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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#10801
Richard Upjohn
1802 - 1878 (76 years)
Richard Upjohn was a British-born American architect who emigrated to the United States and became most famous for his Gothic Revival churches. He was partially responsible for launching the movement to popularity in the United States. Upjohn also did extensive work in and helped to popularize the Italianate style. He was a founder and the first president of the American Institute of Architects. His son, Richard Michell Upjohn, , was also a well-known architect and served as a partner in his continued architectural firm in New York.
Go to Profile#10802
Marc Isambard Brunel
1769 - 1849 (80 years)
Sir Marc Isambard Brunel was a French-British engineer who is most famous for the work he did in Britain. He constructed the Thames Tunnel and was the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Born in France, Brunel fled to the United States during the French Revolution. In 1796, he was appointed Chief Engineer of New York City. He moved to London in 1799, where he married Sophia Kingdom. In addition to the construction of the Thames Tunnel, his work as a mechanical engineer included the design of machinery to automate the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy.
Go to Profile#10803
Pyotr Baranovsky
1892 - 1984 (92 years)
Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky was a Russian architect, preservationist and restorator who reconstructed many ancient buildings in the Soviet Union. He is credited with saving Saint Basil's Cathedral from destruction in the early 1930s, founding and managing the Kolomenskoye and Andrei Rublev museums, and developing modern restoration technologies.
Go to Profile#10804
Jaap Bakema
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Jacob Berend "Jaap" Bakema was a Dutch modernist architect, notable for design of public housing and involvement in the reconstruction of Rotterdam after the Second World War. Born in Groningen, Bakema studied at the Groningen Higher Technical College and the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, where he studied among others with Mart Stam. In 1946 he began attending meetings of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, became its Secretary in 1955, and was a core member of its offshoot Team 10.
Go to Profile#10805
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach
1656 - 1723 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was an Austrian architect, sculptor, engraver, and architectural historian whose Baroque architecture profoundly influenced and shaped the tastes of the Habsburg Empire. His influential book A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture was one of the first and most popular comparative studies of world architecture. His major works include Schönbrunn Palace, Karlskirche, and the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and Schloss Klessheim, Holy Trinity Church, and the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg.
Go to Profile#10806
Jules Hardouin-Mansart
1646 - 1708 (62 years)
Jules Hardouin-Mansart was a French Baroque architect and builder whose major work included the Place des Victoires ; Place Vendôme ; the domed chapel of Les Invalides , and the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles. His monumental work was designed to glorify the reign of Louis XIV of France.
Go to Profile#10807
Pierre Cuypers
1827 - 1921 (94 years)
Petrus Josephus Hubertus "Pierre" Cuypers was a Dutch architect. His name is most frequently associated with the Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum , both in Amsterdam. More representative for his oeuvre, however, are numerous churches, of which he designed more than 100. Moreover, he restored many monuments.
Go to Profile#10808
Laurynas Gucevičius
1753 - 1798 (45 years)
Laurynas Gucevičius was an 18th-century architect from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and all of his designs were built there. In his youth he travelled to Italy and Paris and other countries in Western Europe, where he studied architecture under the notable contemporary neo-classical French architects, Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Later he was appointed professor at the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius, the predecessor of the University of Vilnius. Among the best known of his works are the Vilnius Cathedral, the Vilnius Town Hall and the summer palace of bishops in Verkiai. Th...
Go to Profile#10809
Friedrich Zander
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
Georg Arthur Constantin Friedrich Zander , was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.
Go to Profile#10810
Otto Krause
1856 - 1920 (64 years)
Otto Krause was an Argentine engineer and educator. Early life Krause was born in the Buenos Aires Province town of Chivilcoy to Leopoldina and Carl August Krause, both German Argentine immigrants arrived in 1851. Tending his farm with implements he brought from Germany, Carl Krause instilled an interest in machinery to his five children, though the family eventually relocated to Buenos Aires in 1870. Otto subsequently finished his secondary school studies at the prestigious Buenos Aires National College, a public college preparatory school.
Go to Profile#10811
Lazare Carnot
1753 - 1823 (70 years)
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription , were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.
