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
Michael George Cooke
1934 - 1990 (56 years)
Michael George Cooke was an American academic. Cooke graduated from Yale University in 1957, and completed doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. He then began teaching at Yale, accepting an assistant professorship at his alma mater in 1968. Cooke later taught at the University of Iowa and at Boston University, before returning to Yale in 1971. Cooke was a defendant named for sexual harassment in the famous lawsuit Alexander v. Yale that helped established the legal responsibility of universities to curtail sexual misconduct. Cooke was later appointed by Yale as the Bird White Housum Professor of English Literature in 1987.
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John Edward Fletcher
#10453
Joshua Logan
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Joshua Lockwood Logan III was an American theatre and film director, playwright and screenwriter, and actor. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the musical South Pacific and was involved in writing other musicals.
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George Vernon Russell
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
George Vernon Russell was an American architect. He designed many residential properties and commercial buildings in Los Angeles, California. He also designed the masterplans and a library unit for the University of California, Riverside as well as the 1976 expansion of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
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Gerhard Fischer
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Gerhard Fischer was a Norwegian architect and archaeologist. Biography Johan Adolf Gerhard Fischer was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of architect Adolph Fischer and Dorothea Margaretha Elisabeth Wilcken . Fischer studied at the Bergen Technical School , the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Oslo and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
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Robert L. Sumwalt
1895 - Present (131 years)
Robert Llewellyn Sumwalt was an American engineer and academic, who was President of the University of South Carolina. Sumwalt was born in Baltimore on July 8, 1895. He began undergraduate studies at Delaware College in 1914, belonged to the Sigma Nu fraternity there, and received a B.S. degree in 1918, for which his thesis was "The Design of A Type Emergency Mill Building".
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John Shaw Sr.
1776 - 1832 (56 years)
John Shaw Sr. was an English architect. He was architect to Christ's Hospital in London, and to the Port of Ramsgate. Many of his works, including the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street, London, were in a Gothic Revival style.
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Amaza Lee Meredith
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
Amaza Lee Meredith was an American architect, educator and artist. Meredith was unable to enter the profession as an architect because of "both her race and her sex" as an African-American woman, and worked primarily as an art teacher at Virginia State University , where she founded the art department. She is best known for her residence, Azurest South, where she and her partner, Dr. Edna Meade Colson, resided together. Moreover, she co-founded the Azurest Syndicate Inc., a vacation destination for black middle class Americans on Sag Harbor, New York. As an educated black woman, Meredith is a...
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John Webb
1754 - 1828 (74 years)
John Webb was an English landscape designer, who also trained as an architect. He studied under William Emes between 1782 and 1793, and then established his own practice. He worked mainly in the Midlands and the north of England. In Staffordshire he was commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood to work in the gardens of Lowther Hall and Maer Hall. In Cheshire he designed work in the gardens of Rode Hall, Tabley House, Crewe Hall, Tatton Park, and Ardene Hall. He followed Emes at Eaton Hall where he added new terrace walls, improved one of the approach roads by levelling it and planting 130,000 tree...
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Henry Wilson
1864 - 1934 (70 years)
Henry Wilson was a British architect, jeweller and designer. Career He was born at 91 Red Rock Street in West Derby near Liverpool on 12 March 1864. He studied at the Kidderminster School of Art before being articled to the architect Edward James Shrewsbury in Maidenhead. He then worked and was trained in the practices of John Oldrid Scott, John Belcher and J. D. Sedding.
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Jean Tschumi
1904 - 1962 (58 years)
Jean André Tschumi was a Swiss architect and professor at the . A member of the Modern Movement, Jean Tschumi is known for his buildings for Sandoz , Nestlé , la Mutuelle Vaudoise , as well as for some of his projects .
