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
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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William Butterfield
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
William Butterfield was a British Gothic Revival architect and associated with the Oxford Movement . He is noted for his use of polychromy. Biography William Butterfield was born in London in 1814. His parents were strict non-conformistss who ran a chemist's shop in the Strand. He was one of nine children and was educated at a local school. At the age of 16, he was apprenticed to Thomas Arber, a builder in Pimlico, who later became bankrupt. He studied architecture under E. L. Blackburne . From 1838 to 1839, he was an assistant to Harvey Eginton, an architect in Worcester, where he became articled.
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Pietro da Cortona
1596 - 1669 (73 years)
Pietro da Cortona was an Italian Baroque painter and architect. Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, he was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture. He was also an important designer of interior decorations.
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Euripides
480 BC - 406 BC (74 years)
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete . There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient...
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Capability Brown
1716 - 1783 (67 years)
Lancelot Brown , more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English gardener and landscape architect, who remains the most famous figure in the history of the English landscape garden style. He is remembered as "the last of the great English 18th-century artists to be accorded his due" and "England's greatest gardener".
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Benjamin Henry Latrobe
1764 - 1820 (56 years)
Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe was an Anglo-American neoclassical architect who emigrated to the United States. He was one of the first formally trained, professional architects in the new United States, drawing on influences from his travels in Italy, as well as British and French Neoclassical architects such as Claude Nicolas Ledoux. In his thirties, he emigrated to the new United States and designed the United States Capitol, on "Capitol Hill" in Washington, D.C., as well as the Old Baltimore Cathedral or The Baltimore Basilica, . It is the first Cathedral constructed in the United States for any Christian denomination.
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William Fairbairn
1789 - 1874 (85 years)
Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet of Ardwick was a Scottish civil engineer, structural engineer and shipbuilder. In 1854 he succeeded George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson to become the third president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
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Alfred Waterhouse
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Alfred Waterhouse was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known for his designs for Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the country. Besides his most famous public buildings he designed other town halls, the Manchester Assize buildings—bombed in World War II—and the adjacent Strangeways Prison. He also designed several hospitals, the most architecturally interesting being the Royal Infirmary Liverpool and University College Hospital London.
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Frank Furness
1839 - 1912 (73 years)
Frank Heyling Furness was an American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his diverse, muscular, often inordinately scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago-based architect Louis Sullivan. Furness also received a Medal of Honor for bravery during the Civil War.
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Armas Lindgren
1874 - 1929 (55 years)
Armas Eliel Lindgren was Finnish architect, professor and painter. Biography Early life and career Armas Lindgren was born in Hämeenlinna on 28 November 1874. He studied architecture in the Polytechnical Institute of Helsinki, from where he graduated in 1897. While a student he collaborated with Josef Stenbäck and Gustaf Nyström, two well-known Finnish architects. He spent the 1898–1999 studying history of art and culture in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In 1896 he founded with Herman Gesellius and Eliel Saarinen, an architectural firm named Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen.
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David B. Steinman
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
David Barnard Steinman was an American civil engineer. He was the designer of the Mackinac Bridge and many other notable bridges, and a published author. He grew up in New York City's lower Manhattan, and lived with the ambition of making his mark on the Brooklyn Bridge that he lived under. In 1906 he earned a bachelor's degree from City College and in 1909, a Master of Arts from Columbia University and a Doctorate in 1911. He also received an honorary Doctor of Science in Engineering on 15 April 1952 from degree mill Sequoia University, but would distance himself from it soon after a 1957 inquiry raised doubts over its legitimacy, and did not mention the qualifications in his biographies.
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Elie Carafoli
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Elie Carafoli was an accomplished Romanian engineer and aircraft designer. He is considered a pioneering contributor to the field of Aerodynamics. Biography First years, education Carafoli was of Aromanian descent. In 1915, he left Greece for Bitola, and then Bucharest, where he studied at Gheorghe Lazăr High School. In 1919 he entered University Politehnica of Bucharest, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering. He pursued his studies at the University of Paris, while also working at the Institut Aérotechnique in Saint-Cyr-l'École, France. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1928, with a thesi...