Go to Profile#10812
Samuel Jefferson Mason
1921 - 1974 (53 years)
Samuel Jefferson Mason was an American electronics engineer. Mason's invariant and Mason's rule are named after him. He was born in New York City, but he grew up in a small town in New Jersey. It was so small, in fact, that it only had a population of 26. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1942, and after graduation, he joined the Antenna Group of MIT Radiation Laboratory as a staff member. Mason went on to earn his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1947 and 1952, respectively. After World War II, the Radiation Laboratory was renamed the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he became the associate director in 1967.
Go to Profile#10813
Luigi Vanvitelli
1700 - 1773 (73 years)
Luigi Vanvitelli , known in Dutch as , was an Italian architect and painter. The most prominent 18th-century architect of Italy, he practised a sober classicising academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism.
Go to Profile#10814
Gustav Niemann
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Gustav Niemann was a mechanical engineering professor who is regarded as an expert in machine elements. Biography Niemann studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt from 1919 to 1923. In 1928 he was promoted at the Technische Hochschule Berlin with the doctoral dissertation Über Wippkrane mit wagrechtem Lastwippweg . He taught at the Braunschweig University of Technology from 1934 to 1950, and at the Technische Universität München from 1951 to 1968. He was a recipient of the Grashof medal from the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure and the E. P. Connell medal from the Ame...
Go to Profile#10815
Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
Go to Profile#10816
Joseph Paxton
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Sir Joseph Paxton was an English gardener, architect, engineer and Member of Parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace and for cultivating the Cavendish banana, the most consumed banana in the Western world.
Go to Profile#10817
William Robert Ware
1832 - 1915 (83 years)
William Robert Ware , born in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a family of the Unitarian clergy, was an American architect, author, and founder of two important American architectural schools. He received his own professional education at Milton Academy, Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1859, he began working for Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of the first American architectural school, the AIA, and the first American to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward Ware formed a partnership with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick, Philbrick and Ware, a...
Go to Profile#10818
Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
Go to Profile#10819
Hermann Ende
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Hermann Gustav Louis Ende was a German architect noted for his work in Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Biography Ende was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Province of Brandenburg,Prussia . In 1836 he moved with family to Berlin, where, after graduating from the Köllnisches Gymnasium in 1852, he studied architecture at the Bauakademie, a Berlin architectural school housed in what is considered one of the forerunners of modern architecture due to its theretofore uncommon use of red brick and a relatively streamlined façade. His studies were interrupted for a year by military service, and by another year spent travelling abroad with his friend Wilhelm Böckmann.
Go to Profile#10820
Berenice Abbott
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
Go to Profile#10821
Louis Le Vau
1613 - 1670 (57 years)
Louis Le Vau was a French Baroque architect, who worked for Louis XIV of France. He was an architect that helped develop the French Classical style in the 17th century. Early life and career Born Louis Le Veau, he was the son of Louis Le Veau , a stonemason, who was active in Paris. His younger brother François Le Vau also became an architect. The father and his two sons worked together in the 1630s and 1640s. The two brothers later changed the spelling of their surname from "Le Veau" to "Le Vau" to avoid its association with the French word veau .
Go to Profile#10822
Philipp Forchheimer
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Philipp Forchheimer was an Austrian engineer, a pioneer in the field of civil engineering and practical hydraulics, who also contributed to the archaeological study of Byzantine water supply systems. He was professor in Istanbul, Aachen and Graz.
Go to Profile#10823
Egon Eiermann
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Egon Eiermann was one of Germany's most prominent architects in the second half of the 20th century. He was also a furniture designer. From 1947, he was Professor for architecture at the Technical University of Karlsruhe.
Go to Profile#10824
George B. Post
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
George Browne Post was an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. Active from 1869 almost until his death, he was recognized as a master of several prominent contemporary American architectural genres, and instrumental in the birth of the skyscraper.
Go to Profile#10825
Francisco J. Serrano
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Francisco J. Serrano y Alvarez de la Rosa was a Mexican civil engineer and architect. Serrano studied civil engineering and afterwards architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , where later taught as professor of civil engineering and architecture, and researched influences of climatic phenomenons on architecture. His son J. Francisco Serrano Cacho became also a notable architect.
