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,
#10401
William Robertson
1770 - 1850 (80 years)
William Robertson, an Irish architect, was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, some days before 4 December 1770. He attended the Dublin Society where he was awarded with a silver medal for his drawing skills in 1795.
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Alfred Stansfield
1871 - 1944 (73 years)
Alfred Stansfield was a British-Canadian metallurgist and Birks Professor of Metallurgy at McGill University, Montreal, Canada . Early life Stansfield was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1872, the second son of Frederic and Mary Ellen Stansfield. His younger brother was the British physicist Herbert Stansfield . He was educated at the Royal College of Science, London and Royal College of Mines, London, graduating in 1891.
Go to Profile#10403
George Frederick Barker
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
George Frederick Barker was an American physician and scientist. He graduated from the Yale Scientific School in 1858. He was successively chemical assistant in Harvard Medical School in 1858–1859 and 1860–1861, professor of chemistry and geology in Wheaton College. In 1864 he became the Professor of Natural Science at the Western University of Pennsylvania, now known as the University of Pittsburgh, where he undertook experiments to produce electric light by passing the current through a resisting filament which he claimed was "the first steady electric light generated in Pittsburgh, if not in the country".
Go to Profile#10404
Väinö Tanner
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Väinö Tanner was a Finnish geographer, geologist, professor and diplomat. Tanner is best known for his studies on the Quaternary geology of northern Finland. He was a vocal opponent to the Finnicization of the University of Helsinki.
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Jane Teller
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Jane Teller was an American printmaker and sculptor. Early life and education Jane Simon was born in 1911, in Rochester, New York. Simon attended Rochester Institute of Technology and Skidmore College, and earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1933. She pursued further art studies through Works Project Administration classes in New York City, and in classes with Aaron Goodelman, Karl Nielson, and Ibram Lassaw.
Go to Profile#10406
John Donald Wade
1892 - 1963 (71 years)
John Donald Wade was an American biographer, author, essayist, and teacher. Early life Wade was born in Marshallville, Georgia. His father was a country doctor who served as a surgeon in the Civil War. Wade was descended from the first governor of Georgia, John Adam Treutlen.
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Antonio Signorini
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Antonio Signorini was an influential Italian mathematical physicist and civil engineer of the 20th century. He is known for his work in finite elasticity, thermoelasticity and for formulating the Signorini problem.
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Jack Parsons
1914 - 1952 (38 years)
John Whiteside Parsons was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology , Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.
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Eugene C. Woodruff
1871 - 1944 (73 years)
Eugene Cyrus Woodruff was an American college football coach and electrical engineer. University of Michigan Woodruff graduated from the University of Michigan with degrees in engineering and music .
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Joseph Saunders
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Joseph Saunders, , sometimes also Joseph Sanders , was an engraver, illustrator, publisher and professor of fine art, active in London, Saint Petersburg and Vilnius. He has sometimes become conflated with the London painter and miniaturist, Joseph Saunders . Professor Anthony Cross suggests a further confusion with a 'John Saunders', born 1750, who also went to Russia.
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Hubert Mack Thaxton
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Hubert Mack Thaxton was an American nuclear physicist, mathematician, engineer, and the fourth African American person to earn a PhD in physics in the United States. Thaxton's research focused on proton scattering, which at the time was a largely unexplored area of study.
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John Ellis
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
John Ellis was a British executioner for 23 years, from 1901 to 1924. His other occupations were as a Rochdale hairdresser and newsagent. Personal life Born in Balderstone, Rochdale on 4 October 1874, he first worked in a series of jobs as a casual labourer in and around Manchester before gaining a job at a spinning mill in Bury. After another stint in a factory he decided to follow his father's trade by becoming a barber and hairdresser in Rochdale, where he subsequently also opened a newsagent's shop, which he ran with his wife and children.
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Enrico Bernardi
1841 - 1919 (78 years)
Enrico Zeno Bernardi was an Italian engineer and one of the Italian automobile pioneers. As a child growing up in Verona, Bernardi spent much of his free time in blacksmiths' workshops learning the skills to put his inventive abilities into practice. In 1856, he entered a mechanical model of a steam engine and locomotive in the Verona Agricultural Exhibition, where he earned an honorable mention for his work.
