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,
#10551
Herbert Baker
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Sir Herbert Baker was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades, and a major designer of some of New Delhi's most notable government structures. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.
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Tatsuno Kingo
1854 - 1919 (65 years)
Tatsuno Kingo was a Japanese architect born in Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, Kyushu. Doctor of Engineering. Conferred Jusanmi and Kunsanto . Former dean of Architecture Department at Tokyo Imperial University.
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Charles Follen McKim
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Charles Follen McKim was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White, he provided the architectural expertise as a member of the partnership McKim, Mead & White.
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Max Ernst
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages.
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Edward Durell Stone
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Edward Durell Stone was an American architect known for the formal, highly decorative buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, The Keller Center at the University of Chicago, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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Franz Reuleaux
1829 - 1905 (76 years)
Franz Reuleaux , was a German mechanical engineer and a lecturer of the Berlin Royal Technical Academy, later appointed as the president of the academy. He was often called the father of kinematics. He was a leader in his profession, contributing to many important domains of science and knowledge.
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Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Nikolai Ladovsky
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Ladovsky was a Russian avant-garde architect and educator, leader of the rationalist movement in 1920s architecture, an approach emphasizing human perception of space and shape. Ladovsky is known as the founder of modern Soviet and Russian schools of architectural training; his classes of 1920–1932 in VKhUTEMAS shaped the generation of Soviet architects active throughout the period of Stalinist architecture and subsequent decades.
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Maxwell Fry
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry , was an English modernist architect, writer and painter. Originally trained in the neo-classical style of architecture, Fry grew to favour the new modernist style, and practised with eminent colleagues including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Fry was a major influence on a generation of young architects. Among the younger colleagues with whom he worked was Denys Lasdun.
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Viktor Kaplan
1876 - 1934 (58 years)
Viktor Kaplan was an Austrian engineer and the inventor of the Kaplan turbine. Life Kaplan was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria into a railroad worker's family. He graduated from high school in Vienna in 1895, after which he attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied mechanical engineering and specialised in diesel engines. From 1900 to 1901 he was drafted into military service in Pula.
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Vladimir Shchuko
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Vladimir Alekseyevich Shchuko was a Russian architect, member of the Saint Petersburg school of Russian neoclassical revival notable for his giant order apartment buildings "rejecting all trace of the moderne". After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Shchuko gradually embraced modernist ideas, developing his own version of modernized neoclassicism together with his partner Vladimir Gelfreikh. Shchuko and Gelfreikh succeeded through the prewar period of Stalinist architecture with high-profile projects like the Lenin Library, Moscow Metro stations and co-authored the unrealized Palace of Soviets....
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Filippo Brunelleschi
1377 - 1446 (69 years)
Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi , commonly known as Filippo Brunelleschi and also nicknamed Pippo by Leon Battista Alberti, was an Italian architect, designer, goldsmith and sculptor. He is considered to be a founding father of Renaissance architecture. He is recognized as the first modern engineer, planner, and sole construction supervisor. In 1421, Brunelleschi became the first person to receive a patent in the Western world. He is most famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, and for the mathematical technique of linear perspective in art which governed pictorial depictions of space until the late 19th century and influenced the rise of modern science.
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Constantin Brâncuși
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought ...
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Julius Weisbach
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Julius Ludwig Weisbach was a German mathematician and engineer. Life and work Weisbach was born on 10 August 1806 in Mittelschmiedeberg . He studied at the Bergakademie in Freiberg from 1822 to 1826. After that, he studied with Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen and with Friedrich Mohs in Vienna.
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Bernard Maybeck
1862 - 1957 (95 years)
Bernard Ralph Maybeck was an American architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was an instructor at University of California, Berkeley. Most of his major buildings were in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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James Gibbs
1682 - 1754 (72 years)
James Gibbs was one of Britain's most influential architects. Born in Aberdeen, he trained as an architect in Rome, and practised mainly in England. He is an important figure whose work spanned the transition between English Baroque architecture and Georgian architecture heavily influenced by Andrea Palladio. Among his most important works are St Martin-in-the-Fields , the cylindrical, domed Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University, and the Senate House at Cambridge University.
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Jacob Pieter Den Hartog
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Jacob Pieter Den Hartog was a Dutch-American mechanical engineer and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Biography J. P. Den Hartog was born in 1901 in Ambarova, the Dutch East Indies. In 1916 his family moved to Holland. After attending high school in Amsterdam, he enrolled at Delft University of Technology in 1919 and received his MSc degree in electrical engineering in 1924. Unable to find suitable work in the Netherlands, he emigrated to the United States in 1924.
