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
Lloyd H. Donnell
1895 - 1997 (102 years)
Lloyd Hamilton Donnell was an American mechanical engineer, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is considered internationally renowned expert in engineering mechanics, specifically known for his work on shell analysis and thin-shell structure. He was recipient of the 1969 ASME Medal.
Go to Profile#10502
Don Torrieri
942 - Present (1084 years)
Don J. Torrieri is an American electrical engineer and mathematician. His primary research interests are communication systems, adaptive arrays, and signal processing. He is a Fellow of the US Army Research Laboratory, where he was employed for most of his career. He has authored many articles and several books including "Principles of Spread-Spectrum Communication Systems, 4th edition" . He has taught many graduate courses at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland and many short courses. Don Torrieri received the B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, the MS.
Go to Profile#10503
Frederick Terman
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Frederick Emmons Terman was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.
Go to Profile#10504
William B. Kouwenhoven
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
William Bennet Kouwenhoven , also known as the "Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation," is famous for his contributions to the development of the closed-chest cardiac massage and his invention of the cardiac defibrillator. After obtaining his doctorate degree in engineering from the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Germany, Kouwenhoven began his career as the dean at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Kouwenhoven focused his research mainly on improving and saving lives of patients through the application of electricity. With the help and cooperation of the Johns Hopkins School of ...
Go to Profile#10505
Maurice Anthony Biot
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Maurice Anthony Biot was a Belgian-American applied physicist. He made contributions in thermodynamics, aeronautics, geophysics, earthquake engineering, and electromagnetism. Particularly, he was accredited as the founder of the theory of poroelasticity.
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Stephen Timoshenko
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Stepan Prokopovich Timoshenko , later known as Stephen Timoshenko, was an ethnic Ukrainian, citizen of the Russian Empire and later, an American engineer and academician. He is considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. An inventor and one of the pioneering mechanical engineers at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in the Russi...
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Forest Baskett
Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration, and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.
Go to Profile#10508
King-Sun Fu
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.
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Jesse Francis McClendon
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.
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Gerald T. Heydt
Gerald Thomas Heydt is an American electrical engineer and Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Heydt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to the technology of electric power quality.
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Dallas B. Phemister
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.
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Robert J. Linhardt
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary appointment at RPI is based in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting of joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center. He is highly cited in his field, with over 100 papers having each over 100 citations.
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Yeram S. Touloukian
1920 - 1981 (61 years)
Yeram Sarkis Touloukian was an American professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Thermophysical Properties Research Center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was world-renowned for his work in thermophysics and his name has become synonymous with the field of thermophysical properties.
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Katsutada Sezawa
1895 - 1944 (49 years)
Katsutada Sezawa was a Japanese geophysicist . Sezawa's key work was on the mathematical aspects of wave transmission in media of different viscosities and the Sezawa wave mode of surface waves is named after him.
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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Paul Davidoff
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Paul Davidoff was an American planner, planning educator, and planning theoretician who conceptualized "advocacy planning" with his wife, Linda Stone Davidoff. In legal scholarship, he is known as the primary litigant in the Mount Laurel decision, which established a state-constitutional basis for inclusionary zoning in New Jersey, a doctrine which has been accepted in other United States jurisdictions. Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute and the urban planning department at Hunter College, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University during his career...
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Hardy Cross
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Hardy Cross was an American structural engineer and the developer of the moment distribution method for structural analysis of statically indeterminate structures. The method was in general use from c. 1935 until c. 1960 when it was gradually superseded by other methods.
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Ernest Edwin Sechler
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Ernest Edwin Sechler was an aerospace engineer and scientist who specialized in thin-shell structures. He earned his doctorate in 1934 at Caltech as one of the early students of Theodore von Kármán with a dissertation on the mechanics of thin-plate compression.
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Edward C. Molina
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Edward Charles Dixon Molina was an American engineer, known for his contributions to teletraffic engineering. Biography Edward Molina was born on December 13, 1877. After completing high school, he went to work, and was self-taught in mathematics. He began working for the Western Electric Company in 1898 at the age of 21 and entered the AT&T research department in 1901. His invention of relay translators in 1906 resulted in the panel dial systems. In his studies of telephone traffic, Molina independently rediscovered the Poisson distribution in 1908. It was briefly named in his honor among American telephone engineers until the prior art was recovered.
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Rudolf Kompfner
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Rudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born inventor, physicist and architect, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube . Life Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England , where he worked as an architect until 1941. He had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943.