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Romuald Adam Cebertowicz
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Romuald Adam Cebertowicz was a Polish hydrotechnician and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences . Cebertowicz is the creator of electro-injection method of soil solidification.
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Muzio Oddi
1569 - 1639 (70 years)
Muzio or Mutio Oddi was an Italian mathematician and Gnomonist. Biography He was born to Lisabetta Genga and Lattanzio Oddi. His initial training was in eloquence and philosophy, but he later trained under the painter Federico Barocci. He moved to Pesaro to work under Guidobaldo del Monte, one of the main disciples of Federico Commandino. He was hired to work in Spain and France as a military engineer, which required him also to help train in the use of artillery. He returned to the Duchy of Urbino to work as an engineer under the Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere.
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Juan María Aubriot
1876 - 1930 (54 years)
Juan María Aubriot was a Uruguayan architect. Some of his most important buildings are:School of Law, University of the RepublicResidencia de SuárezEdificio Lapido
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Aldo Fabrizi
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Aldo Fabrizi was an Italian actor, director, screenwriter and comedian, best known for the role of the heroic priest in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and as partner of Totò in a number of successful comedies.
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Arthur Spooner
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Arthur Spooner was a British painter from Nottingham, England. Spooner was born in Nottingham and trained at the Nottingham School of Art in the late 19th century. He later taught landscape and figurative painting there in the early 20th century.
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David Stirling Anderson
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Sir David Stirling Anderson was a 20th-century Scottish engineer and educationalist. Life He was born in Glasgow on 25 September 1895, the son of Alexander Anderson and his wife, Sarah Stirling. In the First World War he served as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force.
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Charles E. Courtney
1849 - 1920 (71 years)
Charles Edward Courtney was an American rower and rowing coach from Union Springs, New York. A carpenter by trade, Courtney was a nationally known amateur rower. Courtney never lost a race as an amateur and finished a total of 88 victories.
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Benjamin Outram
1764 - 1805 (41 years)
Benjamin Outram was an English civil engineer, surveyor and industrialist. He was a pioneer in the building of canals and tramways. Life Born at Alfreton in Derbyshire, he began his career assisting his father Joseph Outram, who described himself as an "agriculturalist", but was also a land agent, an enclosure commissioner arbitrating in the many disputes which arose from the enclosures acts, an advisor on land management, a surveyor for new mines and served as a turnpike trustee.
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Edgar Viguers Seeler
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Edgar Viguers Seeler was an American architect. Biography Early life He was born on November 18, 1867, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was George Washington Seeler and his mother, Anna Maria Seeler . He graduated from Central High School in 1884. He attended night classes at the Philadelphia Museum and School of Industrial Art. He then graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890. He then attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts under the tutelage of Victor Laloux from 1890 to 1893.
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John Logie Baird
1888 - 1946 (58 years)
John Logie Baird was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.
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Nikolai Plotnikov
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Nikolai Sergeyevich Plotnikov was a Soviet film actor. He appeared in the 1949 biopic Ivan Pavlov. Selected filmography Dawn of Paris as General DombrovskyThe Lonely White Sail as The Plainclothes Agent of the TsarThe Oppenheim Family as Edgar OppenheimLenin in 1918 as the kulak from TamborskGorky 2: My Apprenticeship as NikiforytchGorky 3: My Universities as NikiforytchThe Wedding as the best manThe Vow as Ivan YermilovThe White Fang as Handsome SmithIvan Pavlov as Nikodin VasilyevichThe Battle of Stalingrad as Commissioner GurovThe Fall of Berlin as Walther von BrauchitschLeast ...
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George A. Baxter
1771 - 1841 (70 years)
George Addison Baxter was an educator, American university administrator, theologian and author. He served as President of Washington and Lee University from 1799 to 1829 and Hampden–Sydney College from 1835 until his death.
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John Philip Kemble
1757 - 1823 (66 years)
John Philip Kemble was a British actor. He was born into a theatrical family as the eldest son of Roger Kemble, actor-manager of a touring troupe. His elder sister Sarah Siddons achieved fame with him on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. His other siblings, Charles Kemble, Stephen Kemble, Ann Hatton, and Elizabeth Whitlock, also enjoyed success on the stage.
Go to Profile#10427
Charles Erwin Wilson
1890 - 1961 (71 years)
Charles Erwin Wilson was an American engineer and businessman who served as United States Secretary of Defense from 1953 to 1957 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Known as "Engine Charlie", he was previously the president and chief executive officer of General Motors. In the wake of the Korean War, he cut the defense budget significantly.
