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
Jules Hardouin-Mansart
1646 - 1708 (62 years)
Jules Hardouin-Mansart was a French Baroque architect and builder whose major work included the Place des Victoires ; Place Vendôme ; the domed chapel of Les Invalides , and the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles. His monumental work was designed to glorify the reign of Louis XIV of France.
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Pierre Cuypers
1827 - 1921 (94 years)
Petrus Josephus Hubertus "Pierre" Cuypers was a Dutch architect. His name is most frequently associated with the Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum , both in Amsterdam. More representative for his oeuvre, however, are numerous churches, of which he designed more than 100. Moreover, he restored many monuments.
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Laurynas Gucevičius
1753 - 1798 (45 years)
Laurynas Gucevičius was an 18th-century architect from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and all of his designs were built there. In his youth he travelled to Italy and Paris and other countries in Western Europe, where he studied architecture under the notable contemporary neo-classical French architects, Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Later he was appointed professor at the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius, the predecessor of the University of Vilnius. Among the best known of his works are the Vilnius Cathedral, the Vilnius Town Hall and the summer palace of bishops in Verkiai. Th...
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Friedrich Zander
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
Georg Arthur Constantin Friedrich Zander , was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.
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Otto Krause
1856 - 1920 (64 years)
Otto Krause was an Argentine engineer and educator. Early life Krause was born in the Buenos Aires Province town of Chivilcoy to Leopoldina and Carl August Krause, both German Argentine immigrants arrived in 1851. Tending his farm with implements he brought from Germany, Carl Krause instilled an interest in machinery to his five children, though the family eventually relocated to Buenos Aires in 1870. Otto subsequently finished his secondary school studies at the prestigious Buenos Aires National College, a public college preparatory school.
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Lazare Carnot
1753 - 1823 (70 years)
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription , were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.
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Samuel Jefferson Mason
1921 - 1974 (53 years)
Samuel Jefferson Mason was an American electronics engineer. Mason's invariant and Mason's rule are named after him. He was born in New York City, but he grew up in a small town in New Jersey. It was so small, in fact, that it only had a population of 26. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1942, and after graduation, he joined the Antenna Group of MIT Radiation Laboratory as a staff member. Mason went on to earn his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1947 and 1952, respectively. After World War II, the Radiation Laboratory was renamed the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he became the associate director in 1967.
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Luigi Vanvitelli
1700 - 1773 (73 years)
Luigi Vanvitelli , known in Dutch as , was an Italian architect and painter. The most prominent 18th-century architect of Italy, he practised a sober classicising academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism.
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Gustav Niemann
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Gustav Niemann was a mechanical engineering professor who is regarded as an expert in machine elements. Biography Niemann studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt from 1919 to 1923. In 1928 he was promoted at the Technische Hochschule Berlin with the doctoral dissertation Über Wippkrane mit wagrechtem Lastwippweg . He taught at the Braunschweig University of Technology from 1934 to 1950, and at the Technische Universität München from 1951 to 1968. He was a recipient of the Grashof medal from the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure and the E. P. Connell medal from the Ame...
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Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
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Joseph Paxton
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Sir Joseph Paxton was an English gardener, architect, engineer and Member of Parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace and for cultivating the Cavendish banana, the most consumed banana in the Western world.
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William Robert Ware
1832 - 1915 (83 years)
William Robert Ware , born in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a family of the Unitarian clergy, was an American architect, author, and founder of two important American architectural schools. He received his own professional education at Milton Academy, Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1859, he began working for Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of the first American architectural school, the AIA, and the first American to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward Ware formed a partnership with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick, Philbrick and Ware, a...
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Hermann Ende
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Hermann Gustav Louis Ende was a German architect noted for his work in Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Biography Ende was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Province of Brandenburg,Prussia . In 1836 he moved with family to Berlin, where, after graduating from the Köllnisches Gymnasium in 1852, he studied architecture at the Bauakademie, a Berlin architectural school housed in what is considered one of the forerunners of modern architecture due to its theretofore uncommon use of red brick and a relatively streamlined façade. His studies were interrupted for a year by military service, and by another year spent travelling abroad with his friend Wilhelm Böckmann.
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Berenice Abbott
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
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Louis Le Vau
1613 - 1670 (57 years)
Louis Le Vau was a French Baroque architect, who worked for Louis XIV of France. He was an architect that helped develop the French Classical style in the 17th century. Early life and career Born Louis Le Veau, he was the son of Louis Le Veau , a stonemason, who was active in Paris. His younger brother François Le Vau also became an architect. The father and his two sons worked together in the 1630s and 1640s. The two brothers later changed the spelling of their surname from "Le Veau" to "Le Vau" to avoid its association with the French word veau .