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John R. Ragazzini
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
John Ralph Ragazzini was an American electrical engineer and a professor of Electrical Engineering. Biography Ragazzini was born in Manhattan, New York City from Italian immigrants Luigi Ragazzini and Angelina Badelli and received the degrees of B.S. and E.E. at the City College of New York in 1932 and 1933 and earned the degrees of A.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 1939 and 1941.
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Vikram Sarabhai
1919 - 1971 (52 years)
Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped to develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.
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Robert Lumiansky
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Robert Mayer Lumiansky was an American scholar of Medieval English and president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Robert Lumiansky received a bachelor's degree from The Citadel, a master's degree from the University of South Carolina, and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina. He was professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1973 and professor of English at New York University from 1975 to 1983. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Clark Blanchard Millikan
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Clark Blanchard Millikan was a distinguished professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology , and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. Biography Millikan's parents were noted physicist Robert A. Millikan and Greta Erwin Blanchard. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduated from Yale College in 1924, then earned his PhD in physics and mathematics at Caltech in 1928 under Professor Harry Bateman. He became a professor upon receiving his degree, full professor of aeronautics in 1940, and director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical La...
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Wilhelm Flügge
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge was a German engineer, and Professor of Applied Mechanics at Stanford University. He is known as recipient of the 1970 Theodore von Karman Medal in Engineering Mechanics, and the 1970 Worcester Reed Warner Medal.
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William M. Harlow
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
William M. Harlow was an American professor of engineering and silviculture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was also a nature photographer and filmmaker, particularly of time-lapse films.
Go to Profile#10527
Earle Buckingham
1887 - 1978 (91 years)
Earle Buckingham was an American mechanical engineer and pioneer in the theory of gears. Buckingham was one of the founders of the theory of gearing and gear design and made significant contributions to this area. His monographs gained him international recognition in addition to the great respect he had already earned in English-speaking countries.
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Gordon Rawcliffe
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe FRS was a British electrical engineer and academic. Life Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe, whose father was an Anglican clergyman in Sheffield, was born on 2 June 1910, moving from Sheffield to Gloucester when he was two. He was educated at the King's School, Gloucester, Hereford Cathedral School and St Edmund's School, Canterbury before matriculating at Keble College, Oxford to study mathematics. After his first-year examinations, he switched to engineering, under Richard V. Southwell, and obtained a first-class degree in 1932. He worked for the next five years for Metropolitan-Vickers in Manchester, initially as an apprentice and then as a design engineer.
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Llewellyn M. K. Boelter
1898 - 1966 (68 years)
Llewellyn Michael Kraus Boelter was an American engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and founding Dean of its UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
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Markus Reiner
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Markus Reiner was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology. Biography Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna . After the First World War, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa.
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F. W. Hutchinson
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Francis William Hutchinson was an engineer, and a pioneer in HVAC research. Hutchinson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1931, and received an M.S. and M.E. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937. He was a professor of engineering at Berkeley and at Purdue University. At Purdue, he established a solar energy research program in which two experimental solar houses were built on the Purdue campus in the summer of 1945. By analyzing this experiment, Hutchinson concluded that the solar gain through the double glazed house was greater than the excess heat loss.
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Alexander Hrennikoff
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Alexander Pavlovich Hrennikoff was a Russian-Canadian structural engineer, a founder of the Finite Element Method. Biography Alexander was born in Russia, graduated from the Institute of Railway Engineering in Moscow, received M.A.Sc. degree from the University of British Columbia , and D.Sc degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1933 until his death in 1984 he worked as a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia.
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Cecil Burgess
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Cecil Burgess was a Canadian architect. He was born in Walkden, Lancashire, England on 8 July 1888. He was educated Walkden, Lancashire, England. He articled to Henry Kirkby, an architect in Manchester, England. Cecil Burgess arrived in Ottawa, Ontario with his parents in 1905. He married Violet Hervey from Round Hill, Nova Scotia, in 1913. The couple had a son, Bernard W. Burgess of Montreal, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Joyce Greenwood.
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Walter Rautenstrauch
1880 - 1951 (71 years)
Walter Rautenstrauch was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, and Professor at Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s. He coined the term break-even point, and developing the break-even chart together with Charles Edward Knoeppel.
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Otto Julius Zobel
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Otto Julius Zobel was an electrical engineer who worked for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the early part of the 20th century. Zobel's work on filter design was revolutionary and led, in conjunction with the work of John R. Carson, to significant commercial advances for AT&T in the field of frequency-division multiplex telephone transmissions.
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John Ely Burchard
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
John Ely Burchard was an American professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a historian and architectural critic. He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1954 to 1957.
