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,
#10501
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.
Go to Profile#10502
Hendrik Wade Bode
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Hendrik Wade Bode was an American engineer, researcher, inventor, author and scientist, of Dutch ancestry. As a pioneer of modern control theory and electronic telecommunications he revolutionized both the content and methodology of his chosen fields of research. His synergy with Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, laid the foundations for the technological convergence of the information age.
Go to Profile#10503
Raymond Unwin
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Sir Raymond Unwin was a prominent and influential English engineer, architect and town planner, with an emphasis on improvements in working class housing. Early years Raymond Unwin was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire and grew up in Oxford, after his father sold up his business and moved there to study. He was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford. In 1884 he returned to the North to become an apprentice engineer for Stavely Iron & Coal Company near Chesterfield.
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Hack Kampmann
1856 - 1920 (64 years)
Hack Kampmann was a Danish architect, Royal Inspector of Listed State Buildings in Jutland and professor at the architecture department of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Marselisborg Palace in Aarhus, built between 1899 and 1902, is among his best known works.
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Colen Campbell
1676 - 1729 (53 years)
Colen Campbell was a pioneering Scottish architect and architectural writer, credited as a founder of the Georgian style. For most of his career, he resided in Italy and England. As well as his architectural designs he is known for Vitruvius Britannicus, three volumes of high-quality engravings showing the great houses of the time.
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Károly Zipernowsky
1853 - 1942 (89 years)
Károly Zipernowsky was an Austriann-born Hungarian electrical engineer. He invented the transformer with his colleagues at the famous Hungarian manufacturing company Ganz Works and he contributed significantly with his works also to other AC technologies.
Go to Profile#10507
Sophocles
496 BC - 406 BC (90 years)
Sophocles was an ancient Greek tragedian, known as one of three from whom at least one play has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia.
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Claude Lorrain
1600 - 1682 (82 years)
Claude Lorrain was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in Italy, and is one of the earliest important artists, apart from his contemporaries in Dutch Golden Age painting, to concentrate on landscape painting. His landscapes are usually turned into the more prestigious genre of history paintings by the addition of a few small figures, typically representing a scene from the Bible or classical mythology.
Go to Profile#10509
Corradino D'Ascanio
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
General Corradino D'Ascanio was an Italian aeronautical engineer. D'Ascanio designed the first production helicopter, for Agusta, and designed the first motor scooter for Ferdinando Innocenti. After the two fell out, D'Ascanio helped Enrico Piaggio produce the original Vespa.
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Ernest Cormier
1885 - 1980 (95 years)
Ernest Cormier OC was a Canadian engineer and architect. He spent much of his career in the Montreal area, designing notable examples of Art Deco architecture, including the Université de Montréal original main building, the Supreme Court of Canada Building in Ottawa, and the Cormier House .
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Pierre Charles L'Enfant
1754 - 1825 (71 years)
Pierre "Peter" Charles L'Enfant was an American-French military engineer who in 1791 designed the basic plan for Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. His work is known today as the L'Enfant Plan. He also inspired the street plan for Detroit, Michigan.
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Joseph Bazalgette
1819 - 1891 (72 years)
Sir Joseph William Bazalgette CB was an English civil engineer. As chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works, his major achievement was the creation of a sewerage system for central London which was instrumental in relieving the city of cholera epidemics, while beginning to clean the River Thames. He was also the designer of Hammersmith Bridge.
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Helmut Gröttrup
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1950 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. After returning to West Germany in December 1953, he developed data processing systems, contributed to early commercial applications of computer science and coined the German term "Informatik". In 1967 Gröttrup invented the smart card as a "forgery-proof key" for secure identificati...
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François Mansart
1598 - 1666 (68 years)
François Mansart was a French architect credited with introducing classicism into Baroque architecture of France. The Encyclopædia Britannica cites him as the most accomplished of 17th-century French architects whose works "are renowned for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance".