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Philipp Forchheimer
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Philipp Forchheimer was an Austrian engineer, a pioneer in the field of civil engineering and practical hydraulics, who also contributed to the archaeological study of Byzantine water supply systems. He was professor in Istanbul, Aachen and Graz.
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Egon Eiermann
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Egon Eiermann was one of Germany's most prominent architects in the second half of the 20th century. He was also a furniture designer. From 1947, he was Professor for architecture at the Technical University of Karlsruhe.
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George B. Post
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
George Browne Post was an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. Active from 1869 almost until his death, he was recognized as a master of several prominent contemporary American architectural genres, and instrumental in the birth of the skyscraper.
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Francisco J. Serrano
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Francisco J. Serrano y Alvarez de la Rosa was a Mexican civil engineer and architect. Serrano studied civil engineering and afterwards architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , where later taught as professor of civil engineering and architecture, and researched influences of climatic phenomenons on architecture. His son J. Francisco Serrano Cacho became also a notable architect.
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Beatrix Farrand
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden , and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
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Gilmore David Clarke
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Gilmore David Clarke was an American civil engineer and landscape architect who designed many parks and public spaces in and around New York City. Biography Born in New York, Clarke went to Cornell University to study landscape architecture and civil engineering, graduating in 1913 with a B.S. degree. After World War I, during which he served as an engineer in the U.S. Army, he served on several architectural commissions, ranging from local to federal level. Amongst others, he was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board for the U.S. Capitol and of the New York State Council of Parks. He ...
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Carlo Maderno
1556 - 1629 (73 years)
Carlo Maderno was an Italian architect, born in today's Ticino, who is remembered as one of the fathers of Baroque architecture. His façades of Santa Susanna, St. Peter's Basilica and Sant'Andrea della Valle were of key importance in the evolution of the Italian Baroque. He is often referred to as the brother of sculptor Stefano Maderno, but this is not universally agreed upon.
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Clemens Holzmeister
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Clemens Holzmeister was a prominent Austrian architect and stage designer of the early twentieth century. The Austrian Academy of Fine Arts listed his life's work as containing 673 projects. He was the father of Judith Holzmeister.
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Aston Webb
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Sir Aston Webb, was a British architect who designed the principal facade of Buckingham Palace and the main building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other major works around England, many of them in partnership with Ingress Bell. He was President of the Royal Academy from 1919 to 1924. He was also the founding Chairman of the London Society.
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Herbert A. Wagner
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Herbert Alois Wagner was an Austrian scientist who developed numerous innovations in the fields of aerodynamics, aircraft structures and guided weapons. He is most famous for Wagner's function describing unsteady lift on wings and developing the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb.
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel
1788 - 1827 (39 years)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and i...
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Ansel Adams
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
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Wilhelm Nusselt
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Ernst Kraft Wilhelm Nußelt was a German engineer. Nusselt studied mechanical engineering at the Munich Technical University , where he got his doctorate in 1907. He taught in Dresden from 1913 to 1917.
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Jørgen Henrich Rawert
1751 - 1823 (72 years)
Jørgen Henrich Rawert was a was a Danish architect. He created the masterplan for the rebuilding of Copenhagen after the Great Fire of 1795 in his capacity of city architect and was also involved in many building projects, mostly of townhouses, often collaborating with Andreas Hallander.
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Alexander Graham Christie
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Alexander Graham Christie was a Canadian/American mechanical engineer and Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, who served as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1939–40.
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Edith Hughes
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Edith Mary Wardlaw Burnet Hughes HonFRIAS was a Scottish architect, and is considered Britain's first practising female architect, having established her own architecture firm in 1920. Early life Edith Mary Burnet was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of May Crudelius and George Wardlaw Burnet, an advocate. The family lived at 6 West Circus Place in the Stockbridge district. The family moved to 59 Queens Road in Aberdeen when her father was created Sheriff Substitute for Aberdeenshire around 1890.
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Walter Maria Kersting
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Walter Maria Kersting was a German architect and industrial designer. Career In 1928, he published the Bilderbuch für Kaufleute, a publicity handbook containing examples of catalogues, posters and packaging designs which had been created by Kersting and his wife in a plain and functional style. From 1927 to 1932 he was Professor of Artistic and Technical Design at the Kölner Werkschulen. With his students, Kersting designed the bakelite cabinet for the radio receiver, Volksempfänger model VE 301, which was launched at the 1933 Berlin Radio Show and which, on account of its striking design and the number of units sold, would become an icon of the Nazi period.
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Aleksandr Chernyshyov
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Aleksandr Alekseyevich Chernyshyov , anglicised Alexander Chernyshov, was an electrical engineer. He graduated from Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1907, and worked there until the end of his life. His research consisted of radio engineering and high-voltage techniques. He won the Lenin Prize in 1930.
