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,
#10751
Gottlieb Bindesbøll
1800 - 1856 (56 years)
Michael Gottlieb Birckner Bindesbøll was a Danish architect active during the Danish Golden Age in the first half of the 19th century. Most known for his design of Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, he was a key figure in the stylistic shift in Danish architecture from late classicism to Historicism. He was the father of the designer Thorvald Bindesbøll and the textile artist Johanne Bindesbøll.
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Ruth Maxon Adams
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Ruth Maxon Adams was an American architect. Biography Adams grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, the only child of Yale professor George Burton Adams. As a child, she visited England with her father, where she was first exposed to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. She graduated from Vassar College in 1904, with no intention of practicing architecture.
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John F. McCarthy Jr.
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
John Francis McCarthy Jr. was an American scientist and engineer. He worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as director of its Center for Space Research; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as the director of its Lewis Research Center; the United States Air Force, where he served with the Strategic Air Command and as a member of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; North American Rockwell, where he oversaw the design and development of the Apollo command and service module that took the first men to the Moon, and the S-II of the Saturn V rocket.
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Giovan Battista Aleotti
1546 - 1636 (90 years)
Giovan Battista Aleotti was an Italian architect. Biography Aleotti was born in Argenta. For some years, Aleotti went to Ferrara, to work under Alfonso II d'Este where with Alessandro Balbi he designed the façade of the University in 1610. He gave a new façade to the Rocca Scandiano, the home of the Boiardo family. He is known for his designs in Parma, including the Teatro Farnese and, with the assistance of his pupil Giovanni Battista Magnani, the hexagonal church of Santa Maria del Quartiere . He also helped design the facades of the Palazzi Bentivoglio and Bevilacqua-Costabili in Ferrara...
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Fleeming Jenkin
1833 - 1885 (52 years)
Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin FRS FRSE LLD was Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, remarkable for his versatility. Known to the world as the inventor of the cable car or telpherage, he was an electrician and cable engineer, economist, lecturer, linguist, critic, actor, dramatist and artist. His descendants include the engineer Charles Frewen Jenkin and through him the Conservative MPs Patrick, Lord Jenkin of Roding and Bernard Jenkin.
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Julius Erasmus Hilgard
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Julius Erasmus Hilgard was a Bavarian-American engineer. Biography Julius Erasmus Hilgard was born at Zweibrücken, Rhineland-Palatinate, Kingdom of Bavaria on January 7, 1825. His father, Theodore Erasmus Hilgard, was for many years Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals, but on account of his liberal opinions was so dissatisfied with conditions in his native country that in 1835 he emigrated to America. The journey from his native place to Havre was made in wagons. After a voyage of 62 days, the family landed at New Orleans at Christmas, and journeyed up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and thence to a farm at Belleville, Illinois.
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Johann Andreas Schubert
1808 - 1870 (62 years)
Johann-Andreas Schubert was a German general engineer , designer and university lecturer. Life Schubert was born on 19 March 1808 in Wernesgrün in the Kingdom of Saxony in Germany. He was the son of a day labourer and was brought up by foster parents, who enabled him to have a sound education at the St Thomas School in Leipzig, at the garrison school at Königstein Fortress and at the Freemasons Institute in Dresden's Friedrichstadt.
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James D. Hutton
1828 - 1868 (40 years)
James Dempsey Hutton was an artist, surveyor, cartographer and early photographer active in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota in the years before the American Civil War. He served as an engineer in the Confederate States Army in that conflict, and died in exile in Mexico in 1868.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Leopold Pfeil
1783 - 1859 (76 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Leopold Pfeil was a German forester. Pfeil was born in Rammelburg. From 1801 onward, he trained and worked as a forester at several sites in the Harz region, Neuchâtel and Silesia. As a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars he fought at the Battles of Großbeeren and Wartenburg. From 1816 he was employed as a forester in the service of Heinrich Karl Erdmann, prince of Carolath-Beuthen. In 1821 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Berlin, and despite lacking a university education, was named a professor of forest science. In 1830 when the department of forestry w...
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Constantin Avram
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Constantin Avram was a Romanian structural engineer. Born in Ciumași, Bacău County, his parents Nicolai and Maria were peasants; in addition, his father was a mechanic for Căile Ferate Române. The couple worked hard for their children's education; their four sons all earned university degrees, with three becoming structural engineers and the fourth a chemical engineer. Constantin attended Ferdinand I High School in Bacău from 1923 to 1930. He then enrolled in the military engineers officers' school in Bucharest, graduating first in his class in 1932 and becoming a second lieutenant in the Romanian Army.