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Alfred Stieglitz
1864 - 1946 (82 years)
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
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Juan Nakpil
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Juan Nakpil was born on May 26, 1899. Over his career, he rose to prominence as one of the most distinguished architects in the Philippines. He received the honor of National Artist for architecture for his contributions to the field. Nakpil received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Kansas before studying architecture at the Fontainbleu School of Fine Arts. Nakpil founded an architectural firm in 1930. He is credited with bringing modern architecture to the Philippines through his work. Nakpil completed many of his projects in the 1930s and 40s. He co-founded the Philippine College of Design in 1941, but World War II brought an end to the school.
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Lev Rudnev
1885 - 1956 (71 years)
Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev was a Soviet architect, and a leading practitioner of Stalinist architecture. Biography Rudnev was born to the family of a school teacher in the town of Opochka . He graduated from the Riga Realschule and entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg . At the Academy he studied painting under Leon Benois and architecture under Ivan Fomin. From 1911 Rudnev was a success in various architectural competitions, and in 1915 he became a certified specialist in the art of architecture.
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Harold Stephen Black
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Harold Stephen Black was an American electrical engineer, who revolutionized the field of applied electronics by inventing the negative feedback amplifier in 1927. To some, his invention is considered the most important breakthrough of the twentieth century in the field of electronics, since it has a wide area of application. This is because all electronic devices are inherently nonlinear, but they can be made substantially linear with the application of negative feedback. Negative feedback works by sacrificing gain for higher linearity . By sacrificing gain, it also has an additional effect of increasing the bandwidth of the amplifier.
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Roman Klein
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Roman Ivanovich Klein , born Robert Julius Klein, was a Russian architect and educator, best known for his Neoclassical Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Klein, an eclectic, was one of the most prolific architects of his period, second only to Fyodor Schechtel. In the 1880s-1890s, he practiced Russian Revival and Neo-Gothic exteriors; in the 1900s, his knowledge of Roman and Byzantine classical architecture allowed him to integrate into the Neoclassical revival trend of that period.
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Donato Bramante
1444 - 1514 (70 years)
Donato Bramante , born as Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio and also known as Bramante Lazzari, was an Italian architect and painter. He introduced Renaissance architecture to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his plan for St. Peter's Basilica formed the basis of the design executed by Michelangelo. His Tempietto marked the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome when Pope Julius II appointed him to build a sanctuary over the spot where Peter was martyred.
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Emery Roth
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Emery Roth was an American architect of Hungarian-Jewish descent who designed many New York City hotels and apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, incorporating Beaux-Arts and Art Deco details. His sons continued in the family enterprise, largely expanding the firm under the name Emery Roth & Sons.
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Piero Portaluppi
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Piero Portaluppi was an Italian architect. Biography Pietro Portaluppi was born in Milan, son of the engineer Oreste Portaluppi and wife Luisa Gadda. He graduated in 1905 from the Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo and registered at the Politecnico, studying with and Carlo Calzecchi. During this time, he worked as a caricaturist with the satirical newspapers Il Babau, A quel paese, and Guerin Meschino.
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Karl Schwanzer
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
Karl Schwanzer was an Austrian architect. He was an important figure of post-war architecture. Life As early as high school, the architecture enthusiast Karl Schwanzer and his uncle planned and built an allotment garden house for his family on Vienna's Schafberg in 1935. After his graduation from high school at the Bundesrealgymnasium Wien 7 in 1936, he completed his mandatory service in the Austrian national guard.
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Louis George Carpenter
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Louis George Carpenter , was a college Professor and later the Dean of Engineering & Physics at Colorado State University formerly known as the Colorado Agricultural College. He was also a mathematician and an irrigation and consulting engineer.
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Mustafa İnan
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Mustafa İnan was a Turkish civil engineering academic. Life He was born in Adana. His mother was Rabia and father was Hüseyin Avni. At the end of the First World War Adana was occupied by the French forces and his family had to move to Konya. At the end of the Turkish War of Independence the family returned to Adana and Mustafa continued his secondary education in Adana. In 1931 he took the first place in the entrance examinations of the Istanbul Technical University . Later he was sent to Switzerland for advanced studies in the ETH Zurich . After his doctorate thesis 1941, he returned to Turkey to continue academic studies in the Engineering School.
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Giovanni Muzio
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Giovanni Muzio was an Italian architect. Muzio was born and died in Milan. He was closely associated with the Novecento Italiano artists group. Biography The son of Virginio Muzio, an accomplished architect, Muzio studied in Milan, and after participation in the war and a trip to Europe, in 1920 he opened in Milan a study with Giuseppe De Finetti, Gio Ponti, Emilio Lancia and Mino Fiocchi and actively participated in the cultural life of Milan.
