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,
#10851
Karl Schwanzer
1918 - 1975 (57 years)
Karl Schwanzer was an Austrian architect. He was an important figure of post-war architecture. Life As early as high school, the architecture enthusiast Karl Schwanzer and his uncle planned and built an allotment garden house for his family on Vienna's Schafberg in 1935. After his graduation from high school at the Bundesrealgymnasium Wien 7 in 1936, he completed his mandatory service in the Austrian national guard.
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Louis George Carpenter
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Louis George Carpenter , was a college Professor and later the Dean of Engineering & Physics at Colorado State University formerly known as the Colorado Agricultural College. He was also a mathematician and an irrigation and consulting engineer.
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Mustafa İnan
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Mustafa İnan was a Turkish civil engineering academic. Life He was born in Adana. His mother was Rabia and father was Hüseyin Avni. At the end of the First World War Adana was occupied by the French forces and his family had to move to Konya. At the end of the Turkish War of Independence the family returned to Adana and Mustafa continued his secondary education in Adana. In 1931 he took the first place in the entrance examinations of the Istanbul Technical University . Later he was sent to Switzerland for advanced studies in the ETH Zurich . After his doctorate thesis 1941, he returned to Turkey to continue academic studies in the Engineering School.
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Giovanni Muzio
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Giovanni Muzio was an Italian architect. Muzio was born and died in Milan. He was closely associated with the Novecento Italiano artists group. Biography The son of Virginio Muzio, an accomplished architect, Muzio studied in Milan, and after participation in the war and a trip to Europe, in 1920 he opened in Milan a study with Giuseppe De Finetti, Gio Ponti, Emilio Lancia and Mino Fiocchi and actively participated in the cultural life of Milan.
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Samuel H. Caldwell
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Samuel Hawks Caldwell was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers. Early life and education Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier . In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique ...
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Louis A. Simon
1867 - 1958 (91 years)
Louis A. Simon was an American architect. He spent almost his entire career with the Office of the Supervising Architect for the U.S. Treasury. He served as the last supervising architect from 1934 to 1939 and thereafter of the Public Buildings Branch of the Federal Works Agency until 1941. He was also principal architect for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.
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Wilhelm Cauer
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specific...
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Yoshirō Taniguchi
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Yoshirō Taniguchi was a Japanese architect. He was born in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He was a graduate of Tokyo University Department of Architecture and professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1929–1965. As an architect, he created over 50 buildings and 10 memorials and participated in many professional activities as a statesman of Japanese modern architecture. “Yoshirō Taniguchi must be regarded as one of the most widely known, and, in the best sense, popular architects in Japan. Taniguchi is also well known for his writings and has made a name for himself as ...
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Thomas Rickman
1776 - 1841 (65 years)
Thomas Rickman was an English architect and architectural antiquary who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival. He is particularly remembered for his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture , which established the basic chronological classification and terminology that are still in widespread use for the different styles of English medieval ecclesiastical architecture.
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John Eisenmann
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
John Eisenmann was an architect in Cleveland, Ohio. As part of Eisenmann & Smith he designed the Cleveland Arcade in downtown Cleveland. He also designed the Main building for Case School of Applied Science, present-day Case Western Reserve University, where he was also the school's first professor of civil engineering. He pioneered structural steel construction in the United States and is credited with co-designing Cleveland's Arcade, "the first commercial building in the state designated an historic landmark in architecture." Eisenmann is also credited with designing the flag of Ohio in 19...
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Dugald C. Jackson
1865 - 1951 (86 years)
Dugald Caleb Jackson was an American electrical engineer. He received the IEEE Edison Medal for "outstanding and inspiring leadership in engineering education and in the field of generation and distribution of electric power".
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Józef Szanajca
1902 - 1939 (37 years)
Józef Szanajca was a Polish architect. Founder and member of PRAESENS group: "The Praesens group played a pioneering role in the development of modern architecture in Poland. From 1927 a link with Le Corbusier was established. Its members participated in all the main meetings".
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Jo van den Broek
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, was a Dutch architect influential in the rebuilding of Rotterdam after World War II. Van den Broek was born in Rotterdam. He joined with Johannes Brinkman in 1936, after the death of Brinkman's partner Leendert van der Vlugt. The firm's work during this time including a new terminal building for the Holland-America cruise line.
