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
Clarence Perry
1872 - 1944 (72 years)
Clarence Arthur Perry was an American urban planner, sociologist, author, and educator. Perry devised the neighbourhood unit plan, a residential community scheme disseminated through the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs in 1929 that influenced planning in US cities.
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Boris Stechkin
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Boris Sergeyevich Stechkin was a Russian Empire scientist, engineer and inventor. He developed a theory of heat engines and was involved in construction of many Soviet aircraft engines. He was also co-developer of Sikorsky Ilya Muromets and Lebedenko's Tsar Tank . He died in Moscow on April 2, 1969.
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Paul Philippe Cret
1876 - 1945 (69 years)
Paul Philippe Cret was a French-born Philadelphian architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he taught at a design studio in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Friedrich Eisenkolb
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Friedrich Eisenkolb was a German metallurgist. Life Eisenkolb was born at the start of the twentieth century in Warnsdorf, at that time a small German-speaking town in northern Bohemia. His father was employed in finance security. Eisenkolb passed his School final exams in 1919 and then, from 1919 till 1923, studied Chemistry and Metallurgy at the Prague Poly-technical Institute. He received his doctorate in 1924 and went to work for Eisenwerke AG at Rothau-Neudek, on the Bohemian side of the Western Ore Mountains. In 1928 Eisenkolb completed a second dissertation, his subject being the pickling of sheet-metals.
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Tokushichi Mishima
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Tokushichi Mishima was a Japanese metallurgist and inventor. He discovered that aluminum restored magnetism to non-magnetic nickel steel. He invented MKM steel, which was an extremely inexpensive magnetic substance that has been used in many applications. It is also closely related to the modern Alnico magnets. He later became a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. After his death, his remains were buried in the Tama Cemetery in Tokyo.
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Bernard D. H. Tellegen
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Bernard D.H. Tellegen was a Dutch electrical engineer and inventor of the pentode and the gyrator. He is also known for a theorem in circuit theory, Tellegen's theorem. He obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering from Delft University in 1923, and joined the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven. In 1926, he invented the pentode vacuum tube. The gyrator was invented by him around 1948. The gyrator is useful to simulate the effect of an inductor without using a coil. For example, it is used in hi-fi graphic equalizers. He held 41 US patents.
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Walter Curt Behrendt
1884 - 1945 (61 years)
Walter Curt Behrendt was a German-American architect and active advocate of German modernism. He was an authority on city planning and housing, editor of Die Form, and author of The Victory of the New Building Style among many other works.
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Otto Lindig
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Otto Lindig was a German master potter who was a student and later a workshop manager at the famous Bauhaus art school in Weimar, Germany. Background Lindig was born in Pößneck, Germany. Initially trained as an artist and modeler, he also studied sculpture with architect and designer Henry van de Velde in 1913-15 at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule , in the building that would soon become the first location of the Bauhaus. Shortly after the Bauhaus opened in 1919, Lindig enrolled in the program and, beginning in 1920, studied ceramics with sculptor Gerhard Marcks, his Formmeister and Master Pot...
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Ralph C. Bryant
1877 - 1939 (62 years)
Ralph Clement Bryant, Sr. was an early American professor of forestry, the author of the pioneer textbook and other books and notes in forestry. Logging Education and career R. C. Bryant was the first person to receive a forestry degree in the United States, as a graduate from the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell .
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Sylvia Lavin
1900 - Present (126 years)
Sylvia Lavin is a professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, School of Architecture. She was previously the head of the Ph.D. in Architecture program from 2007-2017 and professor of architectural history and theory at UCLA, where she was chairperson of the department of architecture and urban design from 1996 to 2006. Lavin is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a visiting professor of architectural theory at Princeton University School of Architecture. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architectur...
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Kevin A. Lynch
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping. His most influential books include The Image of the City , a seminal work on the perceptual form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place? , which theorizes how the physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes.
