm Wagenfeld
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Wilhelm Wagenfeld was a German industrial designer and former student of the Bauhaus art school. He designed glass and metal works for the Jenaer Glaswerk Schott & Gen., the Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke in Weißwasser, Rosenthal, Braun GmbH and WMF. Some of his designs are still produced to this day.
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Konstantin Bushuyev
1914 - 1978 (64 years)
Konstantin Davydovich Bushuyev was a Soviet engineer and director of the Apollo–Soyuz for the Soviet Union. Early life and education Bushuyev was born on 23 May 1914 in the village of Cherten, in the district of Mosaik, Kaluga Oblast, in what was then the Russian Empire. He was the son of rural teachers. Bushuyev graduated in 1930 from an industrial college in Pesochnya . He was then a foreman and later a deputy shop manager at the P.L.Voikov Moscow Iron Foundry before earning an admission to the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1936. Bushuyev graduated with a degree in aircraft mechanical engine...
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De Volson Wood
1832 - 1897 (65 years)
De Volson Wood was an American civil engineer and educator. He invented a steam rock drill and an air compressor and designed an ore dock. Wood was a professor, an author of multiple monographs on mathematics and engineering, vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the first president of the American Society for Engineering Education.
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Frank Miles Day
1861 - 1918 (57 years)
Frank Miles Day was a Philadelphia-based architect who specialized in residences and academic buildings. Career In 1883, he graduated from the Towne School of the University of Pennsylvania, and traveled to Europe. In England, he apprenticed under two architects, and won the 1885 prize from the Architectural Association of London. He returned to Philadelphia, and worked in the offices of George T. Pearson and Addison Hutton, before opening his own office in 1887. Day's first major commission was the Art Club of Philadelphia , on South Broad Street in Center City, Philadelphia. His brother Hen...
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Robert Ridgway
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Robert Ridgway, sometimes spelled Robert Ridgeway , was an American civil engineer. He did not study engineering at any school, but worked 49 years for New York City in the construction of major projects, and became Chief Engineer of the Transit Commission in 1921. He became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers Metropolitan section. Further he became president of the national ASCE in 1925. The Ridgway Awards are an annual award of the ASCE Met section named for him.
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Thomas Egleston
1832 - 1900 (68 years)
Thomas Egleston was an American engineer who helped found Columbia University's School of Mines, now the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. Throughout his lifetime, Egleston published numerous lectures and books on metallurgy. Many of his books are preserved today at the archive in the Library of Congress.
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Leonard F. Fuller
1890 - 1987 (97 years)
Dr. Leonard F. Fuller was a noted American radio pioneer. In 1919, Fuller earned a PhD degree at the Stanford Department of Electrical Engineering. In World War I, he was part of the antisubmarine group of the National Research Council, and charged with the design and installation of the "high-power transoceanic radio telegraph stations" built by the United States Army and Navy. He held 24 patients for inventions before his death. He spent time as chair of the electrical engineering department at University of California, Berkeley, and then was acting professor of electrical engineering at St...
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Elmar Lohk
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Elmar Lohk was an Estonian architect. Many of his buildings in Tallinn are now valued as great examples of 1930s architecture, for example, the prominent Scandic Hotel Palace on Freedom Square. His creation can be categorised as functionalism with some influence of Chicago school and traditional art.
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Edward Gordon Craig
1872 - 1966 (94 years)
Edward Henry Gordon Craig , sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of actress Dame Ellen Terry.
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Johan Daniel Herholdt
1818 - 1902 (84 years)
Johan Daniel Herholdt was a Danish architect, professor and royal building inspector. He worked in the Historicist style and had a significant influence on Danish architecture during the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. His most famous work is the Copenhagen University Library in Fiolstræde in Copenhagen which heralded a new trend. The strong use of red brick in large-scale cultural and civic buildings was to characterize Danish architecture for several decades. He was a leading proponent of the "national" school in Danish architecture of the period as opposed to...
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Alfons Hoffmann
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Professor Alfons Hoffmann was a Polish engineer and political activist. He attended Königliche Technische Hochschule zu Danzig, from 1905 to 1910, earning degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering. After graduating, between 1911–1913 and 1918–1919, Prof. Hoffman worked as an engineer for the Garbe Lahmeyer company in the electric machine laboratory and in the construction department, in Aachen, Westphalia.