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Peter Meyn
1749 - 1808 (59 years)
Peter Meyn was a Danish architect. Early life and education Meyn was born in Copenhagen, the son of master joiner Anton Christian Meyn and Helena Klefts . He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where he won the small gold medal in 1767 and the large gold medal in 1768 with a project for a royal military academy. The large gold medal qualified him for the first vacant travel stipend. He worked for Caspar Frederik Harsdorff on the marble baths in Frederiksberg Palace and as executing architect on Frederick V's Chapel at Roskilde Cathedral. In 1777, when Nicolai Abildgaard had re...
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Vincente Minnelli
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Vincente Minnelli was an American stage director and film director. He directed the classic movie musicals Meet Me in St. Louis , An American in Paris , The Band Wagon , and Gigi . An American in Paris and Gigi both won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Minnelli winning Best Director for Gigi. In addition to having directed some of the best-known musicals of his day, Minnelli made many comedies and melodramas. He was married to Judy Garland from 1945 until 1951; the couple were the parents of Liza Minnelli.
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James Murphy
1834 - 1907 (73 years)
James Murphy, FAIA, was an Irish-American architect active in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New England, who designed numerous Roman Catholic churches and related structures. Early life and career Murphy was born in 1834 in County Tipperary, Ireland. In 1852, he emigrated to the United States along with his brother Michael. Soon after his arrival, he entered the Brooklyn, New York, firm of Patrick C. Keely as an apprentice. Keely was already an established architect specializing in ecclesiastical design. Eventually, Murphy became a partner in the firm, operating as Keely & Murphy.
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Hans Georg Küssner
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Hans Georg Küssner was a German physicist and aeronautical scientist known for his work in the field of aeroelasticity. Work Hans Georg Küssner was born on September 14, 1900, in Bartenstein, then part of the East Prussian district of in the German Reich. Küssner studied at the Technical University of the Free City of Danzig and received his doctorate in 1928 with his dissertation "Das wirtschaftliche Ozeanflugzeug" under Viktor Rembold. In the same year he moved to the German Research Institute for Aviation in Berlin, where he worked on the aircraft problem of flutter, which was reflected ...
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William Wallace
William Wallace was a Scottish master mason and architect. He served as King's Master Mason under James VI. From 1615, Wallace is known to have been the leading mason working on the King's Lodgings at Edinburgh Castle. On 18 April 1617 he was appointed King's Master Mason, holding this post until his death. Wallace was commissioned in 1618 to rebuild the north range of Linlithgow Palace, which had collapsed in 1605. He was responsible for design as well as building, and executed the new range in an Anglo-Flemish style, which he helped to popularise in Scotland.
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Georg Ludwig Hartig
1764 - 1837 (73 years)
Georg Ludwig Hartig was a German forester. Education Hartig was born at Gladenbach, in present-day Hesse. After obtaining a practical knowledge of forestry from his uncle at Harzburg, he studied from 1781 to 1783 at the University of Giessen, which had commenced a course of instruction in forestry just a few years earlier, in 1778.
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Christine Salmon
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Christine Salmon was an American architect and educator, originally from Pennsylvania. After teaching at Pennsylvania State University for a decade, she moved to Oklahoma in the late-1950s and taught at Oklahoma State University. She and her husband founded the architectural firm Salmon and Salmon, which focused primarily on housing and designs which accommodated people with disabilities. At the national level, she served on the National Housing Commission of the American Institute of Architects from 1969 to 1985 and was a Fellow of the AIA. She was the first woman elected as mayor of Stillwater, Oklahoma and had previously served on the Stillwater City Commission.
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Robert E. Cox
1917 - 1989 (72 years)
Robert Edward Cox was an American optical engineer and a popularizer of amateur telescope making. He conducted the popular "Gleanings for ATMs" column in Sky and Telescope magazine for 21 years. Career Cox worked briefly at Perkin Elmer in 1939. Shortly thereafter he was inducted into the Army Air Corps and served for two years in the South Pacific as a weather specialist. After the war, Cox accepted part-time positions as photographic technician at Harvard Observatory and as staff member at Sky and Telescope. He also became associate editor of Weatherwise magazine.