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Joseph Lyman Silsbee
1848 - 1913 (65 years)
Joseph Lyman Silsbee was a significant American architect during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was well known for his facility of drawing and gift for designing buildings in a variety of styles. His most prominent works ran through Syracuse, Buffalo and Chicago. He was influential as mentor to a generation of architects, most notably architects of the Prairie School including the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Nicholas Hawksmoor
1661 - 1736 (75 years)
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Part of his work has been correctly attributed to him only relatively recently, and his influence has reached several poets and...
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William Pereira
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
William Leonard Pereira was an American architect from Chicago, Illinois, who was noted for his futuristic designs of landmark buildings such as the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Remarkably prolific, he worked out of Los Angeles, and was known for his love of science fiction and expensive cars, but mostly for his unmistakable style of architecture, which helped define the look of mid-20th century America.
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Hassan Fathy
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Hassan Fathy was a noted Egyptian architect who pioneered appropriate technology for building in Egypt, especially by working to reestablish the use of adobe and traditional mud construction as opposed to western building designs, material configurations, and lay-outs. Fathy was recognized with the Aga Khan Chairman's Award for Architecture in 1980. In 2017, Google celebrated Fathy with a Google Doodle for "pioneering new methods [in architecture], respecting tradition [Egyptian heritage and tradition], and valuing all walks of life".
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Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban
1633 - 1707 (74 years)
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Seigneur de Vauban, later Marquis de Vauban , commonly referred to as Vauban , was a French military engineer and Marshal of France who worked under Louis XIV. He is generally considered the greatest engineer of his time, and one of the most important in European military history.
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Friedrich August Stüler
1800 - 1865 (65 years)
Friedrich August Stüler was an influential Prussian architect and builder. His masterpiece is the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as the dome of the triumphal arch of the main portal of the Berliner Schloss.
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Theodor Fischer
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Theodor Fischer was a German architect and teacher. Career Fischer planned public housing projects for the city of Munich beginning in 1893. He was the joint founder and first chairman of the Deutscher Werkbund , as well as member of the German version of the Garden city movement. In 1909, Fischer accepted a position as professor for architecture at the Technical University of Munich.
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Nikolay Dollezhal
1899 - 2000 (101 years)
Nikolay Antonovich Dollezhal was a Russian engineer of Czech origin whose career was spent in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and later played an influential role in developing the commercial nuclear power industry of Russia.
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Ernesto Basile
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Ernesto Basile was an Italian architect and an exponent of modernisme and Liberty style, the Italian variant of Art Nouveau. His style was known for its eclectic fusion of ancient, medieval and modern elements.
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Stanford White
1853 - 1906 (53 years)
Stanford White was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the wealthy, in addition to numerous civic, institutional, and religious buildings. His temporary Washington Square Arch was so popular that he was commissioned to design a permanent one. His design principles embodied the "American Renaissance".
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Nikolai Kolli
1894 - 1966 (72 years)
Nikolai Dzhemsovich Kolli was a Soviet and Russian Modernist—Constructivist architect, architectural functionary, and city planner in the Soviet Union. History Kolli was born in Moscow, and studied at the Imperial Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and then at the Leninist VKhUTEMAS in Moscow.
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Walter Burley Griffin
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect and landscape architect. He designed Canberra, Australia's capital city, the New South Wales towns of Griffith and Leeton, and the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.
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Richard Norman Shaw
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
Richard Norman Shaw RA , also known as Norman Shaw, was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings. He is considered to be among the greatest of British architects; his influence on architectural style was strongest in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Oskar Kokoschka
1886 - 1980 (94 years)
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.
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Mikhail Tikhonravov
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Mikhail Klavdievich Tikhonravov was a Soviet engineer who was a pioneer of spacecraft design and rocketry. Mikhail Tikhonravov was born in Vladimir, Russia. He attended the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy from 1922 to 1925, where he was exposed to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's ideas of spaceflight. After graduation and until 1931 worked in several aircraft industries and was engaged in developing gliders. From 1931 and on, devoted himself to the development of the field of rocketry. In 1932, he joined Group for the Study of Reactive Motion , as one of the four brigade leaders. His brigade built the G...
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Henry Hornbostel
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Henry Hornbostel was an American architect and educator. Hornbostel designed more than 225 buildings, bridges, and monuments in the United States. Twenty-two of his designs are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the Oakland City Hall in Oakland, California and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum and University Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Richard Trevithick
1771 - 1833 (62 years)
Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his most significant contributions were the development of the first high-pressure steam engine and the first working railway steam locomotive. The world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place on 21 February 1804, when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ...
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Charles Alton Ellis
1876 - 1949 (73 years)
Charles Alton Ellis was a professor, structural engineer and mathematician who was chiefly responsible for the structural design of the Golden Gate Bridge. Because of a dispute with Joseph Strauss, he was not recognized for his work when the bridge opened in 1937. His contributions were ultimately recognized at the bridge in a plaque installed in 2012.
