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,
#10801
Allan Pinkerton
1819 - 1884 (65 years)
Allan J. Pinkerton was a Scottish-American cooper, abolitionist, detective, and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the United States and his claim to have foiled a plot in 1861 to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he provided the Union Army – specifically General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac – with military intelligence, including extremely inaccurate enemy troop strength numbers. After the war, his agents played a significant role as strikebreakers – in particular during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 ...
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
Go to Profile#10803
RAH Livett
1898 - 1959 (61 years)
Richard Alfred Hardwick Livett, OBE , known as R.A.H. Livett, was an architect and pioneer of modernist social housing. Early life Livett was born at 59 Sistova Road, Balham, London in early 1898, the only son of undertaker and valuer Harry Clayton Livett and his wife, Ada , who had married in Edmonton in 1893. He trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London before working for a number of private firms; for while, he was employed as an assistant by Paul and Michael Waterhouse. He later served as Chief Housing Assistant to TC Howitt in Nottingham.
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Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
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Edward Kimbark
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Edward Wilson Kimbark was a noted power engineer and professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University. Kimbark was born in Chicago, Illinois to Edward Hall and Maude Kimbark. In 1920 Kimbark enrolled at Northwestern University where he earned his B.S. in 1924 and his E.E. in 1925. After graduation, he worked for two years as a substation operator and testing lab assistant for the Public Service Company of Northern Illinois at Evanston, and for two years as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Antoine Marc Gaudin
1900 - 1974 (74 years)
Antoine Marc Gaudin was a metallurgist who laid the foundation for understanding the scientific principles of the froth flotation process in the minerals industry. He was also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and during World War II developed there the ore-processing techniques needed to extract uranium from its low grade ores for the Manhattan Project. He was a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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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.
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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.
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Lloyd H. Donnell
1895 - 1997 (102 years)
Lloyd Hamilton Donnell was an American mechanical engineer, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is considered internationally renowned expert in engineering mechanics, specifically known for his work on shell analysis and thin-shell structure. He was recipient of the 1969 ASME Medal.
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Don Torrieri
942 - Present (1084 years)
Don J. Torrieri is an American electrical engineer and mathematician. His primary research interests are communication systems, adaptive arrays, and signal processing. He is a Fellow of the US Army Research Laboratory, where he was employed for most of his career. He has authored many articles and several books including "Principles of Spread-Spectrum Communication Systems, 4th edition" . He has taught many graduate courses at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland and many short courses. Don Torrieri received the B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, the MS.
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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.
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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.
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Raymond D. Mindlin
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Raymond David Mindlin was an American mechanical engineer, Professor of Applied Science at Columbia University, and recipient of the 1946 Presidential Medal for Merit and many other awards and honours. He is known as mechanician, who made seminal contributions to many branches of applied mechanics, applied physics, and engineering sciences.
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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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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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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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Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff
1897 - 1992 (95 years)
Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff , who published as S. A. Schelkunoff, was a distinguished mathematician, engineer and electromagnetism theorist who made noted contributions to antenna theory. Biography Schelkunoff was born in Samara, Russia in 1897, attended the University of Moscow before being drafted in 1917. He crossed Siberia into Manchuria and then Japan before settling in Seattle in 1921. There he received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the State College of Washington, now Washington State University, and in 1928 received his Ph.D. from Columbia University for his diss...
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William Grey Walter
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
William Grey Walter was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the only child of Minerva Lucrezia Hardy , an American journalist and Karl Wilhelm Walter , a British journalist who was working on the Kansas City Star at the time. His parents had met and married in Italy, and during the First World War the family moved from to Britain. Walter's ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to Engl...
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Arthur T. Ippen
1907 - 1974 (67 years)
Arthur Thomas Ippen was a noted hydrologist and engineer and was an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born to German parents, he attended high school and college in Aachen, Germany graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1931. He then took an Institute of International Education scholarship to study at the University of Iowa but after his doctoral advisor, Floyd Nagler, died suddenly, Ippen transferred to Caltech to complete his Ph.D. His doctoral work, supervised by Theodore von Kármán and Robert T. Knapp, explored sediment transport and open-channel ...