Go to Profile#10826
Beatrix Farrand
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden , and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Go to Profile#10827
Gilmore David Clarke
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Gilmore David Clarke was an American civil engineer and landscape architect who designed many parks and public spaces in and around New York City. Biography Born in New York, Clarke went to Cornell University to study landscape architecture and civil engineering, graduating in 1913 with a B.S. degree. After World War I, during which he served as an engineer in the U.S. Army, he served on several architectural commissions, ranging from local to federal level. Amongst others, he was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board for the U.S. Capitol and of the New York State Council of Parks. He ...
Go to Profile#10828
Carlo Maderno
1556 - 1629 (73 years)
Carlo Maderno was an Italian architect, born in today's Ticino, who is remembered as one of the fathers of Baroque architecture. His façades of Santa Susanna, St. Peter's Basilica and Sant'Andrea della Valle were of key importance in the evolution of the Italian Baroque. He is often referred to as the brother of sculptor Stefano Maderno, but this is not universally agreed upon.
Go to Profile#10829
Clemens Holzmeister
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Clemens Holzmeister was a prominent Austrian architect and stage designer of the early twentieth century. The Austrian Academy of Fine Arts listed his life's work as containing 673 projects. He was the father of Judith Holzmeister.
Go to Profile#10830
Aston Webb
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Sir Aston Webb, was a British architect who designed the principal facade of Buckingham Palace and the main building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other major works around England, many of them in partnership with Ingress Bell. He was President of the Royal Academy from 1919 to 1924. He was also the founding Chairman of the London Society.
Go to Profile#10831
Herbert A. Wagner
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Herbert Alois Wagner was an Austrian scientist who developed numerous innovations in the fields of aerodynamics, aircraft structures and guided weapons. He is most famous for Wagner's function describing unsteady lift on wings and developing the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb.
Go to Profile#10832
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
1788 - 1827 (39 years)
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and i...
Go to Profile#10833
Ansel Adams
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Go to Profile#10834
Wilhelm Nusselt
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Ernst Kraft Wilhelm Nußelt was a German engineer. Nusselt studied mechanical engineering at the Munich Technical University , where he got his doctorate in 1907. He taught in Dresden from 1913 to 1917.
Go to Profile#10835
Ernst Ziller
1837 - 1923 (86 years)
Ernst Moritz Theodor Ziller was a German-born university teacher and architect who later became a Greek national. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he was a major designer of royal and municipal buildings in Athens, Patras, and other Greek cities.
Go to Profile#10836
Lars Israel Wahlman
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Lars Israël Wahlman was a Swedish architect. He was a supporter of the Arts and Crafts movement in Sweden and his architecture was influenced by romantic nationalism. His most famous work include Tjolöholm Castle and Engelbrekt Church. In his birthplace Hedemora one of the buildings he designed, the Wahlman building, bears his name.
Go to Profile#10837
Gustav Gull
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Gustav Gull was a Swiss architect. Life He came from a family of architects. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic of Zürich attended courses at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva from 1879 to 1880. This was followed by an internship with Benjamin Recordon in Lausanne until 1882. After a trip to Italy , he first entered into a partnership with Conrad von Muralt, with whom he built the main post office in Lucerne, the Lavater schoolhouse in Zurich, among other things. In 1890, he received the first commission from the city of Zurich to draw up a plan for a Swiss National Museum. From...
Go to Profile#10838
Benjamin Franklin Bailey
1875 - 2000 (125 years)
Benjamin Franklin Bailey was an American electrical engineer. A native of Sheridan, Michigan, Benjamin Franklin Bailey studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and later held the positions of chief engineer of the Fairbanks Morse Electrical Manufacturing Company and Howell Electrical Motor Company, director of Bailey Electrical Company, and vice-president and director of the Fremont Motor Corporation.
Go to Profile#10839
Nikola Dobrović
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Nikola Dobrović was a Serbian architect, teacher, and urban planner. Dobrović designed a number of buildings including the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building, later destroyed during the Kosovar War by NATO bombings.