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May Hollinworth
1895 - 1968 (73 years)
May Hollinworth was an Australian theatre producer and director, former radio actress, and founder of the Metropolitan Theatre in Sydney. The daughter of a theatrical producer, she was introduced to the theatre at a young age. She graduated with a science degree, and worked in the chemistry department of the University of Sydney, before being appointed as director of the Sydney University Dramatic Society, a post she held from 1929 until 1943
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Guido Marx
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Guido Hugo Marx was an American mechanical engineer who was active in progressive politics, the technocracy movement, and civil liberties. He contributed to helping feed and house hundreds of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake survivors and led the Stanford Academic Council through changes in academic freedom, culminating in founding both the American Association of University Professors and the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Frederick Stark Pearson
1861 - 1915 (54 years)
Fred Stark Pearson was an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur. Biography Pearson was the son of Ambrose and Hannah Pearson. He graduated from Tufts University in 1883 with an A.M.B. and received an A.M.M. degree one year later. Previously, for one year , he was instructor in chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; later , he was instructor in mathematics and applied mechanics at Tufts College. From college, he went on to develop the electric transportation system in Boston and, with electric powered streetcars of major importance, in 1894 he was appointed the head engineer for Metropolitan Street Railways in New York City.
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Roberto Valturio
1405 - 1475 (70 years)
Roberto Valturio was an Italian engineer and writer born in Rimini. He was the author of the military treatise De Re militari . The work consists of a preface, with a dedication to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta; a list of the classical works mentioned and an introduction on the history of warfare. The work was widely known: King Louis XI of France, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and the ruler of Florence Lorenzo de' Medici had a copy of the printed book. In Leonardo da Vinci's list of books Roberto Valturio has been mentioned. This indicates that Leo...
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François d'Aguilon
1567 - 1617 (50 years)
François d'Aguilon was a Jesuit, mathematician, physicist, and architect from the Spanish Netherlands. D'Aguilon was born in Brussels; his father was a secretary to Philip II of Spain. He became a Jesuit in Tournai in 1586. In 1598 he moved to Antwerp, where he helped plan the construction of the Saint Carolus Borromeus church. In 1611, he started a special school of mathematics in Antwerp, fulfilling a dream of Christopher Clavius for a Jesuit mathematical school; in 1616, he was joined there by Grégoire de Saint-Vincent. The notable geometers educated at this school included Jean-Charles d...
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Janet Parker
1938 - 1978 (40 years)
#10767
Hyrum Manwaring
1877 - 1956 (79 years)
Hyrum Manwaring was the president of Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, from 1930 to 1944. Ricks College was the precursor to today's Brigham Young University–Idaho, a private university operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . Manwaring overcame delayed schooling – he was almost 29 when he graduated from high school – to become a dedicated champion of education. He led Ricks College through difficult times, when dissolution seemed inevitable, to a point where its future was assured. After retiring from the presidency in 1944, Manwaring continued to teach, and take classes ...
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Hugh Hutton Stannus
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Hugh Hutton Stannus was a sculptor, architect and author. In his early career he worked with the sculptor Alfred Stevens; he was in later life a lecturer at art colleges. Life Stannus was born in Sheffield on 21 March 1840; his father, the Rev. Bartholomew Stannus, was a member of an old Irish family, and his mother Jane was daughter of the Rev. William Hutton of Belfast. His first artistic training was gained in Sheffield under Henry Dent Lomas at the Sheffield School of Art, after which he was articled to the firm of H. E. Hoole & Co. in that town, whose foundry was then engaged in producin...
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William Hutchison McMillan
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
William Hutchison McMillan OBE MIME FRSE was a British mining engineer. He was Head of the Department of Mining and Fuels at University College, Nottingham then Professor of Mining in Edinburgh. In authorship he usually appears as W. H. McMillan.
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Walter Mulford
1877 - 1955 (78 years)
Walter Mulford was an American forester for the state of Connecticut, and a professor. He was the first state forester in the United States. Biography He was born on September 16, 1877, in Millville, New Jersey.