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Frederick Vinton Hunt
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Frederick Vinton Hunt was an inventor, a scientist and a professor at Harvard University who worked in the field of acoustic engineering. He made significant contributions to room acoustics, regulated power supply, lightweight phonograph pickups and electronic reproduction equipment, and notably, during World War II, invented new techniques for sonar . He developed the first efficient and modern sonar system, for this work he received the Medal for Merit from President Truman , and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. Navy in 1970.
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Serge von Bubnoff
1888 - 1957 (69 years)
Sergius Nikolajewitsch von Bubnoff was a geologist and geotechnical engineer with Germano-Baltic ancestry who made important contributions to the rebuilding of geological research in East Germany after World War II. Starting in 1922, he was a professor at the University of Breslau. In 1929 he became a professor at the University of Greifswald and in 1950, he started his professorship at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. The Bubnoff unit, which is the unit of measure for the speed of geological processes, is named after him.
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Issac Koga
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
was an inventor and scientist. Early life and education He was the eldest of seven children born in Tashiro Village , Saga Prefecture. In July 1920, at the age of 20, he started to study at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tokyo Imperial University . After graduation in August 1925, he moved to the new Tokyo City Electrical Institute, which was established to develop and promote radio broadcasting technology under the directorship of Kotaro Kujirai, a pioneer of the research and teaching of radio science.
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William Gould Dow
1895 - 1999 (104 years)
William Gould Dow was an American scientist, educator and inventor. He was a pioneer in a variety of fields, including electrical engineering, space research, computer engineering, and nuclear engineering. He helped develop life-saving radar jamming technology during World War II, and was a long-time professor at the University of Michigan.
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George Ashley Campbell
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
George Ashley Campbell was an American engineer. He was a pioneer in developing and applying quantitative mathematical methods to the problems of long-distance telegraphy and telephony. His most important contributions were to the theory and implementation of the use of loading coils and the first wave filterss designed to what was to become known as the image method. Both these areas of work resulted in important economic advantages for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company .
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William Hovgaard
1857 - 1950 (93 years)
William Hovgaard was a Danish, later American professor of naval design and construction at Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 1933. Hovgaard was one of the foremost authorities on ship design in his generation, especially on the general and structural design of warships. He wrote several books on naval design and construction and the history thereof, but also on a diversity of other subjects, and he received a significant number of orders, awards and merits during his life. William was the brother of officer of the Danish Navy Andreas Peter Hovgaard, who led an Ar...
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Sigfried Giedion
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Sigfried Giedion was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. Giedion was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin. He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the ETH-Zurich.
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Reginald J. S. Pigott
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Reginald James Seymour Pigott was a British/American mechanical and consulting engineer, director of the engineering division of Gulf Research & Development Company, a subsidiary of Gulf Oil, and inventor.
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Krafft Arnold Ehricke
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Krafft Arnold Ehricke was a German rocket-propulsion engineer and advocate for space colonization. Ehricke is a co-designer of the first Centaur liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen upper stage. Biography Born in Berlin, Ehricke believed in the feasibility of space travel from a very young age, influenced by his viewing of the Fritz Lang film Woman in the Moon. At the age of 12, he formed his own rocket society. He attended Technical University of Berlin and studied celestial mechanics and nuclear physics under physicists including Hans Geiger and Werner Heisenberg, attaining his degree in Aeronaut...
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John Harbeson
1888 - 1986 (98 years)
John Frederick Harbeson was a Philadelphia architect and a long-time architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a principal in the Philadelphia design firm, Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson, successors to the office of Paul Cret.
