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,
#10451
Robert Vorhoelzer
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Robert Vorhoelzer was a German architect. Vorhoelzer belonged to the classical modernist school of architecture that is otherwise rather underrepresented in Bavaria. Most of his works were built when Vorhoelzer was Oberbaurat of the Bavarian postal administration. Together with Robert Poeverlein he founded the "Bayerische Postbauschule". In the early stages of his work, such as at the post office Penzberg or the post office on Ismaninger Straße in Munich, the influence of the "Heimatstil" was dominant. But later Vorhoelzer built many modern and functional buildings in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit.
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Arnold Böcklin
1827 - 1901 (74 years)
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss Symbolist painter. Biography He was born in Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city. Arnold studied at the Düsseldorf academy under Schirmer, and became a friend of Anselm Feuerbach. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Schirmer, who recognized in him a student of exceptional promise, sent him to Antwerp and Brussels, where he copied the works of Flemish and Dutch masters. Böcklin then went to Paris, wo...
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Luchino Visconti
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian filmmaker, theatre and opera director, and screenwriter. He was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “no one did as much to shape Italian cinema as Luchino Visconti.”
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Alfred Albini
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Alfred Albini was a Croatian-Jewish architect. He received a Vladimir Nazor Award for architecture and urban planning. Albini was born and died in Zagreb. He worked at the ateliers of Viktor Kovačić and Hugo Ehrlich and as a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb. He projected single-family houses and apartment buildings, together with civic buildings . He synthesized modernistic ideas into his own architectural expression. Furthermore, he discussed the problem of urban planning and the protection of landmarks, wrote expert works and theoretical articles, and painted.
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Cornelis van Eesteren
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Cornelis van Eesteren was a prominent Dutch architect and urban planner. He worked for the Town Planning department of Amsterdam and was the chairman of the CIAM . He contributed to the De Stijl movement, with its founder Theo van Doesburg, the artist Piet Mondrian, and others.
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Jacob van Ruisdael
1628 - 1682 (54 years)
Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement when Dutch painting became highly popular.
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Christian Hansen
1803 - 1883 (80 years)
Hans Christian Hansen was a Historicist Danish architect who worked 18 years in Greece where he was active in the transformation of Athens from a small town to the country's capital and an international metropolis. Later in his career he returned to Denmark, where he became a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and designed buildings such as the Copenhagen Municipal Hospital and the Østervold Observatory. He was the brother of Theophilus Hansen who was also an internationally successful architect, active in Athens and Vienna. He is considered to be a pioneer in the study and a...
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Dwight H. Perkins
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Dwight Heald Perkins was an American architect and planner. Early life Perkins was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Chicago with his family at age four. His mother was widowed a few years after his family completed their move. His father died when Dwight was young.
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Samu Pecz
1854 - 1922 (68 years)
Samu Pecz was a Hungarian architect and academic. Career Pecz studied at a number of universities both at home and abroad in Stuttgart, later at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under the Danish architect Theophil Hansen, the builder of the Austrian Parliament Building, Musikverein, and Stock Exchange buildings in Vienna.
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Ralph Hartley
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley was an American electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory. Biography Hartley was born in Sprucemont, Nevada, and attended the University of Utah, receiving an A.B. degree in 1909. He became a Rhodes Scholar at St Johns, Oxford University, in 1910 and received a B.A. degree in 1912 and a B.Sc. degree in 1913. He married Florence Vail of Brooklyn on March 21, 1916. The Hartleys had no children.
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Walter Andrae
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Walter Andrae was a German archaeologist and architect born near Leipzig. Career Archaeologist Andrae initially studied architecture at the Dresden University of Technology, where he befriended a younger student, Julius Jordan, with a life-changing effect on him.
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Clarence Floyd Hirshfeld
1881 - 1939 (58 years)
Clarence Floyd Hirshfeld was an American electrical, mechanical and consulting engineer, educator, chief of research for the Detroit Edison Co., now DTE Electric Company, author, and inventor, who was awarded the John Fritz Medal posthumously in 1940.
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Leonid Vesnin
1880 - 1933 (53 years)
Leonid Aleksandrovich Vesnin , was a Russian and Soviet architect. The oldest of Vesnin brothers, who were influential in developing Constructivist architecture. Biography Leonid Aleksandrovich was born on 28 November [O.S. 10 December] 1880 in a merchant family in Nizhny Novgorod. He went to Moscow Practical Academy of Commercial Sciences from 1890 to 1899. In 1900 he got into Imperial Academy of Arts and was a student of Leon Benois until he graduated in 1909.
