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,
#10901
Rudolf Kompfner
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Rudolf Kompfner was an Austrian-born inventor, physicist and architect, best known as the inventor of the traveling-wave tube . Life Kompfner was born in Vienna to Jewish parents. He was originally trained as an architect and after receiving his university degree in 1933 he moved to England , where he worked as an architect until 1941. He had a strong interest in physics and electronics, and after being briefly detained by the British at the start of World War II he was recruited to work in a secret microwave vacuum tube research program at the University of Birmingham. While there, Kompfner invented the TWT in 1943.
Go to Profile#10902
John R. Ragazzini
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
John Ralph Ragazzini was an American electrical engineer and a professor of Electrical Engineering. Biography Ragazzini was born in Manhattan, New York City from Italian immigrants Luigi Ragazzini and Angelina Badelli and received the degrees of B.S. and E.E. at the City College of New York in 1932 and 1933 and earned the degrees of A.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 1939 and 1941.
Go to Profile#10903
Vikram Sarabhai
1919 - 1971 (52 years)
Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped to develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.
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Robert Lumiansky
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Robert Mayer Lumiansky was an American scholar of Medieval English and president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Robert Lumiansky received a bachelor's degree from The Citadel, a master's degree from the University of South Carolina, and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina. He was professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1973 and professor of English at New York University from 1975 to 1983. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#10905
Clark Blanchard Millikan
1903 - 1966 (63 years)
Clark Blanchard Millikan was a distinguished professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology , and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. Biography Millikan's parents were noted physicist Robert A. Millikan and Greta Erwin Blanchard. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduated from Yale College in 1924, then earned his PhD in physics and mathematics at Caltech in 1928 under Professor Harry Bateman. He became a professor upon receiving his degree, full professor of aeronautics in 1940, and director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical La...
Go to Profile#10906
Wilhelm Flügge
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge was a German engineer, and Professor of Applied Mechanics at Stanford University. He is known as recipient of the 1970 Theodore von Karman Medal in Engineering Mechanics, and the 1970 Worcester Reed Warner Medal.
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William M. Harlow
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
William M. Harlow was an American professor of engineering and silviculture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was also a nature photographer and filmmaker, particularly of time-lapse films.
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Earle Buckingham
1887 - 1978 (91 years)
Earle Buckingham was an American mechanical engineer and pioneer in the theory of gears. Buckingham was one of the founders of the theory of gearing and gear design and made significant contributions to this area. His monographs gained him international recognition in addition to the great respect he had already earned in English-speaking countries.
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Vladimir Karapetoff
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Vladimir Karapetoff was a Russian-American electrical engineer, inventor, professor, and author. Life He was the son of Nikita Ivanovich Karapetov and Anna Joakimovna Karapetova. Karapetoff first studied at Petersburg State University of Means of Communication taking his first certification in 1897 and a second in 1902. During his studies he was a consultant to the Russian government and served as an instructor teaching electrical engineering and hydraulics in three of Saint Petersburg's colleges.
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Edgar Bain
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Edgar Collins Bain was an American metallurgist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who worked for the US Steel Corporation of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He worked on the alloying and heat treatment of steel; Bainite is named in his honor.
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Catherine Bauer Wurster
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Catherine Krouse Bauer Wurster was an American public housing advocate and educator of city planners and urban planners. A leading member of the "housers," a group of planners who advocated affordable housing for low-income families, she dramatically changed social housing practice and law in the United States. Wurster's influential book Modern Housing was published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1934 and is regarded as a classic in the field.
Go to Profile#10912
John Voelcker
1927 - 1972 (45 years)
John Harold Westgarth Voelcker was an English architect. A member of the Team 10 group of architects, he ran a small rural practice before his appointment first Professor of Architecture at the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#10913
Dexter S. Kimball
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Dexter Simpson Kimball was an American engineer, professor of industrial engineering at Cornell University, early management author and president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1922–23.
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Luciano Orlando
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Luciano Orlando was an Italian mathematician and military engineer. Biography Orlando received in 1903 his laurea from the University of Messina, where he was a student of Bagnera and Marcolongo. After a year of graduate study at the University of Pisa, he became an assistant and libero docente at the University of Messina. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto superiore di Magistero and at the Aeronautical School of Engineering of the Sapienza University of Rome. He took part in some university competitions but was unsuccessful and when, in 1915...
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Louis Conrad Rosenberg
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Louis Conrad Rosenberg , was an American artist, architect, author, and educator active between 1914 and 1966 known for his precise staging and rendering of architectural scenes in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.
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Comfort A. Adams
1868 - 1958 (90 years)
Comfort Avery Adams was an American electrical engineer who as a student helped Albert A. Michelson with the Michelson–Morley experiment , which was later viewed as confirming the special relativity theory of Albert Einstein . He was a recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal and AIEE Lamme Medal.
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William Littell Everitt
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
William Littell Everitt was a noted American electrical engineer, educator, and founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1933. He was adviser of numerous outstanding scientists at OSU including Karl Spangenberg, and Nelson Wax. His PhD adviser was Frederic Columbus Blake.