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Zhang Heng
78 - 139 (61 years)
Zhang Heng , formerly romanized as Chang Heng, was a Chinese polymathic scientist and statesman who lived during the Han dynasty. Educated in the capital cities of Luoyang and Chang'an, he achieved success as an astronomer, mathematician, seismologist, hydraulic engineer, inventor, geographer, cartographer, ethnographer, artist, poet, philosopher, politician, and literary scholar.
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Alexey Dushkin
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Alexey Nikolayevich Dushkin was a Soviet architect, best known for his 1930s designs of the Kropotkinskaya and Mayakovskaya stations of the Moscow Metro. He worked primarily for subway and railroads and is also noted for his Red Gate Building, one of the Seven Sisters.
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Dimitris Pikionis
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Demetrios Pikionis was a Greek architect, and also painter, of the 20th century who had a considerable influence on modern Greek architecture. He was a founding member of the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA-Hellas, International Association of Art Critics. His oeuvre includes buildings and urban planning in Athens and the entirety of Greece—including several schools and a playground in Filothei, Athens.
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Friedrich von Gärtner
1791 - 1847 (56 years)
Friedrich von Gärtner was a German architect. Biography His father was also an architect, and moved in 1804 to Munich, where young Gärtner received his first education in architecture. To complete that education, he went in 1812 to Paris, where he studied under Percier, and in 1814 to Italy, where he spent four years in the earnest study of antiquities. The fruits of this labor appeared in 1819 in some views accompanied by descriptions of the principal monuments of Sicily .
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Willy Messerschmitt
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Wilhelm Emil "Willy" Messerschmitt was a German aircraft designer and manufacturer. In 1934, in collaboration with Walter Rethel, he designed the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which became the most important fighter aircraft in the Luftwaffe as Germany rearmed prior to World War II. It remains the second most-produced warplane in history, with some 34,000 built, behind the Soviet Ilyushin Il-2. Another Messerschmitt aircraft, first called "Bf 109R", purpose-built for record setting, but later redesignated Messerschmitt Me 209, broke the absolute world airspeed record and held the world speed record for propeller-driven aircraft until 1969.
Go to Profile#10520
Charles Holden
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Charles Henry Holden was an English architect best known for designing many London Underground stations during the 1920s and 1930s, for Bristol Central Library, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London's headquarters at 55 Broadway and for the University of London's Senate House. He created many war cemeteries in Belgium and northern France for the Imperial War Graves Commission.
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Ange-Jacques Gabriel
1698 - 1782 (84 years)
Ange-Jacques Gabriel was the principal architect of King Louis XV of France. His major works included the Place de la Concorde, the École Militaire, and the Petit Trianon and opera theater at the Palace of Versailles. His style was a careful balance between French Baroque architecture and French neoclassicism.
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Filippo Juvarra
1678 - 1736 (58 years)
Filippo Juvarra was an Italian architect, scenographer, engraver and goldsmith. He was active in a late-Baroque architecture style, working primarily in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Biography Juvarra was born in Messina, Sicily, to a family of goldsmiths and engravers. After spending his formative years with his family in Sicily where he designed Messina's festive settings for the coronation of Philip V of Spain and Sicily , Juvarra moved to Rome in 1704. There he studied architecture with Carlo and Francesco Fontana.
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Bertolt Brecht
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht , known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the .
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Carl Ludvig Engel
1778 - 1840 (62 years)
Carl Ludvig Engel, or Johann Carl Ludwig Engel , was a German architect whose most noted work can be found in Helsinki, which he helped rebuild. His works include most of the buildings around the capital's monumental centre, the Senate Square and the buildings surrounding it. The buildings are Helsinki Cathedral, The Senate , the Helsinki City Hall, and the library and the main building of Helsinki University.