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Alessandro Antonelli
1798 - 1888 (90 years)
Alessandro Antonelli was an Italian architect of the 19th century. His most famous works are the Mole Antonelliana in Turin and both the Novara Cathedral and the Basilica of St. Gaudenzio in Novara.
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Fiske Kimball
1888 - 1955 (67 years)
Sidney Fiske Kimball was an American architect, architectural historian and museum director. A pioneer in the field of architectural preservation in the United States, he played a leading part in the restoration of Monticello and Stratford Hall Plantation in Virginia.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Jonathan Zenneck
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Jonathan Adolf Wilhelm Zenneck was a German physicist and electrical engineer who contributed to researches in radio circuit performance and to the scientific and educational contributions to the literature of the pioneer radio art.
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Cecil Beaton
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.
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Nicolas-Henri Jardin
1720 - 1799 (79 years)
Nicolas-Henri Jardin was a French architect. Born in St. Germain des Noyers, Seine-et-Marne, Jardin worked seventeen years in Denmark–Norway as an architect to the Danish royal court. He introduced neoclassicism to Denmark–Norway.
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Giacomo della Porta
1532 - 1602 (70 years)
Giacomo della Porta was an Italian architect and sculptor, who worked on many important buildings in Rome, including St. Peter's Basilica. He was born at Porlezza, Lombardy and died in Rome. Biography Giacomo Della Porta was born in the Duchy of Genoa into a family of sculptors. He was influenced by and collaborated with Michelangelo, and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, his teacher of architecture. With these two great masters, he became one of the most important architects in the history of the Roman Renaissance. In fact, after 1563 he carried out Michelangelo's plans for the rebuilding of the C...
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Alwin Seifert
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Alwin Seifert was a German horticultural architect, architect, university teacher, landscape designer, local curator, and conservationist. He is considered to be one of the most important representatives of the early ecological movement and biodynamic agriculture.
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August Sicard von Sicardsburg
1813 - 1868 (55 years)
August Sicard von Sicardsburg was an Austrian architect. He is best remembered as the co-architect of the Vienna State Opera, together with Eduard van der Nüll. Sicardsburg was born in Buda. He studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology under Peter von Nobile, and together with van der Nüll. In 1843, he became professor at the Vienna Academy.
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Joseph Strauss
1870 - 1938 (68 years)
Joseph Baermann Strauss was an American structural engineer who revolutionized the design of bascule bridges. He was the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. Life, beginnings and death He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to an artistic family of German-Jewish ancestry. His mother was a pianist, and his father, Raphael Strauss, was a writer and painter. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1892 with a degree in civil engineering. He served as both class poet and president, and was a brother of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
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James Gillespie Graham
1776 - 1855 (79 years)
James Gillespie Graham was a Scottish architect, prominent in the early 19th century. Life Graham was born in Dunblane on 11 June 1776. He was the son of Malcolm Gillespie, a solicitor. He was christened as James Gillespie.
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Heinrich Hübsch
1795 - 1863 (68 years)
Heinrich Hübsch was a German architect. After studies in Heidelberg and at Friedrich Weinbrenner's school of architecture in Karlsruhe he traveled extensively in Greece and Italy . In 1831 he was appointed Oberbaurat at Karlsruhe. He designed many churches and other public buildings, mainly in the Grand Duchy of Baden, and is also known for his writings.
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Kenji Imai
1895 - 1987 (92 years)
was a Japanese architect and professor. Biography Imai was born on 11 January 1895, in Tokyo. He went to Waseda University in Tokyo and graduated with a degree in architecture. He travelled to the USSR, Scandinavia, Italy and Spain in 1926. He met Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ernst May and others, which asserted an influence on his way of thinking and his architectural style. Like Togo Murano and Takamasa Yoshizaka who also trained at Waseda University, Imai had a style which can be categorized as Expressionist. Impressed with the works of Antoni Gaudi, he proceeded to promote him in Japan an...
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Edo Šen
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Edo Šen was a Croatian Jewish architect notable for creating the foundation of the modern Croatian architecture. Early life Šen was born in Zagreb on 10 March 1877. After high school graduation in 1894, he went to Vienna, Austria where he studied at the Vienna University of Technology. Šen graduated in 1900. After graduation, he worked in the studio of Slovenian architect Max Fabiani.
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Jan Zachwatowicz
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Jan Zachwatowicz was a Polish architect, architectural historian, and restorer. Biography Zachwatowicz was born in Gatchina. He studied Industrial Civil Engineering at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University, and graduated from the School of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology in 1930. He was awarded with the SARP Honorary Award .
