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,
#10701
Vladimir Shukhov
1853 - 1939 (86 years)
Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov was a Russian and Soviet engineer-polymath, scientist and architect renowned for his pioneering works on new methods of analysis for structural engineering that led to breakthroughs in industrial design of the world's first hyperboloid structures, diagrid shell structures, tensile structures, gridshell structures, oil reservoirs, pipelines, boilers, ships and barges. He is also the inventor of the first cracking method.
Go to Profile#10702
Ernst May
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Ernst Georg May was a German architect and city planner. May successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic period, and in 1930 less successfully exported those ideas to Soviet Union cities, newly created under Stalinist rule. It is said May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including Magnitogorsk. May's travels left him stateless when the Nazis seized power in Germany, and he spent many years in African exile before returning to Germany near the end of his life.
Go to Profile#10703
Edwin Lutyens
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens was an English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses, war memorials and public buildings. In his biography, the writer Christopher Hussey wrote, "In his lifetime was widely held to be our greatest architect since Wren if not, as many maintained, his superior". The architectural historian Gavin Stamp described him as "surely the greatest British architect of the twentieth century".
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Walt Disney
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Walter Elias Disney was an American animator, film producer, and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. As a film producer, he holds the record for most Academy Awards earned and nominations by an individual. He was presented with two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award, among other honors. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and have also been named as some of the greatest films ever by the American Film Institute.
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Gottfried Semper
1803 - 1879 (76 years)
Gottfried Semper was a German architect, art critic, and professor of architecture who designed and built the Semper Operaa House in Dresden between 1838 and 1841. In 1849 he took part in the May Uprising in Dresden and was put on the government's wanted list. He fled first to Zürich and later to London. He returned to Germany after the 1862 amnesty granted to the revolutionaries.
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Edith Clarke
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Edith Clarke was the first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States, and the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. She was the first woman to deliver a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the first female engineer whose professional standing was recognized by Tau Beta Pi, and the first woman named as a Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. She specialized in electrical power system analysis and wrote Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems.
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Christopher Wren
1632 - 1723 (91 years)
Sir Christopher Wren FRS was an English architect, astronomer, mathematician and physicist who was one of the most highly acclaimed architects in the history of England. Known for his work in the English Baroque style, he was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710.
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Hans Poelzig
1869 - 1936 (67 years)
Hans Poelzig was a German architect, painter and set designer. Life Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869 to Countess Clara Henrietta Maria Poelzig while she was married to George Acland Ames, an Englishman. Uncertain of his paternity, Ames refused to acknowledge Hans as his son and consequently he was brought up by a local choirmaster and his wife. In 1899 he married Maria Voss with whom he had four children.
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Hero of Alexandria
10 - 75 (65 years)
Hero of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria in Egypt during the Roman era. He is often considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.
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Sergei Korolev
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was the lead Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. He was involved in the development of the R-7 Rocket, Sputnik 1, launching Laika, Sputnik 3, the first human-made object to make contact with another celestial body, Belka and Strelka, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into space, Voskhod 1, and the first person, Alexei Leonov, to conduct a spacewalk.
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Minoru Yamasaki
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
was a Japanese-American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of "New Formalism".
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Alexey Shchusev
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Alexey Victorovich Shchusev was a Russian and Soviet architect who was successful during three consecutive epochs of Russian architecture – Art Nouveau , Constructivism, and Stalinist architecture, being one of the few Russian architects to be celebrated under both the Romanovs and the communists, becoming the most decorated architect in terms of Stalin prizes awarded.
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William Rankine
1820 - 1872 (52 years)
William John Macquorn Rankine was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson , to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on its First Law. He developed the Rankine scale, a Fahrenheit-based equivalent to the Celsius-based Kelvin scale of temperature.
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Henry Dyer
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Henry Dyer was a Scottish engineer who contributed much to founding Western-style technical education in Japan and Scottish-Japanese relations. Early life Henry Dyer was born on 16 August 1848, in the village of Muirmadkin in the Parish of Bothwell in what is now known as North Lanarkshire.
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Karl Friedrich Schinkel
1781 - 1841 (60 years)
Karl Friedrich Schinkel was a Prussian architect, city planner and painter who also designed furniture and stage sets. Schinkel was one of the most prominent architects of Germany and designed both Neoclassical and neo-Gothic buildings. His most famous buildings are found in and around Berlin.
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Thomas Telford
1757 - 1834 (77 years)
Thomas Telford was a Scottish civil engineer. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well as harbours and tunnels. Such was his reputation as a prolific designer of highways and related bridges, he was dubbed the Colossus of Roads , and, reflecting his command of all types of civil engineering in the early 19th century, he was elected as the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a post he held for 14 years until his death.
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Reyner Banham
1922 - 1988 (66 years)
Peter Reyner Banham Hon. FRIBA was an English architectural critic and writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In the latter he categorized the Los Angeles experience into four ecological models and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each. A frequent visitor to the United States from the early 1960s, he relocated there in 1976.
