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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#1051
Elisabeth Pate-Cornell
#35937
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marie-Elisabeth Lucienne Paté-Cornell, , is a Stanford University Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and was the Founding Chair of the Department. Pate-Cornell is an expert in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001,...
Go to Profile#1052
Richard F. Ericson
#23478
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Richard Ferdinand Ericson was an American organizational theorist, professor emeritus of management and director of the Interdisciplinary Systems and Cybernetics Project, Program of Policy Studies in Science and Technology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#1053
Victor Pasmore
#12928
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Edwin John Victor Pasmore, CH, CBE was a British artist. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Early life Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey, on 3 December 1908. He studied at Summer Fields School in Oxford and Harrow in west London, but with the death of his father in 1927 he was forced to take an administrative job at the London County Council. He studied painting part-time at the Central School of Art and was associated with the formation of the Euston Road School. After experimenting with abstraction, Pasmore worked for a time in a lyrical figur...
Go to Profile#1054
Simon Ostrach
#29864
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Simon Ostrach was an American academic and a pioneer in the fields of buoyancy-driven flows and microgravity science. Early life and education Ostrach was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Engineering from Rhode Island State College, followed by an additional Master of Science and a PhD from Brown University, both in Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1055
Ingeborg Hochmair
#18598
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer is an Austrian electrical engineer and the CEO and CTO of hearing implant company MED-EL. Dr Hochmair and her husband Prof. Erwin Hochmair co-created the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant in the world. She received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions towards the development of the modern cochlear implant. She also received the 2015 Russ Prize for bioengineering.
Go to Profile#1056
Wolfgang Tillmans
#8633
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. Tillmans was the first photographer, and first non-British person, to be awarded the Turner Prize. He has been the subject of large-scale retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and Moderna Museet. In 2023, Tillmans was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time. He lives in Berlin and London.
Go to Profile#1057
John Ballato
#22447
Overall Influence
John Ballato is an American materials scientist, entrepreneur, and academic. He holds the J. E. Sirrine Endowed Chair of Optical Fiber and is a professor of materials science and engineering, electrical and computer engineering, as well as physics and astronomy at Clemson University. He has received many international recognitions for his research on optical and optoelectronic materials, particularly as relates to optical fiber.
Go to Profile#1058
Jeff Wall
#5910
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Go to Profile#1059
Julio Palmaz
#8340
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Julio Palmaz is a doctor of vascular radiology at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He studied at the National University of La Plata in Argentina, earning his medical degree in 1971. He then practiced vascular radiology at the San Martin University Hospital in La Plata before moving to the University of Texas Health and Science Center at San Antonio. He is known for inventing the balloon-expandable stent, for which he received a patent filed in 1985. It was recognized in Intellectual Property International Magazine as one of "Ten Patents that Changed the World" in the last century.
Go to Profile#1060
Bill Kovacs
#26526
Overall Influence
1949 - 2006 (57 years)
Bill Kovacs was a pioneer of commercial computer animation technology. Early career Kovacs received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. He worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill while getting a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale University . He was then transferred to the Chicago Office, where he worked on a computer-aided design system.
Go to Profile#1061
Wu Liangyong
#19554
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
Wu Liangyong is a Chinese architect and urban planner. He was a former professor in urban planning, architecture, and design. In preparation to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, he was leading the team that studied the buildings of the games. He is considered the most influential architect and urban planner in China.
Go to Profile#1062
Bruno Reichlin
#42971
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruno Reichlin is a Swiss architect. Biography Reichlin studied at the Polytechnic of Zürich. In the 1970s he got associated with Fabio Reinhart and opened a practice in Lugano. They were strongly influenced by Italian architect Aldo Rossi.
Go to Profile#1063
Eilfried Huth
#51666
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Eilfried Huth is an Austrian architect who lives and works in Graz. Huth is best known for participatory housing projects, in which future residents of the housing estates are included in the planning process.
Go to Profile#1064
George Ranalli
#28683
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
George Joseph Ranalli is an American modernist architect, scholar, curator, and fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He is based in New York City. Early life and education A native of The Bronx, New York, of Italian American descent, he was inspired to become an architect at the age of about 13 when he saw the then-unfinished Guggenheim Museum, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Ranalli attended Mount Saint Michael Academy high school in New York City and graduated in 1964. From 1967 to 1968, he attended New York Institute of Technology, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture in 1972.