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William Unwin
1838 - 1933 (95 years)
William Cawthorne Unwin FRS was a British civil and mechanical engineer. He is noted for his extensive work on hydraulics and engines as well as his close association with William Fairbairn. He is one of only a few men who have served as president of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Unwin served as an engineering advisor to the government during the First World War and was the first recipient of the Kelvin Gold Medal awarded by the Institution of Civil Engineers.
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Emil Winkler
1835 - 1888 (53 years)
Emil Winkler was a German civil engineer, professor with broad academic interest including engineering mechanics, railway engineering, bridge engineering. Emil Winkler was first to formulate and solve a problem of elastic beam on deformable foundation. The model of a beam on elastic foundation which assumes linear force-deflection relationship is known as Winkler Foundation.
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Shu-tien Li
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Shu-tian Li was a Chinese-American hydraulic engineer. After receiving a Ph.D. degree in engineering and economics from Cornell University in 1926, Li returned to China to assume a professorship at the Peiyang University. He became the executive officer of Northern China Hydraulic Commission in 1928. He was a founder of the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society and served as its deputy president and then president for six terms. Later he was appointed to lead the Yellow River Commission.
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Hans Luckhardt
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Hans Luckhardt was a German architect and the brother of Wassili Luckhardt, with whom he worked his entire life. He studied at the University of Karlsruhe with Hermann Billing and was a member of the Novembergruppe, the Arbeitsrats für Kunst, and the Glass Chain. Together with Anton Lorenz, he designed furniture in the 1920s and 1930s, predominantly steel-tube and moveable chairs.
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Emil Praeger
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Emil H. Praeger was an American architect and civil engineer. Biography He was born in 1892. Praeger graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1915. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, after which he spent time at the architectural office of Bertram Goodhue and the New York City engineering firm Madigan-Hyland.
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Nabor Carrillo Flores
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Nabor Carrillo Flores is the third son of Mexican composer Julián Carrillo Trujillo, and younger brother of Antonio Carrillo Flores. He did his first studies in Mexico City and he continued them in New York City. On his return to Mexico, he made his studies of preparatory and those of civil engineering at the National University , where he graduated in 1939. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940, and his PhD from Harvard University, where he had also received his MSc in 1941. He taught and did scientific research at UNAM. He represented Mexico in the atomic test of the atoll of Bikini in 1946.
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K. A. C. Creswell
1879 - 1974 (95 years)
Sir Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell was an English architectural historian who wrote some of the seminal works on Islamic architecture in Egypt. Early life Creswell was born on 13 September 1879 in London. He was educated at Westminster School before going on to study electrical engineering at Finsbury City and Guilds Technical College in 1896. During this time he developed his considerable skills in draughtsmanship. He worked for Siemens Brothers and then, from 1914, the Deutsche Bank in London.
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Vilanova Artigas
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
João Batista Vilanova Artigas was a Brazilian modernist architect. Born in Curitiba, Artigas is considered one of the most important names in the architectural history of São Paulo, and the founding figure of the Paulista School.
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James Barnet
1827 - 1904 (77 years)
James Johnstone Barnet, was the Colonial Architect for Colonial New South Wales, serving from 1862 to 1890. Early life Barnet was born in the son of a builder in Arbroath, Scotland, and was educated at the local high school. In 1843, at the age of sixteen, Barnet moved to London, where he became a builder's apprentice, studying drawing under William Dyce RA and architecture with CJ Richardson FRIBA. He then became of clerk of works with the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers. In 1854 he married and sailed for Sydney, Australia, with his new wife, Rosa. In Sydney, he worked first as a builder...
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Lionel Pries
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Lionel H. Pries , was a leading architect, artist, and educator in the Pacific Northwest. Early life and education Lionel Pries was born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland. His father worked at the S. & G. Gump store in San Francisco, known for its departments addressing Chinese and Japanese arts and crafts; as a result young Lionel Pries developed early familiarity with the artistic traditions of Asia. He graduated from Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco in 1916. He received his B.A. in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1920, where he studied under John Galen Howard.
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Ernst Sagebiel
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Ernst Sagebiel was a German architect. Life Sagebiel was a sculptor's son, and after his Abitur in 1912, he began his studies in architecture at the Braunschweig University of Technology. He eventually finished his studies in 1922, after they were interrupted by his participation in the First World War, which included a stay in a prisoner-of-war camp. In 1924, he joined Jakob Körfer's architectural bureau in Cologne. In 1926 came his doctorate . In 1929, Sagebiel took up a job in Berlin as a project leader and chief executive officer at the architect Erich Mendelsohn's office, but in 1932, he had to leave this job owing to the severe economic climate in Germany at that time.