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Samuel H. Caldwell
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Samuel Hawks Caldwell was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers. Early life and education Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier . In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique ...
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Louis A. Simon
1867 - 1958 (91 years)
Louis A. Simon was an American architect. He spent almost his entire career with the Office of the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury. He served as the last supervising architect from 1934 to 1939 and thereafter of the Public Buildings Branch of the Federal Works Agency until 1941. He was also principal architect for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.
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Wilhelm Cauer
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specific...
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Yoshirō Taniguchi
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Yoshirō Taniguchi was a Japanese architect. He was born in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He was a graduate of Tokyo University Department of Architecture and professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1929–1965. As an architect, he created over 50 buildings and 10 memorials and participated in many professional activities as a statesman of Japanese modern architecture. “Yoshirō Taniguchi must be regarded as one of the most widely known, and, in the best sense, popular architects in Japan. Taniguchi is also well known for his writings and has made a name for himself as ...
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Thomas Rickman
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Thomas Rickman was an English architect and architectural antiquary who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival. He is particularly remembered for his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture , which established the basic chronological classification and terminology that are still in widespread use for the different styles of English medieval ecclesiastical architecture.
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John Eisenmann
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
John Eisenmann was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. As part of Eisenmann & Smith he designed the Cleveland Arcade in downtown Cleveland. He also designed the Main building for Case School of Applied Science, present-day Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the school's first professor of civil engineering. He pioneered structural steel construction in the United States and is credited with co-designing Cleveland's Arcade, "the first commercial building in the state designated an historic landmark in architecture." Eisenmann is also credited with designing the flag of Ohio in 19...
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Dugald C. Jackson
1865 - 1951 (86 years)
Dugald Caleb Jackson was an American electrical engineer. He received the IEEE Edison Medal for "outstanding and inspiring leadership in engineering education and in the field of generation and distribution of electric power".
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Józef Szanajca
1902 - 1939 (37 years)
Józef Szanajca was a Polish architect. Founder and member of PRAESENS group: "The Praesens group played a pioneering role in the development of modern architecture in Poland. From 1927 a link with Le Corbusier was established. Its members participated in all the main meetings".
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Jo van den Broek
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, was a Dutch architect influential in the rebuilding of Rotterdam after World War II. Van den Broek was born in Rotterdam. He joined with Johannes Brinkman in 1936, after the death of Brinkman's partner Leendert van der Vlugt. The firm's work during this time including a new terminal building for the Holland-America cruise line.
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Alessandro Antonelli
1798 - 1888 (90 years)
Alessandro Antonelli was an Italian architect of the 19th century. His most famous works are the Mole Antonelliana in Turin and both the Novara Cathedral and the Basilica of St. Gaudenzio in Novara.
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Fiske Kimball
1888 - 1955 (67 years)
Sidney Fiske Kimball was an American architect, architectural historian and museum director. A pioneer in the field of architectural preservation in the United States, he played a leading part in the restoration of Monticello and Stratford Hall Plantation in Virginia.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Jonathan Zenneck
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Jonathan Adolf Wilhelm Zenneck was a German physicist and electrical engineer who contributed to researches in radio circuit performance and to the scientific and educational contributions to the literature of the pioneer radio art.
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Cecil Beaton
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
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Nicolas-Henri Jardin
1720 - 1799 (79 years)
Nicolas-Henri Jardin was a French architect. Born in St. Germain des Noyers, Seine-et-Marne, Jardin worked seventeen years in Denmark–Norway as an architect to the Danish royal court. He introduced neoclassicism to Denmark–Norway.
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Giacomo della Porta
1532 - 1602 (70 years)
Giacomo della Porta was an Italian architect and sculptor, who worked on many important buildings in Rome, including St. Peter's Basilica. He was born at Porlezza, Lombardy and died in Rome. Biography Giacomo Della Porta was born in the Duchy of Genoa into a family of sculptors. He was influenced by and collaborated with Michelangelo, and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, his teacher of architecture. With these two great masters, he became one of the most important architects in the history of the Roman Renaissance. In fact, after 1563 he carried out Michelangelo's plans for the rebuilding of the C...
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