Go to Profile#1065
Sam Brinton
#28171
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Samuel Otis Brinton is an American nuclear engineer and LGBTQ activist. They served as the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy from June to December 2022. Brinton is no longer employed by the Office of Nuclear Energy after being charged with luggage theft twice.
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Saraju Mohanty
#12267
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Saraju Mohanty is an Indian-American professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the director of the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory, at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Mohanty received a Glorious India Award – Rich and Famous NRIs of America in 2017 for his contributions to the discipline. Mohanty is a researcher in the areas of "smart electronics for smart cities/villages", "smart healthcare", "application-Specific things for efficient edge computing", and "methodologies for digital and mixed-signal hardware". He has made significant research cont...
Go to Profile#1067
Takayuki Ohira
#26747
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Takayuki Ohira is a Japanese engineer and the creator of the Megastar, a planetarium projector which was recorded in Guinness World Records as the planetarium projector that can project the highest number of stars in the world. Ohira has also designed the Sega Homestar, a home planetarium projector for Sega. According to the Japan Planetarium Association, the popularity of this educational toy has contributed to an increase in visitors to full-sized planetaria in Japan. The newest model, released in 2019, is called Homestar Flux.
Go to Profile#1068
Adrian Forty
#27640
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Adrian Forty is an Emeritus Professor of Architectural History at The Bartlett, the Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. He is also the former Programme Director of the master's programme in Architectural History.
Go to Profile#1069
Thierry Mugler
#1241
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Manfred Thierry Mugler was a French fashion designer, creative director and creative adviser of Mugler. In the 1970s, Mugler launched his eponymous fashion house; and quickly rose to prominence in the following decades for his avant-garde, architectural, hyperfeminine and theatrical approach to haute couture. He was one of the first designers to champion diversity in his runway shows, which often tackled racism and ageism, and incorporated non-traditional models such as drag queens, porn stars, and transgender women. In 2002, he retired from the brand, and returned in 2013 as the creative adv...
Go to Profile#1070
Shrikanth Narayanan
#32123
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Shrikanth Narayanan is an Indian-American Professor at the University of Southern California. He is an interdisciplinary engineer-scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core. A prolific award-winning researcher, educator, and inventor, with hundreds of publications and a number of acclaimed patents to his credit, he has pioneered several research areas including in computational speech science, speech and human language technologies, audio, music and multimedia engineering, human sensing and imaging...
Go to Profile#1071
Joachim Maier
#60347
Overall Influence
#1072
John Burns
#16266
Overall Influence
John Burns is a British recording engineer best known for his credits with noted bands of the 1970s including Jethro Tull, Clouds, Genesis, John Martyn and reggae acts Burning Spear, Delroy Washington, Jimmy Cliff and Toots & The Maytals.
Go to Profile#1073
Jacob van Rijs
#34701
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jacob van Rijs Ir. FRIBA is a Dutch architect, urban planner and one of MVRDV’s three founding partners. Besides giving lectures worldwide van Rijs is also professor Entwerfen und Baukonstruktion at the Technical University of Berlin. Moreover, he regularly lectures and takes part in student juriesat universities and institutes worldwide. His teaching experience comprehends TU Munich, TU Delft, University of Wismar, ETSAM University Madrid, Royal Academy of Arts Copenhagen, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Rice University, Houston, amongst others. Within the Royal Institute of Dutch Archite...
Go to Profile#1074
Dharendra Yogi Goswami
#54704
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Dharendra Yogi Goswami is an U.S. inventor, entrepreneur, author, and educator. He has few times advised the US Congress on energy policy and the transition to renewable energy. Goswami is a Distinguished Professor and the director of the Clean Energy Research Center at the University of South Florida. He is the emeritus editor-in-chief of the journal Solar Energy, and has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles and a number of books and book chapters. He is also the inventor of the Goswami thermodynamic cycle. His inventions have been commercialized and in 2016 Goswami was inducted into Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.
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Bimal Kumar Bose
#24503
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Bimal Kumar Bose , also known as B. K. Bose, is an electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, scientist, educator, and currently a professor emeritus of power electronics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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Martin Parr
#7825
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
Go to Profile#1077
Thomas J. Kelly
#26722
Overall Influence
1929 - 2002 (73 years)
Thomas Joseph Kelly was an American aerospace engineer. Kelly primarily worked on the Apollo Lunar Module, which earned him the name of "Father of the Lunar Module" from NASA. Kelly graduated from Cornell University in 1951, where he was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. Afterwards, Kelly obtained his MS degree from Columbia University and Ph.D. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.