Go to Profile#10918
Nils Otto Myklestad
1909 - 1972 (63 years)
Nils Otto Myklestad was an American mechanical engineer and engineering professor. An authority on mechanical vibration, he was employed by a number of important US engineering firms and served on the faculty of several major engineering universities. Myklestad made significant contributions to both engineering practice and engineering education, publishing a number of widely influential technical journal papers and textbooks. He also was granted five US patents during his career.
Go to Profile#10919
Kaoru Ishikawa
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
was a Japanese organizational theorist and a professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo who was noted for his quality management innovations. He is considered a key figure in the development of quality initiatives in Japan, particularly the quality circle. He is best known outside Japan for the Ishikawa or cause and effect diagram , often used in the analysis of industrial processes.
Go to Profile#10920
Albert H. Taylor
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Albert Hoyt Taylor was an American electrical engineer who made important early contributions to the development of radar. Biography Taylor entered Northwestern University in 1896. In 1899 he was employed by Western Electric Co. He returned to Northwestern in 1900, lacking only one semester of graduating when lack of funds forced him to accept a position as an instructor at Michigan State College. He was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree by Northwestern University in 1902. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1903 to 1908 before going to Germany for his graduate studies, receiving a Ph.D.
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Dietrich Küchemann
1911 - 1976 (65 years)
Dietrich Küchemann CBE FRS FRAeS was a German aerodynamicist who made several important contributions to the advancement of high-speed flight. He spent most of his career in the UK, where he is best known for his work on Concorde.
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Rupert Cross
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Sir Alfred Rupert Neale Cross was an English legal scholar. He was the second of two sons of Arthur George Cross, an architect in Hastings, and Mary Elizabeth . Biography He was born with cancer of the eyes and was completely blind after an operation at the age of 1. Worcester College for the Blind provided his education before he went to Worcester College, Oxford in 1930 where he took a Second in Modern History in 1933.
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Moshé Feldenkrais
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist, known as the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, a system of physical exercise that aims to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement.
Go to Profile#10924
Félix Pollaczek
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Félix Pollaczek was an Austrian-French engineer and mathematician, known for numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and probability theory. He is best known for the Pollaczek–Khinchine formula in queueing theory , and the Pollaczek polynomials.
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H. L. D. Kirkham
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
Harold Laurens Dundas Kirkham was an Anglo-American plastic surgeon. He was the first Professor of Plastic Surgery at Baylor University, Texas and also served with the US Navy Medical Corps, becoming head of plastic surgery at the United States Naval Medical Center San Diego during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#10926
Daniel Frost Comstock
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Daniel Frost Comstock was an American physicist and engineer. Biography Comstock attained a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. He also studied in Berlin, Zürich, and Basel, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1906. At the University of Cambridge he studied under J. J. Thomson. Beginning in 1904 he was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics .
Go to Profile#10927
Shintaro Uda
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Shintaro Uda was a Japanese inventor, and assistant to Professor Hidetsugu Yagi at Tohoku Imperial University, where together they invented the Yagi–Uda antenna in 1926. In February 1926, Yagi and Uda published their first report on the wave projector antenna in a Japanese publication. Yagi applied for patents on the new antenna both in Japan and the United States. His was issued in May 1932 and assigned to the Radio Corporation of America.
Go to Profile#10928
Albert Francis Zahm
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Albert Francis Zahm was an early aeronautical experimenter, a professor of physics, and a chief of the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Library of Congress. He testified as an aeronautical expert in the 1910–14 lawsuits between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss.
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Lillian Moller Gilbreth
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Lillian Evelyn Gilbreth was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their ...
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H. Gene Slottow
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Hiram Gene Slottow was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was the co-inventor of the plasma display. After completing his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Chicago, he completed MS in electrical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was a professor of electrical engineering at Illinois from 1968 to 1986. He was also employed as an electrical engineer at the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Computer-Based Education Re...
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Josep Lluís Sert
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Josep Lluís Sert i López was a Spanish architect and city planner. Biography Born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, Sert showed keen interest in the works of his uncle, the painter Josep Maria Sert, and of Antoni Gaudí. He studied architecture at the Escola Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona and set up his own studio in 1929. That same year Sert moved to Paris, in response to an invitation from Le Corbusier to work for him . Returning to Barcelona in 1930, he continued his practice there until 1937. During the 1930s, Sert co-founded the group GATCPAC , which later was the prominent associatio...
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Harry H. Goode
1909 - 1960 (51 years)
Harry H. Goode was an American computer engineer and systems engineer and professor at the University of Michigan. He is known as co-author of the book Systems Engineering from 1957, which is one of the earliest significant books directly related to systems engineering.
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Asa S. Knowles
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Asa Smallidge Knowles was the ninth President of the University of Toledo and the third President of Northeastern University. A graduate of Thayer Academy, Knowles went on to earn his AB from Bowdoin College in 1930 and his MA from Boston University a few years later. Knowles began his teaching career at Northeastern, leaving for several years to attend several administrative positions at the University of Rhode Island, the Associated Colleges of Upper New York , Cornell University , and the University of Toledo. During his time as president of Northeastern, lasting from 1959 to 1975, he exp...