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Richard Döcker
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Richard Döcker was a German architect and professor associated with the functionalist style in architecture. Biography Döcker studied architecture from 1912 to 1918 at the University of Stuttgart, graduating with honors. From 1914 to 1917 he was a volunteer in World War I. In 1921 he passed his Staatsexamen in Stuttgart, and from 1922 to 1924 he was an assistant for Paul Bonatz at the University of Stuttgart, where he received his doctorate, on the architecture of homes.
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Lionel Simeon Marks
1871 - 1955 (84 years)
Lionel Simeon Marks was a British engineer and one of the pioneers of aeronautics. He was born and mostly educated in England, but in 1892 moved to the United States. During World War II he was a chief consulting engineer to the US Bureau of Aircraft Production. His Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers is considered as classical reference work.
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Camillo Boito
1836 - 1914 (78 years)
Camillo Boito was an Italian architect and engineer, and a noted art critic, art historian and novelist. He was the brother of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's friend and librettist Arrigo Boito. Biography Boito was born in Rome, the son of an Italian painter of miniatures. His mother was of Polish ancestry. He studied in Padua and then architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Venice. During his time there, he was influenced by Selvatico Estense, an architect who championed the study of medieval art in Italy. He taught architecture at the Venice School of Fine Arts until 18...
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Alexander Meissner
1883 - 1958 (75 years)
Alexander Meissner was an Austrian engineer and physicist. He was born in Vienna and died in Berlin. His field of interest was: antenna design, amplification and detection advanced the development of radio telegraphy. In March 1913 he discovered the principle of positive feedback independently of Edwin Armstrong, and by applying positive feedback to vacuum tube amplifiers, Meissner co-invented the electronic oscillator, which became the basis of radio transmission by 1920 and has innumerable uses today. The inductively-coupled oscillator circuit he invented is today known as the Meissner osci...
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Robert H. Perry
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Robert H. Perry was the second editor of the popular reference work Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, originally edited by his father, John H. Perry, with the first edition published in 1934. Perry taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1958 to 1964, and was department director of Chemical Engineering from 1961 to 1963. He also taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Delaware. With Sidney D. Kirkpatrick and Cecil H. Chilton, Perry supervised the production of the 4th edition, published in 1963. Perry and Chilton together edited the 5th edition, released early in 197...
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Sidonius Apollinaris
430 - 489 (59 years)
Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, better known as Sidonius Apollinaris , was a poet, diplomat, and bishop. Born into the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, he was son-in-law to Emperor Avitus and was appointed Urban prefect of Rome by Emperor Anthemius in 468. In 469 he was appointed Bishop of Clermont and he led the defence of the city from Euric, King of the Visigoths, from 473 to 475. He retained his position as bishop after the city's conquest, until his death in the 480s. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic church, the Orthodox Church, and the True Orthodox Church, with his feast ...
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Vsevolod Meyerhold
1874 - 1940 (66 years)
Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer of German descent. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.
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Wyndham Lewis
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Percy Wyndham Lewis was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include Tarr and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass , Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta . A fourth volume, titled The Trial of Man, was unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: Blasting and Bombardiering and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date .
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Estevan Antonio Fuertes
1838 - 1903 (65 years)
Estevan Antonio Fuertes was a Puerto Rican-American civil engineer and professor of astronomy at Cornell University. Biography Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Estevan Antonio Fuertes was the son of Estevan and Demetria Cherbonnier Fuertes. He received his education at Salamanca, Spain, and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York.
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Käthe Kollwitz
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Käthe Kollwitz was a German artist who worked with painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her most famous art cycles, including The Weavers and The Peasant War, depict the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class. Despite the realism of her early works, her art is now more closely associated with Expressionism. Kollwitz was the first woman not only to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts but also to receive honorary professor status.
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Francis Greenway
1777 - 1837 (60 years)
Francis Howard Greenway was an English-born architect who was transported to Australia as a convict for the crime of forgery. In New South Wales he worked for the Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, as Australia's first government architect. He became widely known and admired for his work displayed in buildings such as St Matthew's Church, St James' Church and Hyde Park Barracks.
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