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Morien Morgan
1912 - 1978 (66 years)
Sir Morien Bedford Morgan CB FRS , was a noted Welsh aeronautical engineer, sometimes known as "the Father of Concorde". He spent most of his career at the Royal Aircraft Establishment , before moving to Whitehall for ten years as the Controller of Aircraft within the Ministry of Aviation. He spent the last years of his life as master of Downing College, Cambridge.
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Thomas Tallmadge
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Thomas Eddy Tallmadge was an American architect, best known for his Prairie School works with Vernon S. Watson as Tallmadge & Watson. Biography Thomas Eddy Tallmadge was born in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1876. He was raised in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, graduating from Evanston Township High School. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1898 with a bachelor's degree in Architecture. He returned to Chicago to study under Daniel H. Burnham, one of the city's most prominent architects. While working for Burnham, Tallmadge received a scholarship from the Chicago Architectural Club for his work "A Crèche in a Manufacturing District".
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Charlemae Hill Rollins
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Charlemae Hill Rollins was a pioneering librarian, writer and storyteller in the area of African-American literature. During her thirty-one years as head librarian of the children's department at the Chicago Public Library as well as after her retirement, she instituted substantial reforms in children's literature.
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Ernst Julius Berg
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Ernst Julius Berg was a Swedish-born, American electrical engineer. Biography Ernst Julius Berg was born in Östersund, Jämtland County in Sweden. After graduating from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1892, he immigrated to the United States. He began working as an assistant to Charles Proteus Steinmetz at General Electric. He then joined the faculty of electrical engineering at Union College.
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Giuseppe Colombo
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo was an Italian scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy. Mercury Colombo studied the planet Mercury, and it was his calculations which showed how to get a spacecraft into a solar orbit which would encounter Mercury multiple times, using a gravity assist maneuver with Venus. Due to this idea, NASA was able to have the Mariner 10 accomplish three fly-bys of Mercury instead of one. Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist. Since then, the technique has become common.
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Buckminster Fuller
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" , "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
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Miller McClintock
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
Miller McClintock was an American expert in traffic control who developed the "friction theory" of traffic. He became interested in educational broadcasting and was a member of the board of Encyclopædia Britannica Films. He subsequently presented the early American factual television series Serving Through Science which showed films from Encyclopædia Britannica.
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W. A. Lambeth
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
William Alexander Lambeth was a medical professor who was the first athletic director at the University of Virginia. He is often called "the father of intercollegiate athletics" at the university. Lambeth was integral in the foundation of the Southern Conference and once a member of the Football Rules Committee. He was the namesake of Lambeth Field; the "Colonnades" where the university used to play football before the building of Scott Stadium. He was also a student of architecture. The Lambeth House, currently used by the Curry School of Education, used to be his residence.
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Heinrich Hertel
1901 - 1982 (81 years)
Heinrich Hertel was a German aeronautical engineer. After graduating as an engineer from Munich Technical College, he joined the Junkers company in 1926. In 1932, he was recruited by Ernst Heinkel and two years later was made the Technical Director of the Heinkel company — within which Siegfried and Walter Günter were already well-established as top engineers — where he oversaw many projects including the Heinkel He 100 and He 111.
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Benjamin Miessner
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Benjamin Franklin Miessner was an American radio engineer and inventor. He is most known for his electronic organ, electronic piano, and other musical instruments. He was the inventor of the Cat's whisker detector.
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John I. Yellott
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
John Ingle Yellott was an American engineer recognized as a pioneer in passive solar energy, and an inventor with many patents to his credit. In his honor the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Solar Division confers a biannual "John I. Yellott Award" which "recognizes ASME members who have demonstrated sustained leadership within the Solar Energy Division, have a reputation for performing high-quality solar energy research and have made significant contributions to solar engineering through education, state or federal government service or in the private sector."
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William Lyman Underwood
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
William Lyman Underwood was an American photographer who was also involved in the research of time-temperature canning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1896. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Underwood was the second son of William James Underwood, one of the nine children of William Underwood, the founder of the William Underwood Company.
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Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity , an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and socia...