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Miller Reese Hutchison
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Miller Reese Hutchison was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He developed some of the first portable electric devices, such as a vehicle horn and a hearing aid. His father was William Hutchison and mother born Tracie Elizabeth Magruder. He attended Marion Military Institute from 1889 through 1891, Spring Hill College 1891 through 1892, the University of Mobile Military Institute from 1892 through 1895, and graduated from Auburn University in 1897. While still in school he invented and patented a lightning arrester for telegraph lines in 1895. At the outbreak of the Spanish–Americ...
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Walter V. Marshall
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Walter V. Marshall was an American architect and university administrator. Life Marshall was born on March 20, 1890, in Helena, Montana. He grew up in Great Falls, Montana from the age of 10, and he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1915.
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Robert Clarke
1819 - Present (207 years)
Robert Clarke was an architect based in Nottingham. History Born in 1819, Robert Clarke was the son of Mr. Clarke of Stoney and Clarke. He married Frances Sympson at St Martin’s Church, Lincoln, on 12 May 1841.
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Huib Luns
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Huibert Marie Luns was a Dutch painter, sculptor and writer. He also designed book covers, posters and medals. Biography Shortly after his birth, his parents returned to Amsterdam. His interest in art was inspired by a visit to the studios of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a Dutch painter who lived in London. He received his first drawing lessons from the brothers and Theo Molkenboer, then went to the for arts and crafts in Amsterdam and served an internship at the Rijksakademie.
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Charles Bell
1846 - 1899 (53 years)
Charles Bell FRIBA was a British architect who designed buildings in the United Kingdom, including over 60 Wesleyan Methodist chapels. Career Bell, who was born in 1846 and came from Bourne in Lincolnshire, was educated at Grantham Grammar School. He was articled to the London architect John Giles. In 1870 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and started independent practice. In 1888 he was working from Dashwood House, 9 New Broad Street, London.
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William Armstrong
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
William Armstrong, CBE was a British actor, theatre manager and director, associated for many years with the Liverpool Playhouse, where as director he was an important influence on young actors in his company, including, at various times, Robert Donat, Robert Flemyng, Rex Harrison, Michael Redgrave and Diana Wynyard.
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Nikos Psacharopoulos
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Nikos Psacharopoulos was a Greek-American theater producer, director, and educator. Born Nickolas Konstantin Athanasios Psacharopoulos VII, he claimed to have organized his first theatrical troupe at age 15 under the Nazi occupation of his homeland. He moved to the United States in 1947 and attended Oberlin College where he directed productions for the Oberlin Mummers. He graduated in 1951 with a degree in art history. Three years later he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in theater direction from the Yale Drama School. In 1955, he joined the faculty of Yale's undergraduate theater studi...
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Paul Shyre
1926 - 1989 (63 years)
Paul Shyre was an American director and playwright who received a Special Tony Award and won a Regional Emmy Award. He is noted for the plays Hizzoner, Will Rogers' USA and The President Is Dead. Shyre graduated from the University of Florida and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a professor of theater arts at Cornell University.
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William Mason
1808 - 1883 (75 years)
William Mason was a master mechanical engineer and builder of textile machinery and railroad steam locomotives. He founded Mason Machine Works of Taunton, Massachusetts. His company was a significant supplier of locomotives and rifles for the Union Army during the American Civil War. The company also later produced printing presses.
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Dorothy Dandridge
1922 - 1965 (43 years)
Dorothy Jean Dandridge was an American actress and singer. She was the first African-American film star to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, which was for her performance in Carmen Jones . Dandridge also performed as a vocalist in venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater. During her early career, she performed as a part of The Wonder Children, later The Dandridge Sisters, and appeared in a succession of films, usually in uncredited roles.
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Francisco Antônio de Almeida Júnior
1851 - 1928 (77 years)
Francisco Antônio de Almeida Júnior was a Brazilian astronomer, engineer and university professor during the latter half of the 19th century. Almeida was part of a commission tasked with calculating the stellar parallax of the Sun during the 1874 transit of Venus. Almeida was an important figure in the development of cinematography and he was the first known Brazilian to visit Japan and publish a book about his sojourn in China and Japan.
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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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