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George William Osborn Howe
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
George William Osborn Howe D.Sc. LL.D. was a British electrical engineer. After education at the Roan School, Greenwich, Howe was apprenticed to Siemens Brothers, at Woolwich, where he worked for seven years. During that time he attended evening classes at Woolwich Polytechnic and, as an outstanding student, received an Whitford Exhibition scholarship and a senior county scholarship. With this financial aid, Howe studied for three years at Armstrong College, graduating with honours in 1900. He was then employed for two years by Siemens & Halske, at Charlottenburg .
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William Penn Cresson
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
William Penn Cresson was an American architect, author, diplomat, and husband of sculptor Margaret French Cresson . Education Born in Claymont, Delaware, Cresson studied at the University of Pennsylvania from 1895 until graduation in 1897. Shortly after graduation, Cresson moved to France to study at the influential École des Beaux-Arts until 1902, when he went on to become a student at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques.
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Frank Wattendorf
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Frank Wattendorf was an American physicist specializing in wind tunnels for research in aerodynamics. Wattendorf is recalled for his report on the wind tunnel at Ötztal that was under construction in Austria during World War II. Wattendorf's report, and one by Theodore von Kármán, spurred on renewed research in aerodynamics.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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James Friauf
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
James Byron Friauf was an American electrical engineer who first determined the crystal structure of MgZn2 in 1927. Friauf was a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He had received training in the determination of the structure of crystals as a student at California Institute of Technology where he studied with Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson.
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Sturgis Elleno Leavitt
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Sturgis Elleno Leavitt was the Kenan Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, the author of many books on Spanish language and literature, the president of several Spanish language teaching organizations, an adviser to the U.S. State Department and for many years the chairman of the Southern Humanities Conference as well as editor of the Hispanic Review.
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Charles Inglis
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Sir Charles Edward Inglis, was a British civil engineer. The son of a medical doctor, he was educated at Cheltenham College and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he would later forge a career as an academic. Inglis spent a two-year period with the engineering firm run by John Wolfe-Barry before he returned to King's College as a lecturer. Working with Professors James Alfred Ewing and Bertram Hopkinson, he made several important studies into the effects of vibration on structures and defects on the strength of plate steel.
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Hans Reissner
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Hans Jacob Reissner, also known as Jacob Johannes Reissner , was a German aeronautical engineer whose avocation was mathematical physics. During World War I he was awarded the Iron Cross second class for his pioneering work on aircraft design.
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John Ambrose Fleming
1849 - 1945 (96 years)
Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS was an English electrical engineer and physicist who invented the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, designed the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic radio transmission was made, and also established the right-hand rule used in physics.
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Heinrich Hencky
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
Heinrich Hencky was a German engineer. Born in Ansbach, he studied civil engineering in Munich and received his PhD from the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. In 1913, he joined a railway company in Kharkiv, Ukraine. On the outbreak of World War I he was interned. After the war he taught at Darmstadt, Dresden and at Delft in the Netherlands.
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Franz Maria Feldhaus
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Franz Maria Feldhaus was a German engineer, historian of science, and scientific writer. He was known in the late 1950s as "Germany's most well-known and most prolific writer on the history of technology."
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Alexandre Lézine
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Alexandre Lézine was a French architect, historian and archaeologist of Russian origin. Career Lézine graduated with a degree in archeology in 1937. He was the main architect of the historical monuments of Tunisia. As a historian and archaeologist, he published numerous works on ancient monuments and monuments of the Muslim period, taking an interest in the ancient palaces of Cairo.
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Ludwig Hilberseimer
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at Armour Institute of Technology , in Chicago, Illinois.
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Kiyoshi Mutō
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Kiyoshi Mutō was a Japanese architect and structural engineer. He is considered the "father of the Japanese skyscraper" for his contributions to earthquake engineering. Earthquake engineering research Mutō was born in Toride, Ibaraki, Japan. He entered the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University in 1922 and graduated in 1925. He was immediately appointed Lecturer, and obtained a Dr of Engineering degree in 1931. In 1935 he was appointed Professor of Structural Engineering, a post which he held for almost 30 years, developing and teaching the principles of earthquake-resistant ...
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