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David Schenk Jacobus
1862 - 1955 (93 years)
David Schenk Jacobus was an American mechanical engineer, head of the Engineering Department of Babcock & Wilcox, inventor and educator, who served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1916–17.
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Angus Robertson Fulton
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
Angus Robertson Fulton was a Scottish engineer and academic who served as 'Interim' Principal of University College Dundee for seven years. Life and career Angus Fulton was born and raised in Dundee. In 1903 he matriculated at University College, Dundee, which was then a part of the University of St Andrews, graduating with BSc.1907 After graduation he joined the college's engineering department as an assistant to Professor Thomas Claxton Fidler. During World War I he served in the Royal Flying Corps, and subsequently in the Royal Air Force, investigating aircraft accidents caused by mechanical problems.
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George Gilbert Scott Jr.
1839 - 1897 (58 years)
George Gilbert Scott Jr. was an English architect working in late Gothic and Queen Anne revival styles. Known in later life as 'Middle Scott', he was the eldest son of Sir Gilbert Scott , and father of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and Adrian Gilbert Scott, all also architects.
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Paul Pfann
1860 - 1919 (59 years)
Paul Pfann was a German architect in the Historicist style. Life and work His father was a primary school teacher. From 1879 to 1883, he studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich with Friedrich von Thiersch and Paul Wallot. He would spend most of his career in Munich and often worked in collaboration with . From 1884 to 1887, he also collaborated with the architectural firm of Arwed Roßbach, in Leipzig. From 1887 to 1891, he assisted Paul Wallot during the construction of the Reichstag building in Berlin. In 1890, he entered a competition to design the National Kaiser Wilhelm...
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Hermann Krone
1827 - 1916 (89 years)
Hermann Krone was a photographer from Saxony, Germany, who was born in Breslau. His father was a lithographer and he began an apprenticeship with him 1843. He produced his first calotype and daguerreotype photographs in 1843. He opened a studio in Leipzig in 1851 and in Dresden from 1852. He took landscape photographs of Saxon Switzerland. He married Clementine Blochmann and had four children including Sigismund Ernst Richard Krone.
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Konstantin Adolfovic Semendyayev
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Konstantin Adolfovic Semendyayev or Semendyaev ; born 9 December 1908 in Simferopol, died 15 November 1988 Work and life Semendyayev studied at the Lomonosov University with the degree in 1929 and was then at various higher schools. From 1931 to 1936 he was in the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at Lomonosov University. He habilitated in 1940 . From 1936 he headed the Department of Mathematical Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was evacuated to Kazan with the institute during World War II. After World War II, he headed a department for numerical calculations at the Steklov I...
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Konstantin Petrovich Grigorovich
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Konstantin Petrovich Grigorovich was a metallurgical engineer, founder of the soviet school of electrometallurgy, professor , doctor of technical sciences . Biography Grigorovich Konstantin Petrovich was born 18 September 1886 in Mykolaiv.
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Norman Newton
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Norman Thomas Newton was an American landscape architect and winner of the Prix de Rome. Early career Born in 1898 in Corry, Pennsylvania, Newton graduated from Cornell University in 1919, receiving his master's degree in landscape design, also from Cornell, in 1920.. A winner of the Prix de Rome in 1923, he spent three years as a resident fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he studied the gardens of Italian villas, training for his future as a landscape architect.
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Lee Strasberg
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Lee Strasberg was an American theatre director, actor and acting teacher. He co-founded, with theatre directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective". In 1951, he became director of the nonprofit Actors Studio in New York City, considered "the nation's most prestigious acting school," and, in 1966, was involved in the creation of Actors Studio West in Los Angeles.
