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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.

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List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#10701

Horst Rittel

1930 - 1990 (60 years)

Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.

#10702

Ben Shahn

1898 - 1969 (71 years)

Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.

#10703

Frank Benford

1883 - 1948 (65 years)

Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.

#10704

Joseph Henry Keenan

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.

#10705

Charles Stark Draper

1901 - 1987 (86 years)

Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landingss possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.

#10706

John G. Trump

1907 - 1985 (78 years)

John George Trump was an American electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1973, he was a recipient of the National Medal of Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Trump was noted for developing rotational radiation therapy. Together with Robert J. Van de Graaff, he developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators.

#10707

Eli Sternberg

1917 - 1988 (71 years)

Eli Sternberg was a researcher in solid mechanics and was considered to be the "nation's leading elastician" at the time of his death. He earned his doctorate in 1945 under Michael Sadowsky at the Illinois Institute of Technology with a dissertation entitled Non-Linear Theory of Elasticity and Applications. He made contributions widely in elasticity, especially in mathematical analysis, the theory of stress concentrations, thermo-elasticity, and visco-elasticity.

#10708

Harold Barlow

1899 - 1989 (90 years)

Harold Everard Monteagle Barlow FRS was a British engineer. He was born in Islington, London, the son of Leonard Barlow, an electrical engineer. He entered University College, London where, apart from the World War II years , he spent most of his working life. He was taught by Ambrose Fleming, who held the Pender Chair there. Barlow went on to succeed Fleming in that chair, and hence also in the post of head of department. Among his students, Barlow supervised Charles Kao, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Physics, for a doctoral degree.

#10709

Lan Jen Chu

1913 - 1973 (60 years)

Lan Jen Chu was a noted electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Chu is noted for his work on the fundamental limitations for small antennas, also known as Chu's limit.

#10710

Geoffrey Raynor

1913 - 1983 (70 years)

Geoffrey Vincent Raynor FRS was an English metallurgist and university academic. Life Raynor was educated at Nottingham High School before studying Chemistry at Keble College, Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in 1936. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, working with William Hume-Rothery, and carried out metallurgical research for the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow, with the course that he taught in structural and theoretical metallurgy becoming "the forerunner for the development of metallurgical teaching all over the world".

#10711

Theodore Paul Wright

Theodore Paul Wright

1895 - 1970 (75 years)

Theodore Paul Wright , also known as T. P. Wright, was a U.S. aeronautical engineer and educator. Biography He was born in Galesburg, Illinois on May 25, 1895. His father was the economist Philip Green Wright and his brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. He graduated from Lombard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in World War I.

#10712

Pol Duwez

1907 - 1984 (77 years)

Pol Duwez was a Belgian-born materials scientist. While working at Caltech in 1960, he first introduced metallic glasseses made through rapid liquid cooling using a technique known as splat quenching.

#10713

Leo M. Davidoff

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

Leo M. Davidoff was a professor, associate dean and chairman of the departments of surgery and neurological surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School.

#10714

Gordon Rawcliffe

1910 - 1979 (69 years)

Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe FRS was a British electrical engineer and academic. Life Gordon Hindle Rawcliffe, whose father was an Anglican clergyman in Sheffield, was born on 2 June 1910, moving from Sheffield to Gloucester when he was two. He was educated at the King's School, Gloucester, Hereford Cathedral School and St Edmund's School, Canterbury before matriculating at Keble College, Oxford to study mathematics. After his first-year examinations, he switched to engineering, under Richard V. Southwell, and obtained a first-class degree in 1932. He worked for the next five years for Metropolitan-Vickers in Manchester, initially as an apprentice and then as a design engineer.

#10715

Llewellyn M. K. Boelter

1898 - 1966 (68 years)

Llewellyn Michael Kraus Boelter was an American engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and founding Dean of its UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

#10716

Dallas B. Phemister

1882 - 1951 (69 years)

Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.

#10717

Lloyd A. Jeffress

Lloyd A. Jeffress

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

Lloyd Alexander Jeffress was an acoustical scientist, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and a developer of mine-hunting models for the US Navy during World War II and after, Jeffress was known to psychologists for his pioneering research on auditory masking in psychoacoustics, his stimulus-oriented approach to signal-detection theory in psychophysics, and his "ingenious" electronic and mathematical models of the auditory process.