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Sep Ruf
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Sep Ruf was a German architect and designer strongly associated with the Bauhaus group. He was one of the representatives of modern architecture in Germany after World War II. His elegant buildings received high credits in Germany and Europe and his German pavilion of the Expo 58 in Brussels, built together with Egon Eiermann, achieved worldwide recognition. He attended the Interbau 1957 in Berlin-Hansaviertel and was one of the three architects who had the top secret order to create the governmental buildings in the new capital city of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn. His best known bu...
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Matthew Digby Wyatt
1820 - 1877 (57 years)
Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. From 1855 until 1859 he was honorary secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and in 1866 received the Royal Gold Medal.
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Constance Tipper
1894 - 1995 (101 years)
Constance Tipper was an English metallurgist and crystallographer. She investigated brittle fracture and the ductile-brittle transition of metals used in the construction of warships, and was the first female full-time faculty member at Cambridge University Department of Engineering.
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Henry Marion Howe
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Henry Marion Howe was an American metallurgist, the son of Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe. Education Howe attended the Boston Latin School, class of 1865, then Harvard College, class of 1869. In 1871, he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree of "graduate in the department of geology and mining science", later renamed a Bachelor of Science.
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Fred Forbát
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Alfréd "Fred" Forbát March 31, 1897 in Pécs – May 22, 1972 in Vällingby Life and work He was born to Jewish parents in Pécs, former Austria-Hungary . He studied architecture and art history at the University of Budapest and the Technical University of Munich. From 1920–22 Forbát worked intermittently with Walter Gropius and taught at the Bauhaus in its first incarnation, in Weimar.
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Bruno Schulz
1892 - 1942 (50 years)
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
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August Strindberg
1849 - 1912 (63 years)
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition.
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Cornelis Benjamin Biezeno
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Cornelis Benjamin Biezeno was a Dutch applied mathematician and scientist in engineering mechanics. He was a professor at TU Delft. Biography Biezeno studied mechanical engineering from 1904 to 1909 at TU Delft. Subsequently, he was a lecturer, first for mechanical engineering and then for mathematics at Delft. In 1914, he became a professor of mechanics at Delft. From 1937 to 1938 and from 1949 to 1951 he was rector magnificus at TU Delft.
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Baron Karl von Hasenauer
1833 - 1894 (61 years)
Baron Karl von Hasenauer was an important Austrian architect and key representative of the Historismus school. He created several Neo-Baroque monuments, many around near the Ringstraße in Vienna. He was also a student of August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll. For his outstanding work, he was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1873, and made Freiherr, the equivalent of baron.
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Georg Hermann Nicolai
1811 - 1881 (70 years)
Georg Hermann Nicolai was a German architect and educator, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts on the Brühl Terrace in Dresden from 1850 until his death. Life Nicolai was born at Torgau, in the Kingdom of Saxony. He studied architecture at the Dresden Academy with Bernhard Schreiber under Joseph Thürmer and later in Munich under Friedrich von Gärtner. Travels to Italy included stints in 1834-5 and 1839-40. He served as Hofbaumeister in Coburg from 1841–45 and established a private practice in Frankfurt am Main from 1845-48. In mid-summer 1850 he succeeded Gottfried Se...
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Ivan Vurnik
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Ivan Vurnik was a Slovene architect that helped found the Ljubljana School of Architecture. His early style in the 1920s is associated with the search for Slovene "National Style", inspired by Slovene folk art and the Vienna Secession style of architecture . Upon embracing the functionalist approach in the 1930s, Vurnik rivaled the more conservative Plečnik's approach. The Cooperative Business Bank, designed by Vurnik and his wife Helena Kottler Vurnik who designed the decorative facade in the colors of Slovene tricolor, has been called the most beautiful building in Ljubljana. Vurnik has als...
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Herman Schneider
1872 - 1939 (67 years)
Herman Schneider , engineer, architect, and educator, was the main founder of cooperative education in the United States and president of the University of Cincinnati. Biography While at Lehigh University at the beginning of the 20th century, he concluded that the traditional classroom was insufficient for technical students. Schneider observed that several of the more successful Lehigh graduates had worked to earn money before graduation. Gathering data through interviews of employers and graduates, he devised the framework for cooperative education . About that time, Carnegie Technical Sc...
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Arthur Korn
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Arthur Korn was a German architect and urban planner who was a proponent of modernism in Germany and the UK. Life and career Born in Breslau in Silesia in 1891. Between 1909 and 1911 he studied at the Königliche Kunst- und Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. After World War I he worked briefly at the office of expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. In the 1920s he was active in the modernist architectural movement in Berlin, and associated with Bauhaus architects such as Walter Gropius and Ernst May. He was a member of Der Ring Berlin architectural collective. He published his influential work Glas.