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Adolf Miethe
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Adolf Miethe was a German scientist, lens designer, photochemist, photographer, author and educator. He co-invented the first practical photographic flash and made important contributions to the progress of practical color photography.
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Dave Fleischer
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Dave Fleischer was an American film director and producer who co-owned Fleischer Studios with his older brother Max Fleischer. He was a native of New York City. Biography Fleischer was the youngest of five brothers and grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a poor Jewish neighbourhood. By the time he was born, his father had lost his means of livelihood due to the mass production of garments.
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Robert Wilson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Robert Wilson FRSE FRSSA was a Scottish engineer, remembered as inventor of a special kind of a screw propeller, which he demonstrated in 1827 . Wilson also designed a self-acting motion for steam hammers which was key to making them practical for industrial use, among many other inventions.
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Peter Harrison
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Peter Firman Harrison , town planner, was a champion of the Griffin Plan for Canberra and an influential advocate for the public interest in the development of Australia's national capital. Early career Harrison grew up in Sydney during the Great Depression. Between 1934 and 1951, he undertook part-time architecture studies, before switching to town planning studies, while working as a draftsman at AGL, the Commonwealth Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Department of Works and Housing, and the Cumberland County Council. He was appointed senior lecturer in town planning at the University of Sydney in 1951.
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Pavel Shteller
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Pavel Pavlovich Shteller was a Soviet architect, urban planner, and teacher. In the 1930s, he was a noted swimmer and water polo player. He was made an Honored Architect of the RSFSR
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Wayne Andrews
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Wayne Andrews was an American historian and architectural photographer. He was the author of numerous books, including Battle for Chicago, and Siegfried`s Curse: The German Journey from Nietzsche to Hesse.
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Ely Jacques Kahn
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Ely Jacques Kahn was an American commercial architect who designed numerous skyscrapers in New York City in the twentieth century. In addition to buildings intended for commercial use, Kahn's designs ranged throughout the possibilities of architectural programs, including facilities for the film industry. Many of the buildings he designed under the 1916 Zoning Resolution feature architectural setbacks to keep the building profitably close to its permitted "envelope"; these have been likened to the stepped form of the Tower of Babel. Kahn is also known for his guidance to author Ayn Rand.
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Robert James Moon
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Robert James Moon was an American physicist, chemist and engineer. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he served on the faculty there and participated in the Manhattan Project. External links Who Was Robert J. Moon? https://21sci-tech.com/articles/drmoon.html 21st Century Science & TechnologyUniversity of Chicago Photo Archive, Accelerator Building http://photoarchive.lib.uchicago.edu/db.xqy?one=apf2-00146.xmlInterview: Robert Moon. Part I. 'We grew up confident we could solve any problem.' https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1987/eirv14n43-19871030/eirv14n43-19871030_031-dr_robert_moon.pdf Executive Intelligence Review, Vol.
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Raoul Wallenberg
1912 - 1947 (35 years)
Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.
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William Adam
1689 - 1748 (59 years)
William Adam was a Scottish architect, mason, and entrepreneur. He was the foremost architect of his time in Scotland, designing and building numerous country houses and public buildings, and often acting as contractor as well as architect. Among his best known works are Hopetoun House near Edinburgh, and Duff House in Banff. His individual, exuberant style built on the Palladian style, but with Baroque details inspired by Vanbrugh and Continental architecture.
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Frederick B. Llewellyn
1897 - 1971 (74 years)
Frederick Britton Llewellyn was a noted American electrical engineer. Llewellyn was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He took a course at the Marconi School for Wireless Operators in 1915, spent some three years in the merchant marine, and almost a year in the Navy in 1917-18. He then studied under Professor Alan Hazeltine at Stevens Institute of Technology, receiving his M.E. degree in 1922. After a year as laboratory assistant to Dr. F. K. Vreeland, he joined Western Electric in 1923, transferring in 1925 to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on the long-wave transatlantic telephone based in Rocky Point, New York.
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Ambrose McCarthy Patterson
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Ambrose McCarthy Patterson was a painter and printmaker. Life Patterson was born in Daylesford, Victoria. He studied at the Melbourne Art School under E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker, at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra. In Paris he became a friend of compatriot Nellie Melba, the famous soprano; Patterson's brother, Tom, was married to Melba's sister, Belle. Through Melba's influence, he was able to continue his studies with John Singer Sargent.