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Christopher Tunnard
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Arthur Coney Tunnard , later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape . Biography Christopher Tunnard was the son of Christopher Coney Tunnard, second son of Charles Thomas Tunnard of Frampton House, near Boston, Lincolnshire and Madeline Kingscote. He had one younger brother, Peter Kingscote Tunnard , who died at age 20. Tunnard's uncle was John Charles Tunnard whose only son was British surrealist artist John Tunnard . Another uncle was Thomas Monkton Tunnard of Birtles Hall, vicar o...
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Hayne Constant
1904 - 1968 (64 years)
Hayne Constant, CB, CBE., MA., FRAeS., FRS, was an English mechanical and aeronautical engineer who developed jet engines during World War II. Education Constant was born at Gravesend, the son of Frederick Charles Constant and his wife Mary Theresa Hayne. His father was a dental surgeon in Folkestone. Hayne was educated at King's College Choir School Cambridge, King's School, Canterbury, The Technical Institute Folkestone, Sir Roger Manwood's School, Sandwich and Queens' College, Cambridge.
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Jerome Clarke Hunsaker
1886 - 1984 (98 years)
Jerome Clarke Hunsaker was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work with Gustav Eiffel outside Paris led to the first wind tunnel in the US at MIT. He was instrumental in developing a weather reporting and airway navigation. Hunsaker was also pivotal in establishing the theoretical and scientific study of aerodynamics in the United States. And he was primarily responsible for the design and construction of the Navy-Curtiss airplane that accomplished the first transatlantic flight , and the first successful shipboard fighter.
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Franz Maria Feldhaus
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Franz Maria Feldhaus was a German engineer, historian of science, and scientific writer. He was known in the late 1950s as "Germany's most well-known and most prolific writer on the history of technology."
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Alexandre Lézine
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Alexandre Lézine was a French architect, historian and archaeologist of Russian origin. Career Lézine graduated with a degree in archeology in 1937. He was the main architect of the historical monuments of Tunisia. As a historian and archaeologist, he published numerous works on ancient monuments and monuments of the Muslim period, taking an interest in the ancient palaces of Cairo.
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Ludwig Hilberseimer
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at Armour Institute of Technology , in Chicago, Illinois.
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Kiyoshi Mutō
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Kiyoshi Mutō was a Japanese architect and structural engineer. He is considered the "father of the Japanese skyscraper" for his contributions to earthquake engineering. Earthquake engineering research Mutō was born in Toride, Ibaraki, Japan. He entered the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University in 1922 and graduated in 1925. He was immediately appointed Lecturer, and obtained a Dr of Engineering degree in 1931. In 1935 he was appointed Professor of Structural Engineering, a post which he held for almost 30 years, developing and teaching the principles of earthquake-resistant ...
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Henri Gabriel Marceau
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Henri Gabriel Marceau was an American architect, teacher, art historian and museum curator. He served as Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1955–1964. Career He studied architecture at Columbia University, but his education was interrupted by military service in World War I. He graduated from Columbia in 1921, and spent that summer in France rebuilding war-damaged buildings. He won the 1922 Prix de Rome in architecture, studying for the next three years at the American Academy in Rome. In 1926, he was named assistant curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, a vast collection of Old...
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Hans Tropper
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Hans Tropper was an Austrian Professor of Electrical Engineering with research interest in breakdown strength of liquid insulation. The ‘Hans Tropper Memorial Lecture’ is held in his honour to open each IEEE International Conference on Dielectric Liquids. He also briefly worked for Elin Aktiengesellschaft fur Elektrische Industrie.
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Henri Coandă
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Henri Marie Coandă was a Romanian inventor, aerodynamics pioneer, and builder of an experimental aircraft, the Coandă-1910, which never flew. He invented a great number of devices, designed a "flying saucer" and discovered the Coandă effect of fluid dynamics.
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Ladislaus von Rabcewicz
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Ladislaus von Rabcewicz was an Austrian engineer and university professor at the Vienna University of Technology. He is notable for being one of three men who developed the New Austrian Tunneling method.
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Harry Thomas Cory
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Harry Thomas Cory was an American engineer and professor. Biography Harry Thomas Cory was born in Montmorenci, Indiana, the son of Thomas and Carrie Cory. Cory received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in 1889 and advanced degrees in 1893 and 1896 from Cornell University. He married Ida Judd Hiller on October 4, 1911, and they had three children.
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Henry S. Graves
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Henry Solon Graves was a forest administrator in the United States. He co-founded the Yale Forest School in 1900, the oldest continuous forestry school in the United States. He was appointed Chief of the United States Forest Service in 1910 and served in this position until 1920.
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