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Arne Jacobsen
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Arne Emil Jacobsen, Hon. FAIA was a Danish architect and furniture designer. He is remembered for his contribution to architectural functionalism and for the worldwide success he enjoyed with simple well-designed chairs.
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John Smeaton
1724 - 1792 (68 years)
John Smeaton was a British civil engineer responsible for the design of bridges, canals, harbours and lighthouses. He was also a capable mechanical engineer and an eminent physicist. Smeaton was the first self-proclaimed "civil engineer", and is often regarded as the "father of civil engineering". He pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in concrete, using pebbles and powdered brick as aggregate. Smeaton was associated with the Lunar Society.
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Inigo Jones
1573 - 1652 (79 years)
Inigo Jones was the first significant architect in England and Wales in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings. As the most notable architect in England and Wales, Jones was the first person to introduce the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to Britain. He left his mark on London by his design of single buildings, such as the Queen's House which is the first building in England designed in a pure classical style, and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, as well as the layout for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End.
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Moisei Ginzburg
1892 - 1946 (54 years)
Moisei Yakovlevich Ginzburg was a Soviet constructivist architect, best known for his 1929 Narkomfin Building in Moscow. Biography Education Ginzburg was born in Minsk into a Jewish architect's family. He graduated from Milano Academy and Riga Polytechnical Institute . During Russian Civil War he lived in the Crimea, relocating to Moscow in 1921. There, he joined the faculty of VKhUTEMAS and the Institute of Civil Engineers .
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Karl von Terzaghi
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Karl von Terzaghi was an Austrian mechanical engineer, geotechnical engineer, and geologist known as the "father of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering". Early life In 1883, he was born the first child of Army Lieutenant-Colonel Anton von Terzaghi, of Italian origin, and Amalia Eberle in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic. Upon his father's retirement from the army, the family moved to Graz, Austria.
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Lord Kelvin
1824 - 1907 (83 years)
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. He was the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, where he undertook significant research and mathematical analysis of electricity, the formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and contributed significantly to unifying physics, which was then in its infancy of development as an emerging academic discipline. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, and served as its president from 1890 to 1895. In 1892, he beca...
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Osborne Reynolds
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Osborne Reynolds was an Irish-born innovator in the understanding of fluid dynamics. Separately, his studies of heat transfer between solids and fluids brought improvements in boiler and condenser design. He spent his entire career at what is now the University of Manchester.
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Robert Moses
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Robert Moses was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid 20th century. Despite never being elected to any office, Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful and influential individuals in the history of New York City and New York State. The grand scale of his infrastructural projects and his philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States.
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Hans Scharoun
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Bernhard Hans Henry Scharoun was a German architect best known for designing the and the Schminke House in Löbau, Saxony. He was an important exponent of organic and expressionist architecture. Life
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Josep Puig i Cadafalch
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Josep Puig i Cadafalch was a Spanish Modernista architect who designed many significant buildings in Barcelona, and a politician who had a significant role in the development of Catalan institutions. He was the architect of the Casa Martí , which became a place of ideas, projects and social gatherings for such well-known Catalans as Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas.
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Richard Riemerschmid
1868 - 1957 (89 years)
Richard Riemerschmid was a German architect, painter, designer and city planner from Munich. He was a major figure in Jugendstil, the German form of Art Nouveau, and a founder of architecture in the style. A founder member of both the Vereinigte Werkstätte für Kunst im Handwerk and the Deutscher Werkbund and the director of art and design institutions in Munich and Cologne, he prized craftsmanship but also pioneered machine production of artistically designed objects.
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Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
1814 - 1879 (65 years)
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect and author, famous for his restoration of the most prominent medieval landmarks in France. His major restoration projects included Notre-Dame de Paris, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, the medieval walls of the city of Carcassonne, and Roquetaillade castle in the Bordeaux region.
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Luis Barragán
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín was a Mexican architect and engineer. His work has influenced contemporary architects visually and conceptually. Barragán's buildings are frequently visited by international students and professors of architecture. He studied as an engineer in his home town, while undertaking the entirety of additional coursework to obtain the title of architect.
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Richard Stribeck
1861 - 1950 (89 years)
Richard Stribeck was a German engineer, after whom the Stribeck Curve is named. Life Stribeck studied mechanical engineering in 1880 at the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1885 and worked as a designer in Königsberg. In 1888 he became professor in Stuttgart, and 1890 Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt. 1893 he took a professorship at the Dresden Technical University. In 1896 he became head of the laboratory equipment of the university.
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Charles Barry
1795 - 1860 (65 years)
Sir Charles Barry was a British architect, best known for his role in the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster in London during the mid-19th century, but also responsible for numerous other buildings and gardens. He is known for his major contribution to the use of Italianate architecture in Britain, especially the use of the Palazzo as basis for the design of country houses, city mansions and public buildings. He also developed the Italian Renaissance garden style for the many gardens he designed around country houses.