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Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
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Robert Peele
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Robert Peele was an American mining engineer. He was an emeritus professor at Columbia University and author of the Mining Engineers' Handbook, which was in print from 1918 to 1989. Biography Peele was born on July 15, 1858, in New York City, the son of Raymond and Anne Westervelt Peele. He received the degree of Engineer of Mining from Columbia School of Mines in 1883 and immediately entered the mining business. He worked in gold and silver mines in North Carolina, Arizona, and Colorado, and performed evaluations of mining fields in New Mexico, Colombia, and Dutch Guiana. He served as superi...
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Edwin Duerr
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Edwin Duerr was a theater and radio director. He was director of the Little Theater at University of California, Berkeley when he discovered Gregory Peck. He wrote the books The Length and Depth of Acting and Radio and Television Acting: Criticism, Theory and Practice. According to author Sean Egan in the James Kirkwood biography Ponies & Rainbows, Duerr co-wrote a play with Kirkwood called The Marriage Habit which failed to get staged.
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Frederick E. Turneaure
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Frederick Eugene Turneaure was an American civil engineer and academic from Illinois. A graduate of Cornell University, Turneaure briefly worked in the private sector before joining Washington University in St. Louis as an instructor. In 1892, he was named a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Turneaure was Dean of Engineering there from 1902 to 1937.
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Harriett B. Rigas
1934 - 1989 (55 years)
Harriett B. Rigas FIEEE was a Canadian electrical engineer and innovative lecturer who was recognised worldwide for her hybrid computer and computer simulation research. Early life and education Rigas was born on 30 April 1934 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She graduated from Queens University in 1956 with a bachelor's degree. She completed her master's in electrical engineering in 1959, the same year she got married. Rigas completed her doctorate in 1963 also from Kansas University as the first woman to do so.
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Albert Arnulf
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Albert Arnulf was a French engineer and physicist. In 1939, Arnulf received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society.
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George Howe
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
George Howe was an American architect and educator, and an early convert to the International style. His personal residence, High Hollow , established the standard for house design in the Philadelphia region through the early 20th century. His partnership with William Lescaze yielded the design of Philadelphia's PSFS Building , considered the first International style skyscraper built in the United States.
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Charles F. Scott
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
Charles Felton Scott was an electrical engineer, professor at Yale University and known for his invention of the Scott-T transformer in the 1890s. He graduated from Ohio State University in 1885 and went on to graduate study at Johns Hopkins University. Scott joined the engineering staff of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1888. He assisted the inventor Nikola Tesla with his work on the alternating-current induction motor. Scott also carried out experimental high voltage transmission line work at Telluride, Colorado with Ralph D. Mershon.
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Henry Vincent Hubbard
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Henry Vincent Hubbard was an American landscape architect and planner, famous for his unique teaching styles at Harvard University, and his many publications. He was one of the prime supporters for a national system of public parks.
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Halbert Powers Gillette
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Halbert Powers Gillette was an American engineer and prolific author of textbooks and handbooks for the engineering and construction fields. Biography Born on August 5, 1869, in Waverly, Iowa, to Theodore Weld and Laetitia S. , Gillette attended the Hammond Hall Academy in Salt Lake City, from which he graduated in 1886. Six years later in 1892, he received his engineering degree at the School of Mines at Columbia University, where he was classmate of Edward B. Durham.
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Lionel Bailey Budden
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Lionel Bailey Budden FRIBA was an English architect. Born to William Budden and Elizabeth Adams, Budden attended Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby. From 1933 Budden was Roscoe Professor in Architecture in the Liverpool University School of Architecture. He retired in 1952.
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Raffaele Giacomelli
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Raffaele Giacomelli was an aeronautical engineer, linguist, dialectologist, and historian of science. His father was Francesco Giacomelli, of Bolognese origin, first astronomer at the R. Osservatorio del Campidoglio, and his mother was Maria née Marucchi, from a family of scholars. Raffaele Giacomelli's paternal great-grandfather, Raffaele, jurist, had been rector of the University of Bologna, and his uncle, Orazio Marucchi, was a famous archaeologist.