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Lewis Gordon
1815 - 1876 (61 years)
Prof Lewis Dunbar Brodie Gordon FRSE was a Scottish civil engineer. Life He was the fourth son of Anne Clunes and her husband, Joseph Gordon WS, an Edinburgh lawyer. They lived at 27 London Street in Edinburgh's New Town. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh then went to the University of Edinburgh. A student and assistant to Marc Brunel, during the construction of the Thames Tunnel, he made a career change to mining. Registering as a student at the Freiburg School of Mines, Germany, he then studied further at the École Polytechnique in Paris.
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Caspar Frederik Harsdorff
1735 - 1799 (64 years)
Caspar Frederik Harsdorff , also known as C.F. Harsdorff, was a Danish neoclassical architect considered to have been the leading Danish architect in the late 18th century. Early life and training He was born Caspar Frederik Harsdørffer in Copenhagen, Denmark to German-born schoolteacher Johan Christopher Harsdørffer from Nürnberg and his Swedish-born wife Anne Marie Eriksdatter.
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Walker Evans
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large format, 8×10-inch view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".
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Ximen Bao
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Ximen Bao was a Chinese hydraulic engineer, philosopher, and politician. He was a government minister and court advisor to Marquis Wen of Wei during the Warring States period of ancient China. He was known as an early rationalist, who had the State of Wei abolish the practice of sacrificing people to the river god He Bo. Although the earlier statesman Sunshu Ao is credited as China's first hydraulic engineer , Ximen Bao is nonetheless credited as the first engineer in China to create a large canal irrigation system.
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Max M. Frocht
1894 - 1974 (80 years)
Max Mark Frocht was a Polish-American engineer and educator. He was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and founder of the Laboratory for Experimental Stress Analysis. Education Max Mark Frocht had moved from Congress Poland to the United States in 1912, settling in Detroit where he worked as a machinist and tool maker. In 1916 he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, earning his B.S. in 1920. He received an M.S. in physics in 1925 from the University of Pittsburgh, before retiring to the University of Michigan to earn a Ph.D. in 1931 with Stephen ...
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Domenico Fontana
1543 - 1607 (64 years)
Domenico Fontana was an Italian architect of the late Renaissance, born in today's Ticino. He worked primarily in Italy, at Rome and Naples. Biography He was born at Melide, a village on Lake Lugano, at that time joint possession of some Swiss cantons of the old Swiss Confederacy, and presently part of Ticino, Switzerland, and died at Naples. He went to Rome in 1563, to join his elder brother. He began his career as a plasterer, and then as a mason and master builder, with particular expertise in measuring and technical skills.
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Arthur Blomfield
1829 - 1899 (70 years)
Sir Arthur William Blomfield was an English architect. He became president of the Architectural Association in 1861; a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1867 and vice-president of the RIBA in 1886. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Architecture.
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Eugenio Peschard
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
Eugenio Peschard Delgado was a Mexican architect. Prior to joining the faculty of the National University in 1940, Peschard was an architect in the Ministry of Communications and Public Works and a member of the Council of Architecture of the Federal District. He translated a number of architectural books, including works by Hardy Cross, S. Timoshenko, and Vanden Broek.
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Rudolf Schwarz
1897 - 1961 (64 years)
Rudolf Schwarz was a German architect known for his work on Kirche St. Fronleichnam, Aachen. He also played a decisive part in the reconstruction of Cologne after the Second World War. He took a leading role with Cologne's reconstruction authority between 1947 and 1952, contributing to the rebuilding of the city with some of his own designs. Among these is the Wallraf-Richartz Museum , which now houses the Museum of Applied Art. He also reconstructed the pilgrimage church of Saint Anne in Düren, near Aachen, which is probably his most famous work.
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Mário Gerla
#10487
Robert Rowand Anderson
1834 - 1921 (87 years)
Sir Robert Rowand Anderson, was a Scottish Victorian architect. Anderson trained in the office of George Gilbert Scott in London before setting up his own practice in Edinburgh in 1860. During the 1860s his main work was small churches in the 'First Pointed' style that is characteristic of Scott's former assistants. By 1880 his practice was designing some of the most prestigious public and private buildings in Scotland.
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E. W. Pugin
1834 - 1875 (41 years)
Edward Welby Pugin was an English architect, the eldest son of architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and Louisa Barton and part of the Pugin & Pugin family of church architects. His father was an architect and designer of Neo-Gothic architecture, and after his death in 1852 Edward took up his successful practice. At the time of his own early death in 1875, Pugin had designed and completed more than one hundred Catholic churches.
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Johann Gottfried Tulla
1770 - 1828 (58 years)
Johann Gottfried Tulla was a German engineer who accomplished the straightening of the Rhine, improving navigation and alleviating the effects of flooding. His measures gave the Upper Rhine a completely new appearance. The river was deepened and channelled between embankments which narrowed the channels to a width of ; new sections were dug to straighten out its meandering course, and numerous small islands were removed. The effect was to reduce the river's length between Basel and Worms from . However, the straightening of the Upper Rhine had increased the streaming speed and thus permanentl...