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Julia Morgan
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Julia Morgan was an American architect and engineer. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.
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Pietro Belluschi
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Pietro Belluschi was an Italian-American architect. A leading figure in modern architecture, he was responsible for the design of over 1,000 buildings. Born in Italy, Belluschi began his architectural career as a draftsman in a Portland, Oregon firm. He achieved a national reputation within about 20 years, largely for his 1947 aluminum-clad Equitable Building. In 1951, he was named the dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he served until 1965, also working as collaborator and design consultant for many high-profile commissions, most famously the 1963 Pan Am Building. He ...
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Marcello Piacentini
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
Marcello Piacentini was an Italian urban theorist and one of the main proponents of Italian Fascist architecture. Biography Born in Rome, he was the son of architect Pio Piacentini. When he was only 26, he was commissioned to revamp of the historical center of Bergamo ; subsequently, he worked in most of Italy, but his best works are those commissioned by the Fascist government in Rome.
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Gerrit Rietveld
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch furniture designer and architect. Early life Rietveld was born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888 as the son of a joiner. He left school at 11 to be apprenticed to his father and enrolled at night school before working as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht, from 1906 to 1911.
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Richard Morris Hunt
1827 - 1895 (68 years)
Richard Morris Hunt was an American architect of the nineteenth century and an eminent figure in the history of American architecture. He helped shape New York City with his designs for the 1902 entrance façade and Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty , and many Fifth Avenue mansions since destroyed.
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Philip Webb
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Philip Speakman Webb was a British architect and designer sometimes called the Father of Arts and Crafts Architecture. His use of vernacular architecture demonstrated his commitment to "the art of common building." William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were his business partners and he designed many notable buildings including one for Morris. He co-founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
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Giorgio Vasari
1511 - 1574 (63 years)
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect, who is best known for his work The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of all art-historical writing, and still much cited in modern biographies of the many Italian Renaissance artists he covers, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, although he is now regarded as including many factual errors, especially when covering artists from before he was born.
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Pierre Bonnard
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took pr...
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Leo von Klenze
1784 - 1864 (80 years)
Leo von Klenze was a German architect and painter. He was the court architect of Ludwig I of Bavaria. Von Klenze was a devotee of Neoclassicism and one of the most prominent representatives of Greek revival style.
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Barnes Wallis
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis was an English engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment, especially electric motorss for use in industry.
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Max Fabiani
1865 - 1962 (97 years)
Maximilian Fabiani, commonly known as Max Fabiani was Italian architect, born in the village of Kobdilj near Štanjel on the Karst Plateau, County of Gorizia and Gradisca, in present-day Slovenia. Together with Ciril Metod Koch and Ivan Vancaš, he introduced the Vienna Secession style of architecture in Slovenia.
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Jože Plečnik
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Jože Plečnik was a Slovene architect who had a major impact on the modern architecture of Vienna, Prague and of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, most notably by designing the iconic Triple Bridge and the Slovene National and University Library building, as well as the embankments along the Ljubljanica River, the Ljubljana Central Market buildings, the Ljubljana cemetery, parks, plazas etc. His architectural imprint on Ljubljana has been compared to the impact Antoni Gaudí had on Barcelona.
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Adolf Busemann
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Adolf Busemann was a German aerospace engineer and influential Nazi-era pioneer in aerodynamics, specialising in supersonic airflows. He introduced the concept of swept wings and, after emigrating in 1947 to the United States under Operation Paperclip, invented the shockwave-free supersonic Busemann biplane.
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Henri Poincaré
1854 - 1912 (58 years)
Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. Due to his scientific success, influence and his discoveries, he has been deemed "the philosopher par excellence of modern science."
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Arthur Casagrande
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Arthur Casagrande was an American civil engineer born in Austria-Hungary who made important contributions to the fields of engineering geology and geotechnical engineering during its infancy. Renowned for his ingenious designs of soil testing apparatus and fundamental research on seepage and soil liquefaction, he is also credited for developing the soil mechanics teaching programme at Harvard University during the early 1930s that has since been modelled in many universities around the world.
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Cass Gilbert
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Cass Gilbert was an American architect. An early proponent of skyscrapers, his works include the Woolworth Building, the United States Supreme Court building, the state capitols of Minnesota, Arkansas, and West Virginia, the Detroit Public Library, the Saint Louis Art Museum and Public Library. His public buildings in the Beaux Arts style reflect the optimistic American sense that the nation was heir to Greek democracy, Roman law and Renaissance humanism. Gilbert's achievements were recognized in his lifetime; he served as president of the American Institute of Architects in 1908–09.
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Josep Maria Jujol
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
José María Jujol Gibert was a Catalan Spanish architect. Jujol's wide field of activity ranged from furniture designs and painting, to architecture. He worked with Antoni Gaudí on many of his most famous works. Among Jujol's projects are Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, Park Güell, and Our Lady of Montserrat, and among his design styles are Modernisme and Art Nouveau.
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