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Welton Becket
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Welton David Becket was an American modern architect who designed many buildings in Los Angeles, California. Biography Becket was born in Seattle, Washington and graduated from the University of Washington program in Architecture in 1927 with a Bachelor of Architecture degree .
Go to Profile#10526
Ernest Flagg
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
Ernest Flagg was an American architect in the Beaux-Arts style. He was also an advocate for urban reform and architecture's social responsibility. Early life and education Flagg was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father Jared Bradley Flagg was an Episcopal priest and a notable painter. Ernest left school at 15 to work as an office boy on Wall Street. After working with his father and brothers in real estate for a few years, he designed duplex apartment plans in 1880 with the architect Philip Gengembre Hubert, for the co-operative apartment buildings Hubert was known.
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John Milne
1850 - 1913 (63 years)
John Milne was a British geologist and mining engineer who worked on a horizontal seismograph. Biography Milne was born in Liverpool, England, the only child of John Milne of Milnrow, and at first raised in Tunshill and later moved to Richmond, London, and then in 1895 to the Isle of Wight with his wife. He was educated at King's College London and the Royal School of Mines.
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Heinrich Tessenow
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Heinrich Tessenow was a German architect, professor, and urban planner active in the Weimar era. Biography Tessenow is considered together with Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens, Fritz Höger, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe as one of the most important personalities of the architectural German panorama during the time of the Weimar Republic.
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James Wyatt
1746 - 1813 (67 years)
James Wyatt was an English architect, a rival of Robert Adam in the neoclassical and neo-Gothic styles. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1785 and was its president from 1805 to 1806. Early life Wyatt was born on 3 August 1746 at Weeford, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, England.
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Giuseppe Gabrielli
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Giuseppe Gabrielli was an Italian aeronautics engineer. He is famous as the designer of numerous Italian military aircraft, including the Fiat G.50 Freccia and G.55 World War II fighters. Biography Giuseppe Gabrielli was born in Caltanissetta, Sicily, and studied at the Politecnico di Torino and at the Technische Hochschule of Aachen, Germany under Theodore von Kármán. Gabrielli began his work as designer at Piaggio, but was soon called to FIAT by Giovanni Agnelli to lead his aeronautics section.
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Mimar Kemaleddin
1870 - 1927 (57 years)
Ahmed Kemaleddin , widely known as Mimar Kemaleddin was a renowned Turkish architect during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. He was among the pioneers of the first national architectural movement, a type of Ottoman Revivalism. His lifetime saw intense and important changes for Turkish history and culture.
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Elisha Gray
1835 - 1901 (66 years)
Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him. Although Gray had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years previously, Bell's telephone patent was upheld in numerous court decisions.
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Raphael Soriano
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Raphael S. Soriano, FAIA, was an architect and educator, who helped define a period of 20th-century architecture that came to be known as Mid-century modern. He pioneered the use of modular prefabricated steel and aluminum structures in residential and commercial design and construction.
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Charles Robert Cockerell
1788 - 1863 (75 years)
Charles Robert Cockerell was an English architect, archaeologist, and writer. He studied architecture under Robert Smirke. He went on an extended Grand Tour lasting seven years, mainly spent in Greece. He was involved in major archaeological discoveries while in Greece. On returning to London, he set up a successful architectural practice. Appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, he served in that position between 1839 and 1859. He wrote many articles and books on both archaeology and architecture. In 1848, he became the first recipient of the Royal Gold Medal.
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Charles Bulfinch
1763 - 1844 (81 years)
Charles Bulfinch was an early American architect, and has been regarded by many as the first American-born professional architect to practice. Life Bulfinch split his career between his native Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., where he served as Commissioner of Public Building and built the intermediate United States Capitol rotunda and dome. His works are notable for their simplicity, balance, and good taste, and as the origin of a distinctive Federal style of classical domes, columns, and ornament that dominated early 19th-century American architecture.