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Charles H. Wacker
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Charles Henry Wacker , born in Chicago, Illinois, was a German American businessman and philanthropist. He was vice chairman of the general committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and in 1909 was appointed chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission by Mayor Fred A. Busse. As commission chairman from 1909 to 1926, he championed the Burnham Plan for improving Chicago. His work to promote the plan included addresses, obtaining wide publicity from newspapers, and publishing Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago as a textbook for local schoolchildren.
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Konstantine Hovhannisyan
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Konstantine Hovhannisyan was an Armenian professor, architect and archaeologist. He was the head of an excavation team that was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Urartian city of Erebuni .
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Robert E. Stiemke
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Robert E. Stiemke was an American civil engineer, director of the Georgia Tech School of Civil Engineering from 1950 to 1962, director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute from 1961 to 1963, and Georgia Tech's first Associate Dean of Faculties and Administrator of Research after July 1, 1963.
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John Braithwaite
1797 - 1870 (73 years)
John Braithwaite, the younger , was an English engineer who invented the first steam fire engine. He also co-designed the first locomotive claimed to have covered a mile in less than a minute. Early life Braithwaite was third son of John Braithwaite the elder. He was born at 1 Bath Place, New Road, London, on 19 March 1797, and, after being educated at Mr. Lord's school at Tooting in Surrey, attended in his father's manufactory, where he made himself master of practical engineering, and became a skilled draughtsman. In June 1818 his father died, leaving the business to his sons Francis and John.
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Joshua Thomas Noble Anderson
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
Joshua Thomas Noble Anderson was an engineer practising in Melbourne, Australia, and New Zealand during the difficult times in the Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, but still practised innovative engineering in these periods.
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Harvie Branscomb
1894 - 1998 (104 years)
Bennett Harvie Branscomb was an American theologian and academic administrator. He served as the fourth chancellor of Vanderbilt University, a private university in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1946 to 1963. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, he was the director of the Duke University Libraries and dean of the Duke Divinity School. Additionally, he served as a professor of Christian theology at Southern Methodist University. He was the author of several books about New Testament theology.
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James Madison Porter III
1864 - 1928 (64 years)
James Madison Porter III was an American civil engineer notable for his role in designing two unique bridges across the Delaware River and for his development of the civil engineering program at Lafayette College. His grandfather, James Madison Porter, was one of the college's founders. Porter III served on the civil engineering faculty at Lafayette from 1890 to 1917 and was an early advocate for materials testing.
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Josep Domènech i Estapà
1858 - 1917 (59 years)
Josep Domènech i Estapà was a Catalan architect. He graduated in 1881, and became professor of geodesy and descriptive geometry at the University of Barcelona, and member of the Acadèmia de Ciències i Arts , of which he subsequently became president.
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Masaichi Kobayashi
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Masaichi Kobayashi was a Japanese architect. His work was part of the architecture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
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Archimedes Russell
1840 - 1915 (75 years)
Archimedes Russell was an American architect most active in the Syracuse, New York area. Biography Born in Andover, Massachusetts and trained under local architect Horatio Nelson White, Russell served as a professor of architecture at Syracuse University from 1873 through 1881.
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George S. Richardson
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
George Sherwood Richardson was an American engineer known for his elegant bridges, innovative construction techniques and skillful planning of highways. Designer of many bridges in the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County areas in the 20th century, he has been called "the dean of Pittsburgh bridge engineers".
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George Fillmore Swain
1857 - 1931 (74 years)
George Fillmore Swain was a civil engineer from the United States. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Harvard University. Biography He was graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877 and then studied in Berlin, German Empire, for three years. On his return to the United States, he settled in Boston. In 1887 he became professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was then located in Boston. He remained at MIT until 1909, when he became professor of civil engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science.
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August von Borries
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
August Friedrich Wilhelm von Borries was one of Germany's most influential railway engineers, who was primarily concerned with developments in steam locomotives. Von Borries graduated from the Royal Institute of Trade in Charlottenburg, and then spent a year working at the Bergisch-Märkische railway. In 1875, he joined the service of the Hanover division of the Prussian state railways and subsequently became their Chief Mechanical Engineer. In 1880 he designed the first Prussian compound locomotive, built by Schichau in Elbląg. This showed significant fuel savings. His work on compound locom...
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Max Reinhardt
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
Max Reinhardt was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his innovative stage productions, he is regarded as one of the most prominent directors of German-language theatre in the early 20th century. In 1920, he established the Salzburg Festival with the performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann.
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Howard T. Fisher
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Howard T. Fisher was an American architect, city planner, and educator. Early life Howard Taylor Fisher was born October 30, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Walter Lowrie Fisher and Mabel Taylor. He graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, in 1926. He attended the School of Architecture, Harvard University, from 1926 to 1928.
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Lee Yuk-wing
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Lee Yuk-wing was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for adapting and popularizing the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener and for his own research on statistical communication theory.
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