#10718

Robert W. Newcomb

Robert W. Newcomb is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained a BSEE degree from Purdue University in 1955, an MS from Stanford University in 1957, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He was a professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University through 1968, and from 1969 onward has been a professor in the electrical engineering department at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has graduated over 70 Ph.D. students from both Stanford and the University of Maryland, including Brian D.

#10719

King-Sun Fu

1930 - 1985 (55 years)

King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.

#10720

Norbert Wiener

1894 - 1964 (70 years)

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.

#10721

Katsutada Sezawa

Katsutada Sezawa

1895 - 1944 (49 years)

Katsutada Sezawa was a Japanese geophysicist . Sezawa's key work was on the mathematical aspects of wave transmission in media of different viscosities and the Sezawa wave mode of surface waves is named after him.

#10722

Markus Reiner

1886 - 1976 (90 years)

Markus Reiner was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology. Biography Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna . After the First World War, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa.

#10723

William B. Kouwenhoven

William B. Kouwenhoven

1886 - 1975 (89 years)

William Bennet Kouwenhoven , also known as the "Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation," is famous for his contributions to the development of the closed-chest cardiac massage and his invention of the cardiac defibrillator. After obtaining his doctorate degree in engineering from the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Germany, Kouwenhoven began his career as the dean at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Kouwenhoven focused his research mainly on improving and saving lives of patients through the application of electricity. With the help and cooperation of the Johns Hopkins School of ...

#10724

Frederick Terman

Frederick Terman

1900 - 1982 (82 years)

Frederick Emmons Terman was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.

#10725

Philip Drinker

1894 - 1972 (78 years)

Philip Drinker was an American industrial hygienist. With Louis Agassiz Shaw, he invented the first widely used iron lung in 1928. Family and early life Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker; his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., pathologist Cecil Kent Drinker, businessman James Drinker, and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. After graduating from St. George's and Princeton in 1915, Philip Drinker trained as a chemical engineer at Lehigh for two years.

#10726

Donald Burmister

1883 - 1981 (98 years)

Donald M. Burmister was a professor of civil engineering and a pioneer in the field of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. Career Donald Burmister served as faculty member at Columbia University for 34 years, beginning in 1929. He was a consultant on the foundation design for many notable construction projects including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Verazanno-Narrows Bridge, Tappan Zee Bridge, first New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, and reconstruction of the White House in 1950.

#10727

F. W. Hutchinson

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Francis William Hutchinson was an engineer, and a pioneer in HVAC research. Hutchinson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1931, and received an M.S. and M.E. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937. He was a professor of engineering at Berkeley and at Purdue University. At Purdue, he established a solar energy research program in which two experimental solar houses were built on the Purdue campus in the summer of 1945. By analyzing this experiment, Hutchinson concluded that the solar gain through the double glazed house was greater than the excess heat loss.

#10728

Alexander Hrennikoff

Alexander Hrennikoff

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

Alexander Pavlovich Hrennikoff was a Russian-Canadian structural engineer, a founder of the Finite Element Method. Biography Alexander was born in Russia, graduated from the Institute of Railway Engineering in Moscow, received M.A.Sc. degree from the University of British Columbia , and D.Sc degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1933 until his death in 1984 he worked as a professor of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia.

#10729

Cecil Burgess

1888 - 1956 (68 years)

Cecil Burgess was a Canadian architect. He was born in Walkden, Lancashire, England on 8 July 1888. He was educated Walkden, Lancashire, England. He articled to Henry Kirkby, an architect in Manchester, England. Cecil Burgess arrived in Ottawa, Ontario with his parents in 1905. He married Violet Hervey from Round Hill, Nova Scotia, in 1913. The couple had a son, Bernard W. Burgess of Montreal, and a daughter, Mrs. Barbara Joyce Greenwood.

#10730

Walter Rautenstrauch

1880 - 1951 (71 years)

Walter Rautenstrauch was an American mechanical and consulting engineer, and Professor at Columbia University's Department of Industrial Engineering in the 1930s. He coined the term break-even point, and developing the break-even chart together with Charles Edward Knoeppel.