Go to Profile#10840
Robert Vorhoelzer
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Robert Vorhoelzer was a German architect. Vorhoelzer belonged to the classical modernist school of architecture that is otherwise rather underrepresented in Bavaria. Most of his works were built when Vorhoelzer was Oberbaurat of the Bavarian postal administration. Together with Robert Poeverlein he founded the "Bayerische Postbauschule". In the early stages of his work, such as at the post office Penzberg or the post office on Ismaninger Straße in Munich, the influence of the "Heimatstil" was dominant. But later Vorhoelzer built many modern and functional buildings in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit.
Go to Profile#10841
Arnold Böcklin
1827 - 1901 (74 years)
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss Symbolist painter. Biography He was born in Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city. Arnold studied at the Düsseldorf academy under Schirmer, and became a friend of Anselm Feuerbach. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Schirmer, who recognized in him a student of exceptional promise, sent him to Antwerp and Brussels, where he copied the works of Flemish and Dutch masters. Böcklin then went to Paris, wo...
Go to Profile#10842
Luchino Visconti
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian filmmaker, theatre and opera director, and screenwriter. He was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism, but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epics dealing with themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “no one did as much to shape Italian cinema as Luchino Visconti.”
Go to Profile#10843
Alfred Albini
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Alfred Albini was a Croatian-Jewish architect. He received a Vladimir Nazor Award for architecture and urban planning. Albini was born and died in Zagreb. He worked at the ateliers of Viktor Kovačić and Hugo Ehrlich and as a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb. He projected single-family houses and apartment buildings, together with civic buildings . He synthesized modernistic ideas into his own architectural expression. Furthermore, he discussed the problem of urban planning and the protection of landmarks, wrote expert works and theoretical articles, and painted.
Go to Profile#10844
Cornelis van Eesteren
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Cornelis van Eesteren was a prominent Dutch architect and urban planner. He worked for the Town Planning department of Amsterdam and was the chairman of the CIAM . He contributed to the De Stijl movement, with its founder Theo van Doesburg, the artist Piet Mondrian, and others.
Go to Profile#10845
Jacob van Ruisdael
1628 - 1682 (54 years)
Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement when Dutch painting became highly popular.
Go to Profile#10846
Christian Hansen
1803 - 1883 (80 years)
Hans Christian Hansen was a Historicist Danish architect who worked 18 years in Greece where he was active in the transformation of Athens from a small town to the country's capital and an international metropolis. Later in his career he returned to Denmark, where he became a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and designed buildings such as the Copenhagen Municipal Hospital and the Østervold Observatory. He was the brother of Theophilus Hansen who was also an internationally successful architect, active in Athens and Vienna. He is considered to be a pioneer in the study and a...
Go to Profile#10847
Dwight H. Perkins
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
Dwight Heald Perkins was an American architect and planner. Early life Perkins was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Chicago with his family at age four. His mother was widowed a few years after his family completed their move. His father died when Dwight was young.
Go to Profile#10848
Samu Pecz
1854 - 1922 (68 years)
Samu Pecz was a Hungarian architect and academic. Career Pecz studied at a number of universities both at home and abroad in Stuttgart, later at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under the Danish architect Theophil Hansen, the builder of the Austrian Parliament Building, Musikverein, and Stock Exchange buildings in Vienna.
Go to Profile#10849
Ralph Hartley
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley was an American electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory. Biography Hartley was born in Sprucemont, Nevada, and attended the University of Utah, receiving an A.B. degree in 1909. He became a Rhodes Scholar at St Johns, Oxford University, in 1910 and received a B.A. degree in 1912 and a B.Sc. degree in 1913. He married Florence Vail of Brooklyn on March 21, 1916. The Hartleys had no children.
Go to Profile#10850
Walter Andrae
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Walter Andrae was a German archaeologist and architect born near Leipzig. Career Archaeologist Andrae initially studied architecture at the Dresden University of Technology, where he befriended a younger student, Julius Jordan, with a life-changing effect on him.
Go to Profile