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Kim Chung-up
1922 - 1988 (66 years)
Kim Chung-up was a prominent Korean architect and educator. Kim was born in Pyongyang as the second son of his father, Kim Yeong-pil and his mother, Yi Yeong-ja . He had six siblings; four brothers, and two sisters. He spent his childhood in various places such as Gangdong, Junghwa, Seongcheon and others due to his father's job as the country headman of the places. Kim was awarded the 1962 Cultural Award from Seoul Metropolitan Government in 1962, Chevalier from the France government in 1965, Order of Industrial Service Merit from the South Korea government in 1985.
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Leslie Stephen
1832 - 1904 (72 years)
Sir Leslie Stephen was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, mountaineer, and an early humanist activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Life Sir Leslie Stephen came from a distinguished intellectual family, and was born at 14 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington in London, the son of Sir James Stephen and Jane Catherine Stephen. His father was Colonial Undersecretary of State and a noted abolitionist. He was the fourth of five children, his siblings including James Fitzjames Stephen and Caroline Emelia Stephen .
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John Wood, the Elder
1704 - 1754 (50 years)
John Wood, the Elder was an English architect, working mainly in Bath. In 1740 he surveyed Stonehenge and the Stanton Drew stone circles. He later wrote extensively about Bladud and Neo-Druidism. Because of some of his designs he is also thought to have been involved in the early years of Freemasonry.
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Gaston du Bousquet
1839 - 1910 (71 years)
Gaston du Bousquet was a French engineer who was Chief of Motive Power of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, designer of locomotives and professor at École centrale de Lille. Steam locomotive designer Gaston du Bousquet taught mechanical engineering at the Institut industriel du Nord de la France from 1872. He was appointed chief engineer to the Chemins de Fer du Nord in 1890. He won a gold medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1894. He collaborated successfully with Alfred de Glehn and Edward Beugniot, both working for the Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques . He was president of the Soc...
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Ryszard Bartel
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Ryszard Bartel was a Polish engineer, aircraft designer and aviator, one of Poland's aviation pioneers. Life and career Bartel was born in Sławniów village near Pilica. He was interested in aviation from his youth, and in 1911 he built his own gliders capable of short flights. In 1916, he enrolled in the Warsaw University of Technology, being one of three founders of the Aviation Section of that university's Students' Mechanical Club. In 1917, he completed a pilot course, and he joined the underground aviator organization . In 1918, after Poland regained its independence, he volunteered for the Polish Air Force.
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Frank Matcham
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
Francis Matcham was an English architect who specialised in the design of theatres and music halls. He worked extensively in London, predominantly under Moss Empires, for whom he designed the Hippodrome in 1900, Hackney Empire , Coliseum and Palladium . His last major commission before retirement was the Victoria Palace for the variety magnate Alfred Butt. During his 40-year career, Matcham was responsible for the design and construction of over 90 theatres and the redesign and refurbishment of a further 80 throughout the United Kingdom.
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Ludwig von Tetmajer
1850 - 1905 (55 years)
Ludwig von Tetmajer was a professor at the Eidgenössischen Polytechnikum, the fore-runner of modern ETH in Zurich. Tetmajer was a pioneer in the development of the research laboratories for determining the physical and mechanical properties of the construction materials and a co-founder of the Festigkeitsprüfungsanstalt, the modern Eidgenossische Materialprüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt of Switzerland.
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Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bonch-Bruevich
1888 - 1940 (52 years)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bonch-Bruevich , sometimes spelled Bonch-Bruyevich, was a engineer, scientist, and professor. Generally considered the leading authority on radio in Russian Empire and Soviet Union in the first decades of the 20th century, he greatly influenced the pre-radar development of radio-location in that nation.
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Marian Walentynowicz
1896 - 1967 (71 years)
Marian Walentynowicz was a Polish graphic artist, architect, teacher, writer and a precursor to the comic book in Poland. He is probably best known for his collaboration as illustrator with Kornel Makuszyński in their creation of Koziołek Matołek, a popular classic children's series about a billy goat.
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Carl Abraham Pihl
1825 - 1897 (72 years)
Carl Abraham Pihl was a Norwegian civil engineer and director of the Norwegian State Railways from 1865 until his death. Pihl was one of the main architects of the use of narrow-gauge railways in Norway.
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Tony Smith
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Anthony Peter Smith was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture. Education and early life Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey, to a waterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contracted tuberculosis around 1916, which lasted through much of elementary school. In an effort to speed his recovery, protect his immune system, and protect his siblings, his family constructed a one-room prefabricated house in the backyard. ...
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