#10731

Otto Julius Zobel

1887 - 1970 (83 years)

Otto Julius Zobel was an electrical engineer who worked for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company in the early part of the 20th century. Zobel's work on filter design was revolutionary and led, in conjunction with the work of John R. Carson, to significant commercial advances for AT&T in the field of frequency-division multiplex telephone transmissions.

#10732

John Ely Burchard

1898 - 1975 (77 years)

John Ely Burchard was an American professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a historian and architectural critic. He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1954 to 1957.

#10733

Christopher Tunnard

Christopher Tunnard

1910 - 1979 (69 years)

Arthur Coney Tunnard , later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape . Biography Christopher Tunnard was the son of Christopher Coney Tunnard, second son of Charles Thomas Tunnard of Frampton House, near Boston, Lincolnshire and Madeline Kingscote. He had one younger brother, Peter Kingscote Tunnard , who died at age 20. Tunnard's uncle was John Charles Tunnard whose only son was British surrealist artist John Tunnard . Another uncle was Thomas Monkton Tunnard of Birtles Hall, vicar o...

#10734

Hayne Constant

1904 - 1968 (64 years)

Hayne Constant, CB, CBE., MA., FRAeS., FRS, was an English mechanical and aeronautical engineer who developed jet engines during World War II. Education Constant was born at Gravesend, the son of Frederick Charles Constant and his wife Mary Theresa Hayne. His father was a dental surgeon in Folkestone. Hayne was educated at King's College Choir School Cambridge, King's School, Canterbury, The Technical Institute Folkestone, Sir Roger Manwood's School, Sandwich and Queens' College, Cambridge.

#10735

Jerome Clarke Hunsaker

Jerome Clarke Hunsaker

1886 - 1984 (98 years)

Jerome Clarke Hunsaker was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work with Gustav Eiffel outside Paris led to the first wind tunnel in the US at MIT. He was instrumental in developing a weather reporting and airway navigation. Hunsaker was also pivotal in establishing the theoretical and scientific study of aerodynamics in the United States. And he was primarily responsible for the design and construction of the Navy-Curtiss airplane that accomplished the first transatlantic flight , and the first successful shipboard fighter.

#10736

Friedrich Eisenkolb

1901 - 1967 (66 years)

Friedrich Eisenkolb was a German metallurgist. Life Eisenkolb was born at the start of the twentieth century in Warnsdorf, at that time a small German-speaking town in northern Bohemia. His father was employed in finance security. Eisenkolb passed his School final exams in 1919 and then, from 1919 till 1923, studied Chemistry and Metallurgy at the Prague Poly-technical Institute. He received his doctorate in 1924 and went to work for Eisenwerke AG at Rothau-Neudek, on the Bohemian side of the Western Ore Mountains. In 1928 Eisenkolb completed a second dissertation, his subject being the pickling of sheet-metals.

#10737

Tokushichi Mishima

1893 - 1975 (82 years)

Tokushichi Mishima was a Japanese metallurgist and inventor. He discovered that aluminum restored magnetism to non-magnetic nickel steel. He invented MKM steel, which was an extremely inexpensive magnetic substance that has been used in many applications. It is also closely related to the modern Alnico magnets. He later became a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. After his death, his remains were buried in the Tama Cemetery in Tokyo.

#10738

Bernard D. H. Tellegen

Bernard D. H. Tellegen

1900 - 1990 (90 years)

Bernard D.H. Tellegen was a Dutch electrical engineer and inventor of the pentode and the gyrator. He is also known for a theorem in circuit theory, Tellegen's theorem. He obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering from Delft University in 1923, and joined the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium in Eindhoven. In 1926, he invented the pentode vacuum tube. The gyrator was invented by him around 1948. The gyrator is useful to simulate the effect of an inductor without using a coil. For example, it is used in hi-fi graphic equalizers. He held 41 US patents.

#10739

Walter Curt Behrendt

1884 - 1945 (61 years)

Walter Curt Behrendt was a German-American architect and active advocate of German modernism. He was an authority on city planning and housing, editor of Die Form, and author of The Victory of the New Building Style among many other works.