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François Blondel
1618 - 1686 (68 years)
François Blondel was a soldier, engineer of fortifications, mathematician, diplomat, military and civil engineer and architect, called "the Great Blondel", to distinguish him in a dynasty of French architectss. He is remembered for his Cours d'architecture which remained a central text for over a century. His precepts placed him in opposition with Claude Perrault in the larger culture war known under the heading Querelle des anciens et des modernes. If François Blondel was not the most highly reputed among the académiciens of his day, his were the writings that most generally circulated among...
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Robert Durrer
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Robert Durrer was a Swiss engineer who invented the basic oxygen steelmaking process during his career in Nazi Germany. The process was successfully tested by Durrer in 1948. A team led by Dr Theodor Eduard Suess in Austria adapted the process and scaled it to industrial size, after which it was commercialized by VÖEST and ÖAMG.
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Martín Domínguez Esteban
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Martín Domínguez Esteban was a Spanish architect. Biography Son of Concepción Esteban Guerendián and Martín Domínguez Barros. At seven years Martín Domínguez exhibited a fascination with drawing, he registered in the School of Arts and Offices of San Sebastián which he attended at night while finishing high school. At 17 years of age and after taking his school examinations, he moved to Madrid, passing the entrance exam at the Higher School of Architecture in 1922. He stayed at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid which housed students from different disciplines. There he made friends with Miguel Prados, José Antonio Rubio Sacristán, José Moreno Villa and Federico García Lorca.
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Bohdan Pniewski
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Bohdan Wiktor Kazimierz Pniewski was a Polish modernist architect, professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He is mostly known as a designer of state buildings in pre-war and post-war Poland, though the working conditions of an architect, in these eras, palpably varied. Pniewski, popular amongst the Polish political interwar elite , remained prominent in Communist Poland. Surprisingly, "Beck's of court architect" , as he was called by his enemies after 1945 due to his role in designing the palace of the hated minister, constructed his most known...
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Gabriel Guevrekian
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Gabriel Guevrekian was an Armenian architect, who designed buildings, interiors and gardens, and taught architecture. He worked in Europe, Iran and the USA. Biography Guevrekian was born by some accounts in 1900 , by others in 1892 to Armenian parents. He was born in Constantinople, present day Istanbul, and then moved with his family to Tehran where he grew up. In 1910 he moved to Vienna where he lived with his uncle, architect Alex Galoustian. He studied architecture at the Kunstgewerbeschule with Oskar Strnad and Josef Hoffmann from 1915, and received his diploma in 1919. He then worked with Strnad and Hoffmann until he moved to Paris in 1922.
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Joseph Locke
1805 - 1860 (55 years)
Joseph Locke FRSA was a notable English civil engineer of the nineteenth century, particularly associated with railway projects. Locke ranked alongside Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel as one of the major pioneers of railway development.
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Parry Moon
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Parry Hiram Moon was an American electrical engineer who, with Domina Eberle Spencer, co-wrote eight scientific books and over 200 papers on subjects including electromagnetic field theory, color harmony, nutrition, aesthetic measure and advanced mathematics. He also developed a theory of holors.
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William Pole
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
William Pole was an English engineer, astronomer, musician and an authority on Whist. Life He was born in Birmingham on 22 April 1814, the son of Thomas Pole. Pole was apprenticed as an engineer to Charles H. Capper in Birmingham around 1828. He then went to India in 1844 as professor of engineering at Elphinstone College, Bombay, where he had organized a course of instruction for Indian students; his health obliged him to return to England in 1848. For the next ten years he worked in London under James Simpson and James Meadows Rendel, and was appointed in 1859 to the chair of civil engineering at University College, London.
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Max Klinger
1857 - 1920 (63 years)
Max Klinger was a German artist who produced significant work in painting, sculpture, prints and graphics, as well as writing a treatise articulating his ideas on art and the role of graphic arts and printmaking in relation to painting. He is associated with symbolism, the Vienna Secession, and Jugendstil the German manifestation of Art Nouveau. He is best known today for his many prints, particularly a series entitled Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove and his monumental sculptural installation in homage to Beethoven at the Vienna Secession in 1902.
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Donát Bánki
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Donát Bánki was a Hungarian mechanical engineer and inventor of Jewish heritage. In 1893 he invented the carburetor for the stationary engine, together with János Csonka . The invention is often, incorrectly credited to the German Wilhelm Maybach, who submitted his patent half a year after Bánki and Csonka. Bánki also greatly contributed to the design of compressors for combustion engines.
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Nicéphore Niépce
1765 - 1833 (68 years)
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825 . In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.
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