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Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola
1507 - 1573 (66 years)
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola , often simply called Vignola, was one of the great Italian architects of 16th century Mannerism. His two great masterpieces are the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Jesuits' Church of the Gesù in Rome. The three architects who spread the Italian Renaissance style throughout Western Europe are Vignola, Serlio and Palladio. He is often considered the most important architect in Rome in the Mannerist era.
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Wells Coates
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Wells Wintemute Coates OBE was an architect, designer and writer. He was, for most of his life, an expatriate Canadian who is best known for his work in England, the most notable of which is the Modernist block of flats known as the Isokon building in Hampstead, London.
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A. Quincy Jones
1913 - 1979 (66 years)
Archibald Quincy Jones was a Los Angeles-based architect and educator known for innovative buildings in the modernist style and for urban planning that pioneered the use of greenbeltss and green design.
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Martin Wagner
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Martin Wagner was a German architect, city planner, and author, best known as the driving force behind the construction of modernist housing projects in interwar Berlin. Germany Tall, angular, loyally Socialist, and uncompromising in his opinions, Wagner was educated at the Technical University of Berlin and worked as a draftsman in the office of planner Hermann Muthesius, before being appointed the City Building Commissioner for Schöneberg in 1918 .
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William Burn
1789 - 1870 (81 years)
William Burn was a Scottish architect. He received major commissions from the age of 20 until his death at 81. He built in many styles and was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial Revival, often referred to as the golden age of Scottish architecture.
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Aleister Crowley
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, philosopher, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
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Serge Chermayeff
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Serge Ivan Chermayeff was a Russian-born British architect, industrial designer, writer, and co-founder of several architectural societies, including the American Society of Planners and Architects.
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John Vanbrugh
1664 - 1726 (62 years)
Sir John Vanbrugh was an English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife , which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy. He was knighted in 1714.
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Robert Smirke
1780 - 1867 (87 years)
Sir Robert Smirke was an English architect, one of the leaders of Greek Revival architecture, though he also used other architectural styles. As architect to the Board of Works, he designed several major public buildings, including the main block and façade of the British Museum. He was a pioneer of the use of concrete foundations.
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Robert Stephenson
1803 - 1859 (56 years)
Robert Stephenson FRS HFRSE FRSA DCL was an English civil engineer and designer of locomotives. The only son of George Stephenson, the "Father of Railways", he built on the achievements of his father. Robert has been called the greatest engineer of the 19th century.
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Johann Friedrich Höger
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Johann Friedrich Höger was a German architect from Bekenreihe, Steinburg, Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany. Although never qualified as an architect, he became known for his Brick Expressionist style of architecture.
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Franz Grashof
1826 - 1893 (67 years)
Franz Grashof was a German engineer. He was a professor of Applied Mechanics at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe. Biography Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, as the son of Elisabeth Brüggemann and Karl Grashof, who taught at an upper secondary school, Franz Grashof visited the elementary and lower secondary school in Düsseldorf and the industrial school in Hagen.
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Adolf Meyer
1881 - 1929 (48 years)
Adolf Meyer was a German architect. A student and employee of both Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, Meyer became the office boss of the firm of Walter Gropius around 1915 and a full partner afterwards. In 1919, Gropius appointed Meyer as a master at the Bauhaus, where he taught work drawing and construction technique. Meyer is also credited as co-designer of the Gropius entry for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition.
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Frank Bunker Gilbreth
1868 - 1924 (56 years)
Frank Bunker Gilbreth was an American engineer, consultant, and author known as an early advocate of scientific management and a pioneer of time and motion study, and is perhaps best known as the father and central figure of Cheaper by the Dozen.
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Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was an American landscape architect and city planner known for his wildlife conservation efforts. He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, and worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. He gained national recognition by filling in for his father on the Park Improvement Commission for the District of Columbia beginning in 1901, and by contributing to the famous McMillan Commission Plan for redesigning Washington according to a revised version of the original L’Enfant plan. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Fall...
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