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William Allen
1870 - 1928 (58 years)
William Robert Allen was an early 20th-century architect in Utah. His most important work, the Davis County Courthouse, is no longer extant, yet a number of his works are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Allen received training through the International Correspondence Schools which was based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but allowed him to receive training and continue work in Utah.
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Asger Ostenfeld
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
Asger Skovgaard Ostenfeld was a Danish civil engineer who specialized in the theory of steel and reinforced concrete structures. He is now considered to be the founding father of the theory of structures in Denmark.
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Hans Hausamann
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Ernst Johann Hausamann was a Swiss photographer, businessman, and freemason who later became an intelligence officer. Hausamann's father was a photographer, and when Hausamann grew up he became an amateur photographer himself. He joined the Swiss Militia during World War I and this established his political character. He was initially opposed to left-wing politics and supported a strong military. After the war, he opened a specialist photography business and published an associated magazine, that eventually led the company to work for the Swiss press. During the early 1930's, he worked in the militia's education film service, where he created films that promoted a strong military.
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Roy Williams
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Roy Williams was an artist and entertainer for The Walt Disney Studios, best known as "Big Roy," the adult mouseketeer for four seasons on the Mickey Mouse Club television series and for his invention of the Mickey Mouse hats.
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Richard O. Papenguth
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Richard O. Papenguth was an American college swimming coach at Purdue University and coach of the women's swim team in the 1952 Summer Olympics that won two bronze medals. Papenguth was a graduate of the University of Michigan. Papenguth is a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame
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Lyman Cornelius Smith
1850 - 1910 (60 years)
Lyman Cornelius Smith was an American innovator and industrialist. He is buried in a mausoleum in Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse, New York. Early business ventures L.C. Smith's first business venture occurred in 1873, when he opened a livestock commission in New York City. The business failed within two years. Undeterred, Smith next attempted to establish a lumber business in Syracuse in 1875. His success in lumber was limited. Again on the verge of financial failure, Smith decided to enter into the lucrative business of producing firearms. Although he and members of his family manufactured guns, they are not the 'Smith' from Smith & Wesson.
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John Perry
1743 - 1810 (67 years)
John Perry was the founder of the Blackwall Yard, where he built ships largely for the East India Company. He was buried at St Matthias Old Church, Poplar. Ephraim Seehl, an apothecary and chemist, was married to his sister Sarah.
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Karel Sluijterman
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
Theodorus Karel Lodewijk Sluijterman, was a Dutch architect, furniture designer, interior designer, illustrator, ceramist, book binding designer and professor. Life and work From 1880 to 1884 Sluijterman studied at the Polytechnic School in Delft under the designer Adolf le Comte and at the Academy of Fine and Applied Courses in Rotterdam.
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Thomas Claxton Fidler
1841 - 1917 (76 years)
Thomas Claxton Fidler was a British civil engineer, noteworthy for his 1887 book on bridge construction. Career As successor to Alfred Ewing, T. Claxton Fidler was appointed in 1891 a professor in the Chair of Engineering & Drawing at University College, Dundee. Ewing's Practical Treatise on Bridge-Construction went through 5 editions with the 3rd edition in 1901, 4th edition in 1909, and paperback 5th edition in 1924. The book was praised for its clarity and thoroughness. He retired as professor emeritus in 1909. In retirement he lived in Ventnor, Isle of Wight.
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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.
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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".
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Yeram S. Touloukian
1920 - 1981 (61 years)
Yeram Sarkis Touloukian was an American professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Thermophysical Properties Research Center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was world-renowned for his work in thermophysics and his name has become synonymous with the field of thermophysical properties.
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Robert J. Linhardt
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His primary appointment at RPI is based in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting of joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Biology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center. He is highly cited in his field, with over 100 papers having each over 100 citations.
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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.
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Jesse Francis McClendon
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.
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John D. Eshelby
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
John Douglas Eshelby FRS was a scientist in micromechanics. He made significant contributions to the fields of defect mechanics and micromechanics of inhomogeneous solids for fifty years, including important aspects of the controlling mechanisms of plastic deformation and fracture.
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Arnold Tustin
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Arnold Tustin, , was a British engineer, and Professor of Engineering at the University of Birmingham and at Imperial College London, who made important contributions to the development of control engineering and its application to electrical machines.
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Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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