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Jürgen Jasperneite
#32000
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jürgen Jasperneite is a German Engineer and Professor for Computer networks at the OWL University in Lemgo, North Rhine-Westphalia. Here he is the founding director of the Fraunhofer IOSB-INA in Lemgo and a board member of the University Institute Industrial IT .
Go to Profile#1079
John Newman
#52376
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Scott Newman is an American retired academic. A professor and renowned battery and electrochemical engineer researcher, he worked at the University of California in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The Newman Research Group was established with the goal of identifying "efficient and economical methods for electrochemical energy conversion and storage, development of mathematical models to predict the behavior of electrochemical systems and to identify important process parameters, and experimental verification of the completeness and accuracy of the models". Newman also worked for...
Go to Profile#1080
Yoneichiro Sakaki
#43562
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
is a Japanese electrical engineer. From 1976 to 1984, he served as the first president of the Toyohashi University of Technology. His son Yoshiyuki Sakaki currently serves as the sixth president of TUT.
Go to Profile#1081
Christoph Ingenhoven
#28435
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christoph Ingenhoven is a German architect. He established his architecture practice ingenhoven associates in Düsseldorf in 1985. His major works include Lufthansa HQ in Frankfurt ,. 1 Bligh in Sydney , Marina One in Singapore , Toranomon Hills Towers in Tokyo and Stuttgart Main Station
Go to Profile#1082
Hassan Farhangi
#37201
Overall Influence
Hassan Farhangi is Professor Emeritus at BCIT School of Energy and Retired Director of Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Burnaby, Canada, and an adjunct professor at the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University. He is known for his pioneering work in the design and development of Canada's first Smart Microgrid on Burnaby Campus of British Columbia Institute of Technology from 2007 onwards, as well as for establishing and leading an NSERC Pan-Canadian Strategic Research Network in Smart Microgrids, consisting of a large...
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Nils Ahrbom
#44357
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Nils Olof Ahrbom was a Swedish architect, known for a large number of school buildings in Sweden. Biography Nils Ahrbom was educated in 1927 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he was a classmate of Helge Zimdal. After graduating, he worked for five years with Ivar Tengbom, where he was an important employee at the creation of Esseltehuset in Stockholm .
Go to Profile#1084
Kas Oosterhuis
#39767
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kas Oosterhuis is a Dutch architect, professor and co-founder of the innovation studio ONL together with visual artist Ilona Lénárd. He was a professor at Delft University of Technology from 2000 to 2016 and has been a professor at Qatar University since 2017. His office, ONL, has realized a number of innovative, contemporary architecture projects including the Salt Water Pavilion at Neeltje Jans, the Web of North Holland at the 2002 World Expo in Haarlemmermeer, the A2 Cockpit in the Sounder Barrier at Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht and the Liwa Tower in Abu Dhabi.
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Wiktor Zin
#18798
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Wiktor Zin was a Polish architect, graphic artist, professor, architectural preservationist, cultural activist, and promoter of Polish history and culture. Biography Zin finished architectural studies at Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza in Kraków. In 1952 he received his doctorate, with further advancement in his professorial degrees in 1959, 1967, and 1979.
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Ellen Arruda
#40635
Overall Influence
Ellen Marie Arruda is an American mechanical engineer known for her research on the mechanical properties of polymers and on tissue engineering, with applications including the design of improved football helmets, artificial tooth enamel that can withstand high-shock and high-vibration environments, and nanolayered composite materials that are lightweight, as strong as steel, and transparent. The Arruda–Boyce model for the behavior of rubber-like polymers is named for her and her doctoral advisor Mary Cunningham Boyce, with whom she published it in 1993. She is Maria Comninou Collegiate Profes...
Go to Profile#1087
John Doyle
#41447
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Comstock Doyle is the John G Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and BioEngineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in control theory and his current research interests are in theoretical foundations for complex networks in engineering, biology, and multiscale physics.
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Mete Sozen
#21535
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Mete Avni Sözen was Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, United States from 1992 to 2018. Academic career Sozen earned his undergraduate education at the Engineering School of Robert College in Istanbul , and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He earned his Ph.D. under the direction of Chester P. Siess and Nathan M. Newmark performing experimental studies to develop theories governing the shear strength of prestressed concrete girders. He then began his academic career at University o...