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William Alexander Fairbairn
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
William Alexander Fairbairn FRSE MBOU was a Scottish forester and ornithologist. He was a co-founder of the Central Forestry Examination Board. Life He was born around 1902 in Edinburgh. He was educated at George Heriot's School then attended the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1924. He then spent a year at Trinity College, Oxford undertaking their Colonial Probationers Course. During both his school and university years he was a keen rugby player, including taking part in an international match in France in 1925. In the autumn of 1925 he was posted to Nigeria as part of the Colonial Forest Service.
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François Cosserat
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
François Cosserat was a French engineer and mathematician known by his theories about deformable bodies written with his brother Eugène. Life and work François Cosserat was the eldest of the three sons of François-Constant Cosserat, a textile manufacturer in Amiens. The three sons achieved to study in one of the grandes écoles of Paris. François studied at the École Polytechnique from 1870 to 1872 and then in the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées until 1875. François Cosserat followed a typical career as civil engineer in the French East Railroad Company constructing and designing bridges, tunnels, etc.
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Rex Harrison
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison was an English actor. Harrison began his career on the stage in 1924. He made his West End debut in 1936 appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, in what was his breakthrough role. He won his first Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance as Henry VIII in the Broadway play Anne of the Thousand Days in 1949. He returned to Broadway portraying Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady where he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.
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Frederick W. Lanchester
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Frederick William Lanchester LLD, Hon FRAeS, FRS , was an English polymath and engineer who made important contributions to automotive engineering and to aerodynamics, and co-invented the topic of operations research.
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Gerhard Weber
1909 - 1986 (77 years)
Gerhard Weber was a German architect and lecturer. Weber was a student of Mies van der Rohe and is associated with the Bauhaus school. Weber was born in Mylau. Between 1955 and 1974 he was a professor for architecture at the Technical University of Munich. Considered one of the leading post-war architects in Germany, his architectural estate is today being maintained by the Bauhaus Archive.
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James Matthews
1820 - 1898 (78 years)
James Matthews was a prominent 19th-century architect in northern Scotland who also served as Lord Provost of Aberdeen from 1883 to 1886 during which time he enacted an important city improvement plan. His work as an architect is largely in the Scots baronial style.
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Kurt Leibbrand
1914 - 1985 (71 years)
Kurt Gustav Adolf Max Leibbrand was a German civil engineer, professor, and consultant transport engineer. In July 1961, he was arrested and charged with murder for the deaths of 26 unarmed Italian volunteers who were shot during the German retreat from France in August 1944, allegedly on the regimental orders he issued. Although the court only found him culpable for manslaughter, he was not sentenced because the manslaughter verdict was time-barred. His arrest lead to his resignation as a professor of railway and transport engineering at the Technical University of Zurich and the end of his ...
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Edward M. Hartwell
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Edward Mussey Hartwell was an American academic who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Biography He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire to parents Josiah Shattuck Hartwell and Catherine Stone Hartwell on May 29, 1850, as the eldest of eight children. Edward M. Hartwell attended Lawrence Academy and the Groton School, before graduating from the Boston Latin School, after which he enrolled at Amherst College. Hartwell received his bachelor's degree in 1873, and became vice principal at a school in New Jersey before taking a position at the Boston Latin School. He left Boston to pursue medical st...
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Elizabeth Wood
1899 - 1993 (94 years)
Elizabeth Wood was the first Executive Director of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1937 until 1954. Born to missionary parents in Japan, Elizabeth Wood was educated at Illinois Wesleyan University and at the University of Michigan where she received both bachelor's and master's degrees in rhetoric. In 1928, after teaching English at Vassar College for four years, Wood moved to Chicago and found a job with the Home Modernizing Bureau, a trade organization. This organization collapsed with the stock market, however, and soon after Wood began her career as a housing advocate and planner. Wood...
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Adolf Schill
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Adolf Schill, often also Adolph Schill , was a German architect, interior designer, artisan, illustrator and painter of the historism. As a university lecturer he worked at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1880 and 1911, thus helping to shape the later phase of the Düsseldorf school of painting. Students of sculpture also studied with him.