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Ivan Nikolaev
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Ivan Sergeyevich Nikolaev was a Soviet architect and educator, notable for his late 1920s constructivist architecture and later work in industrial architecture. Life and career Born in Voronezh, Nikolaev trained at the Moscow State Technical University under Viktor Vesnin and Aleksandr Kuznetsov, graduating in 1925. His work prior to 1928 was generally unnoticed .
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Carlo Scarpa
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Carlo Scarpa was an Italian architect, influenced by the materials, landscape and the history of Venetian culture, and by Japan. Scarpa translated his interests in history, regionalism, invention, and the techniques of the artist and craftsman into ingenious glass and furniture design.
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Eugen Sänger
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Eugen Sänger was an Austrian aerospace engineer best known for his contributions to lifting body and ramjet technology. Early career Sänger was born in the former mining town of Preßnitz , near Komotau in Bohemia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied civil engineering at the Technical Universities of Graz and Vienna. As a student, he came in contact with Hermann Oberth's book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen , which inspired him to change from studying civil engineering to aeronautics. He also joined Germany's amateur rocket movement, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt whi...
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Bertram Goodhue
1869 - 1924 (55 years)
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was an American architect celebrated for his work in Gothic Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival design. He also designed notable typefaces, including Cheltenham and Merrymount for the Merrymount Press. Later in life, Goodhue freed his architectural style with works like El Fureidis in Montecito, one of the three estates designed by Goodhue.
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Basil Spence
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Sir Basil Urwin Spence, was a Scottish architect, most notably associated with Coventry Cathedral in England and the Beehive in New Zealand, but also responsible for numerous other buildings in the Modernist/Brutalist style.
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Ralph Adams Cram
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Ralph Adams Cram was a prolific and influential American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the Gothic Revival style. Cram & Ferguson and Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson are partnerships in which he worked. Cram was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
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Leonid Ramzin
1887 - 1948 (61 years)
Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin was a Soviet thermal engineer, and the inventor of a type of flow-through boiler known as the straight-flow boiler, or Ramzin boiler. He was a laureate of the Stalin Prize First-Class, which he received in 1943.
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Claude-Louis Navier
1785 - 1836 (51 years)
Claude-Louis Navier was a French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. The Navier–Stokes equations refer eponymously to him, with George Gabriel Stokes.
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Charles Garnier
1825 - 1898 (73 years)
Jean-Louis Charles Garnier was a French architect, perhaps best known as the architect of the Palais Garnier and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. Early life Charles Garnier was born Jean-Louis Charles Garnier on 6 November 1825 in Paris, on the Rue Mouffetard, in the present-day 5th arrondissement. His father, Jean André Garnier, 1796–1865, who was originally from Sarthe, a department of the French region of Pays de la Loire, had worked as a blacksmith, wheelwright, and coachbuilder before settling down in Paris to work in a horse-drawn carriage rental business. He married Felicia Colle, daughter of...
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Giotto
1267 - 1337 (70 years)
Giotto di Bondone , known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great a...
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Charles Dickinson West
1847 - 1908 (61 years)
Charles Dickinson West was an Irish mechanical engineer and naval architect, who worked for many years at the Imperial College of Engineering, in Meiji era Japan. Biography West was born in Dublin, Ireland as the eldest son of The Very Reverend John West, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Trinity College Dublin in 1869. He worked at Bergenhead Steel Company in Great Britain for five years, followed by positions in other forms where he gained experience in shipbuilding, steel mills and steam power.
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William Chambers
1723 - 1796 (73 years)
Sir William Chambers was a Swedish-born British architect. Among his best-known works are Somerset House, and the pagoda at Kew. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy. Biography William Chambers was born on 23 February 1723 in Gothenburg, Sweden, to a Scottish merchant father.
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Ferdinand Redtenbacher
1809 - 1863 (54 years)
Ferdinand Jakob Redtenbacher is regarded as the founder of science-based mechanical engineering. Life Redtenbacher, son of an ironmonger from Steyr, first went through an apprenticeship in commerce and accounting. After a short interlude as technical illustrator in the "Baudirektion" in Linz, he attended the Polytechnikum in Vienna from 1825 until 1829. He stayed there until 1834 as an assistant to Johann Arzberger. In 1835, he accepted an invitation to become a professor at the Höhere Industrieschule in Zürich, where he taught mathematics and geometry. In 1841 he finally became professor ...
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Marion Mahony Griffin
1871 - 1961 (90 years)
Marion Mahony Griffin was an American architect and artist. She was one of the first licensed female architects in the world, and is considered an original member of the Prairie School. Her work in the United States developed and expanded the American Prairie School, and her work in India and Australia reflected Prairie School ideals of indigenous landscape and materials in the newly formed democracies. The scholar Deborah Wood stated that Griffin "did the drawings people think of when they think of Frank Lloyd Wright ." According to architecture critic, Reyner Banham, Griffin was "America’s...
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