Go to Profile#1089
Ray Harryhausen
#2142
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Raymond Frederick Harryhausen was an American-British animator and special effects creator who created a form of stop motion model animation known as "Dynamation". His works include the animation for Mighty Joe Young with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien ; his first color film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad ; and Jason and the Argonauts , which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans , after which he retired.
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Neville A. Stanton
#59751
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Neville A. Stanton is a British Professor Emeritus of Human Factors and Ergonomics at the University of Southampton. Prof Stanton is a Chartered Engineer , Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Ergonomist . He has written and edited over sixty books and over four hundred peer-reviewed journal papers on applications of the subject. Stanton is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of The Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors and a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He has been published in academic journals including Nature. He has also helped organis...
Go to Profile#1091
Amalia Ercoli Finzi
#52185
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Amalia Ercoli Finzi is an Italian engineer and professor, Principal Investigator of the SD2 drill aboard the Philae spacecraft. Early life and education Ercoli Finzi was born at Gallarate, near Milan.
Go to Profile#1092
Abdol-Aziz Mirza Farmanfarmaian
#28194
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Abdolaziz Farmanfarmaian was an Iranian architect, offspring of Iranian nobleman Abdol Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma and a member of the Qajar dynasty of Iran. In 1976, the company known as AFFA was created for the design of the Aryamehr Stadium which after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 was renamed to Azadi Stadium.
Go to Profile#1093
Stefano Boeri
#15771
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Stefano Boeri is an Italian architect and urban planner, and a founding partner of Stefano Boeri Architetti. Among his most known projects are the Vertical Forest in Milan, the Villa Méditerranée in Marseille, and the House of the Sea of La Maddalena. He is the professor of urban planning at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
Go to Profile#1094
Peyman Milanfar
#47632
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Peyman Milanfar is a Distinguished Scientist / Sr. Director at Google Research, where he leads the Computational Imaging team. Prior to this, he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of California Santa Cruz, from 1999 to 2014. He was Associate Dean for Research at the School of Engineering from 2010 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014 he was on leave at Google-x, where he helped develop the imaging pipeline for Google Glass. Most recently, his team at Google developed the digital zoom pipeline for the Pixel phones, which includes the multi-frame super-resolution "Super Res Zoom" technology, and the RAISR upscaling algorithm.
Go to Profile#1095
William Gosling
#31998
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
William Gosling is a British electrical engineer, Emeritus Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bath, and pioneer of system design in electrical engineering. Biography Gosling received his ARCS at the Imperial College in London in 1953 under George Paget Thomson, and spent his career both in industry and education. Early 1960s he wrote a series of books, which contributed to the establishment of systems design and systems engineering.
Go to Profile#1096
Lars Arendt-Nielsen
#59164
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Lars Arendt-Nielsen is a professor at Aalborg University specialising in translational pain research and bio-markers. Lars Arendt-Nielsen's research is highly recognised internationally, and in addition to his university work he has established several businesses.
Go to Profile#1097
James J. Stoker
#14818
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
James Johnston Stoker was an American applied mathematician and engineer. He was director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is considered one of the founders of the institute, Courant and Friedrichs being the others. Stoker is known for his work in differential geometry and theory of water waves. He is also the author of the now classic book Water Waves: The Mathematical Theory with Applications.
Go to Profile#1098
Bjarni Tryggvason
#13962
Overall Influence
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Bjarni Valdimar Tryggvason was an Icelandic-born Canadian engineer and a NRC/CSA astronaut. He served as a Payload Specialist on Space Shuttle mission STS-85 in 1997, a 12-day mission to study changes in the Earth's atmosphere.
Go to Profile#1099
Ingo Rechenberg
#2516
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Ingo Rechenberg was a German researcher and professor in the field of bionics. Rechenberg was a pioneer of the fields of evolutionary computation and artificial evolution. In the 1960s and 1970s he invented a highly influential set of optimization methods known as evolution strategies . His group successfully applied the new algorithms to challenging problems such as aerodynamic wing design. These were the first serious technical applications of artificial evolution, an important subset of the still growing field of bionics.
Go to Profile#1100
Pedro J. J. Alvarez
#37815
Overall Influence
Pedro J.J. Alvarez is the George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, where he also serves as Director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Engineering Research Center on Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment .
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