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Alexander Catlin Twining
1801 - 1884 (83 years)
Alexander Catlin Twining was an American scientist and inventor. Twining, the son of Stephen Twining and Almira Twining, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, July 5, 1801. He graduated from Yale College in 1820. He left College with the intention of entering the ministry, and soon after studied for one year in Andover Theological Seminary. In 1823 he returned to New Haven as tutor in at Yale, in which office he served for two years.
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Tyrone Guthrie
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Sir William Tyrone Guthrie was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at his family's ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland. He is famous for his original approach to Shakespearean and modern drama.
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William J. Vaughn
1834 - 1912 (78 years)
William J. Vaughn was an American university professor, school principal, librarian and book collector. He was one of the earliest Professors at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
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James Jardine
1776 - 1858 (82 years)
James Jardine was a Scottish civil engineer, mathematician and geologist. He was the first person to determine mean sea level. He built tunnels and bridges, including for the Innocent Railway, and built reservoirs including Glencorse, Threipmuir, Harlaw for Edinburgh Water Company, and Cobbinshaw for the Union Canal.
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Claude Dornier
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Claude Honoré Désiré Dornier was a German-French airplane designer and founder of Dornier GmbH. His notable designs include the 12-engine Dornier Do X flying boat, for decades the world's largest and most powerful airplane. He also made several other successful aircraft.
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Josiah Wedgwood
1730 - 1795 (65 years)
Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, entrepreneur and abolitionist. Founding the Wedgwood company in 1759, he developed improved pottery bodies by systematic experimentation, and was the leader in the industrialisation of the manufacture of European pottery.
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John Rich
1692 - 1761 (69 years)
John Rich was an important director and theatre manager in 18th-century London. He opened The New Theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1714, which he managed until he built the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1732. He managed Covent Garden until 1761, putting on ever more lavish productions. He popularised pantomime on the English stage and played a dancing and mute Harlequin himself from 1717 to 1760 under the stage name of "Lun." Rich's version of the servant character, Arlecchino, moved away from the poor, dishevelled, loud, and crude character, to a colourfully-dressed, silent Harlequin, performing fanciful tricks, dances and magic.
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John Fraser
1825 - 1906 (81 years)
John Fraser was a Scottish-born American architect who practiced in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. His most significant surviving building is the Union League of Philadelphia , a High Victorian, Second Empire gentlemen's club constructed of brick and brownstone.
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Joseph Whitworth
1804 - 1887 (83 years)
Sir Joseph Whitworth, 1st Baronet was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. In 1841, he devised the British Standard Whitworth system, which created an accepted standard for screw threads. Whitworth also created the Whitworth rifle, often called the "sharpshooter" because of its accuracy, which is considered one of the earliest examples of a sniper rifle.
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William Emerson
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
William Emerson was an American architect and the first dean of the MIT School of Architecture from 1932 to 1939. He was instrumental in establishing a city planning department at MIT. Biography Emerson was born in New York City. His parents, of English and Dutch descent, were Susan Tompkins and John Haven Emerson, a medical doctor. His father's family included poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the young Emerson's great uncle.
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Emanuele Foà
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Emanuele Foà was an Italian engineer and engineering physicist, known for his contribution to mathematical fluid dynamics. In particular he proved the first known uniqueness theorem for the solutions to the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluids in bounded domains.
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Caleb Frank Gates
1903 - 1955 (52 years)
Caleb Frank Gates was an American historian who served as Chancellor of the University of Denver. Early life and education Gates was born in Constantinople , and received his early education at Robert College in Istanbul, where his father served as president. Gates came to the United States in 1919 and attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania for three years. In 1926, he graduated with honors from Princeton University and continued his studies under a Rhodes scholarship at Balliol College in Oxford. In 1928, while attending college, Gates married Elizabeth Farnum in England. They raised four children: Caleb Jr., Betsy Ann, Mary Ellen, and Gwynne.
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