#10740

Otto Lindig

1895 - 1966 (71 years)

Otto Lindig was a German master potter who was a student and later a workshop manager at the famous Bauhaus art school in Weimar, Germany. Background Lindig was born in Pößneck, Germany. Initially trained as an artist and modeler, he also studied sculpture with architect and designer Henry van de Velde in 1913-15 at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule , in the building that would soon become the first location of the Bauhaus. Shortly after the Bauhaus opened in 1919, Lindig enrolled in the program and, beginning in 1920, studied ceramics with sculptor Gerhard Marcks, his Formmeister and Master Pot...

#10741

Ralph C. Bryant

1877 - 1939 (62 years)

Ralph Clement Bryant, Sr. was an early American professor of forestry, the author of the pioneer textbook and other books and notes in forestry. Logging Education and career R. C. Bryant was the first person to receive a forestry degree in the United States, as a graduate from the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell .

#10742

Sylvia Lavin

1900 - Present (126 years)

Sylvia Lavin is a professor of history and theory of architecture at Princeton University, School of Architecture. She was previously the head of the Ph.D. in Architecture program from 2007-2017 and professor of architectural history and theory at UCLA, where she was chairperson of the department of architecture and urban design from 1996 to 2006. Lavin is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a visiting professor of architectural theory at Princeton University School of Architecture. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architectur...

#10743

Kevin A. Lynch

1918 - 1984 (66 years)

Kevin Andrew Lynch was an American urban planner and author. He is known for his work on the perceptual form of urban environments and was an early proponent of mental mapping. His most influential books include The Image of the City , a seminal work on the perceptual form of urban environments, and What Time is This Place? , which theorizes how the physical environment captures and refigures temporal processes.

#10744

Morien Morgan

1912 - 1978 (66 years)

Sir Morien Bedford Morgan CB FRS , was a noted Welsh aeronautical engineer, sometimes known as "the Father of Concorde". He spent most of his career at the Royal Aircraft Establishment , before moving to Whitehall for ten years as the Controller of Aircraft within the Ministry of Aviation. He spent the last years of his life as master of Downing College, Cambridge.

#10745

Thomas Tallmadge

1876 - 1940 (64 years)

Thomas Eddy Tallmadge was an American architect, best known for his Prairie School works with Vernon S. Watson as Tallmadge & Watson. Biography Thomas Eddy Tallmadge was born in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1876. He was raised in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, graduating from Evanston Township High School. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1898 with a bachelor's degree in Architecture. He returned to Chicago to study under Daniel H. Burnham, one of the city's most prominent architects. While working for Burnham, Tallmadge received a scholarship from the Chicago Architectural Club for his work "A Crèche in a Manufacturing District".

#10746

Charlemae Hill Rollins

1897 - 1979 (82 years)

Charlemae Hill Rollins was a pioneering librarian, writer and storyteller in the area of African-American literature. During her thirty-one years as head librarian of the children's department at the Chicago Public Library as well as after her retirement, she instituted substantial reforms in children's literature.

#10747

Ernst Julius Berg

Ernst Julius Berg

1871 - 1941 (70 years)

Ernst Julius Berg was a Swedish-born, American electrical engineer. Biography Ernst Julius Berg was born in Östersund, Jämtland County in Sweden. After graduating from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1892, he immigrated to the United States. He began working as an assistant to Charles Proteus Steinmetz at General Electric. He then joined the faculty of electrical engineering at Union College.

#10748

Giuseppe Colombo

1920 - 1984 (64 years)

Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo was an Italian scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy. Mercury Colombo studied the planet Mercury, and it was his calculations which showed how to get a spacecraft into a solar orbit which would encounter Mercury multiple times, using a gravity assist maneuver with Venus. Due to this idea, NASA was able to have the Mariner 10 accomplish three fly-bys of Mercury instead of one. Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist. Since then, the technique has become common.

#10749

Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

1895 - 1983 (88 years)

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" , "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".

#10750

Miller McClintock

1894 - 1960 (66 years)

Miller McClintock was an American expert in traffic control who developed the "friction theory" of traffic. He became interested in educational broadcasting and was a member of the board of Encyclopædia Britannica Films. He subsequently presented the early American factual television series Serving Through Science which showed films from Encyclopædia Britannica.

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