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Georg Duffing
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Georg Wilhelm Christian Caspar Duffing was a German engineer and inventor. In 1918, he described vibrations and their resonances mathematically, as the Duffing equation. Georg Duffing's equation for vibration theory is a standard model for nonlinear vibration. Since the 1970s, it has been popular in chaos theory.
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Charles Buxton Going
1863 - 1952 (89 years)
Charles Buxton Going was an American engineer, writer, and editor. Biography Born in Westchester N.Y., Going attended Columbia College School of Mines, where he graduated in 1882. Columbia University awarded him the honorary degree of M.Sc. in 1910.
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Georg Hans Madelung
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Georg Hans Madelung was a German academic and aeronautical engineer. Madelung studied at several German Technical Universities before his service as a pilot in the First World War. After the war he lectured and worked in Germany and the United States, working on a number of significant aeronautical achievements. Madelung joined the Nazi Party in 1937, and during the Second World War was involved with aeronautical warfare research, including work with Wernher von Braun's rocket program. After the cessation of hostilities, Madelung resumed academic work in both Germany and the USA. Madelung's...
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Raoul Bricard
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Raoul Bricard was a French engineer and a mathematician. He is best known for his work in geometry, especially descriptive geometry and scissors congruence, and kinematics, especially mechanical linkages.
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Le Corbusier
1887 - 1965 (78 years)
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret , known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and acquired French nationality by naturalization on 19 September 1930. His career spanned five decades, in which he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, as well as North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".
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Vitruvius
80 BC - 15 BC (65 years)
Vitruvius was a Roman architect and engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work titled . As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory, as well as a major source on the canon of classical architecture. It is not clear to what extent his contemporaries regarded his book as original or important.
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German-American architect, academic, and interior designer. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture.
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Antoni Gaudí
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
Antoni Gaudí was a Catalan architect and designer from Spain, known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works have a highly individualized, sui generis style. Most are located in Barcelona, including his main work, the church of the Sagrada Família.
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Alvar Aalto
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. He never regarded himself as an artist, seeing painting and sculpture as "branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture." Aalto's early career ran in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his clients were industrialists, among them the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, who became his patrons. The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is ...
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Otto Wagner
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Otto Koloman Wagner was an Austrian architect, furniture designer and urban planner. He was a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau movement. Many of his works are found in his native city of Vienna, and illustrate the rapid evolution of architecture during the period. His early works were inspired by classical architecture. By mid-1890s, he had already designed several buildings in what became known as the Vienna Secession style. Beginning in 1898, with his designs of Vienna Metro stations, his style became floral and Art Nouveau, with decoration by Koloman Moser.
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Victor Horta
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Victor Pierre Horta was a Belgian architect and designer, and one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement. He was a fervent admirer of the French architectural theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and his Hôtel Tassel in Brussels , often considered the first Art Nouveau house, is based on the work of Viollet-le-Duc. The curving stylized vegetal forms that Horta used in turn influenced many others, including the French architect Hector Guimard, who used it in the first Art Nouveau apartment building he designed in Paris and in the entrances he designed for the Paris Metro. He is also considered ...
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Henry van de Velde
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henry Clemens van de Velde was a Belgian painter, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. Together with Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, he is considered one of the founders of Art Nouveau in Belgium. He worked in Paris with Siegfried Bing, the founder of the first gallery of Art Nouveau in Paris. Van de Velde spent the most important part of his career in Germany and became a major figure in the German Jugendstil. He had a decisive influence on German architecture and design at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Josef Hoffmann
1870 - 1956 (86 years)
Josef Hoffmann was an Austrian-Moravian architect and designer. He was among the founders of Vienna Secession and co-establisher of the Wiener Werkstätte. His most famous architectural work is the Stoclet Palace, in Brussels, a pioneering work of Modern Architecture, Art Deco and peak of Vienna Secession architecture.
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Nikola Tesla
1856 - 1943 (87 years)
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist. He is best-known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.
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