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Joseph Wickham Roe
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
Joseph Wickham Roe was an American engineer and Professor of Industrial Engineering at the New York University, known for his seminal work on machine tools and machine tool builders history. Biography Roe was born in 1871 as youngest child of Alfred Cox, pastor of a Presbyterian church and educator, and Emma Wickham Roe. After attending the Burr and Burton Academy, he graduated in 1895 at the Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, and after years of practice received his Master of Engineering in 1907.
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Hallie Flanagan
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Hallie Flanagan Davis was an American theatrical producer and director, playwright, and author, best known as director of the Federal Theatre Project, a part of the Works Progress Administration . Background Hallie Flanagan was born in Redfield, South Dakota. When she was around 10, her family moved to Grinnell, Iowa. She attended Grinnell College where she majored in Philosophy and German, and was an active member in the Literary and Dramatic Clubs. During her time at Grinnell she became friends with Harry Hopkins, who had also grown up in Grinnell and was a year behind her at Grinnell College.
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Robert Scott Troup
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Robert Scott Troup CMG CIE FRS was a British forestry expert. He spent the first part of his career in Colonial India, returning to England in 1920 to head Oxford's School of Forestry. Education Troup was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and the University of Aberdeen. He then entered Cooper's Hill College, which trained engineers and forest conservators for Indian service; there he trained under William Schlich.
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Kinjiro Okabe
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Kinjiro Okabe was a Japanese electrical engineering researcher and professor who made major contributions to magnetron and radar development. He did work after the Second World War on medical instruments using ultrasounds.
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Mieczysław G. Bekker
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Mieczysław Gregory Bekker was a Polish engineer and scientist. Bekker was born in Strzyżów, near Hrubieszów, Poland and graduated from Warsaw Technical University in 1929. Early career Bekker worked for the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs at the Army Research Institute in Warsaw. There he worked on systems for tracked vehicles to work on uneven ground. In the Invasion of Poland he was in a unit that retreated to Romania and then he was moved to France in 1939.
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Ernst Neufert
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ernst Neufert was a German architect who is known as an assistant of Walter Gropius, as a teacher and member of various standardization organizations, and especially for his widely disseminated reference book Architects' data.
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A. L. Strand
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
August Leroy Strand was an American entomologist who served as President of Montana State University from 1937 to 1942, and as President of Oregon State University from 1942 to 1961. Life and career Strand was born on February 12, 1894, in Victoria, Texas, to August M. and Christina Strand. His father was born in Sweden about 1855, and his mother in Sweden about 1861. They emigrated to the United States, first taking up residence in Missouri, where their first three children were born: Rose L. in 1885, Ettie C. in 1888, and May F. in 1887. The family moved to Victoria, Texas, where August was born in 1894.
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Odd Dahl
1898 - 1994 (96 years)
Odd Dahl was a Norwegian engineer and explorer. He is particularly remembered for his contributions to research in nuclear physics. Biography He was born at Drammen in Buskerud, Norway, the son of businessman Lauritz Dahl and his wife Olga Sørensen. Dahl attended an evening technical school during his teenage years. In 1917, he was employed by Fenger Hagen, an electrical engineer with an interest in radio telephony. In 1921, Dahl was admitted as a student at the Army Flyvevæsens flight school at Kjeller in Skedsmo where he received an international pilot's license. Roald Amundsen hired him i...
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William Wurster
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
William Wilson Wurster was an American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, best known for his residential designs in California.
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Gustave Magnel
1889 - 1955 (66 years)
Gustaaf Paul Robert Magnel was a Belgian engineer and professor at Ghent University, known for his expertise regarding reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete. Biography Gustave Magnel studied civil engineering at Ghent University from 1907 to 1912. He left Belgium in 1914 and worked as a civil engineer at the D. G. Somerville & Co. Contractor Company until 1917, finally becoming chief engineer there. After he returned to Belgium from the UK in 1919, he joined the Strength of Materials Laboratory at Ghent University. He first started lecturing at the university in 1922 and went on to bec...
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Eižens Laube
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Eižens Laube was a Latvian architect. He was responsible for some of the reconstruction work of Riga Castle in the 1930s and designed more than 200 houses in Riga. Biography Eižens Laube was born in Riga as a son of a potter. In 1899 he graduated Realschule and started architecture studies in Riga Polytechnic Institute. While still a student he started to work in Konstantīns Pēkšēns's architecture office in 1900. In 1904 he took a study trip to Finland where he was introduced to National Romanticism in architecture. Laube graduated from the Riga Polytechnic Institute's department of architecture in 1907.
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Eugene L. Grant
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Eugene Lodewick Grant , was an American civil engineer and educator. He graduated with a BS from the University of Wisconsin in 1917. He started teaching in 1920 at Montana State University and then in 1930 at the School of Engineering, Stanford University where he taught until 1962. He is known for his work in Engineering Economics with his textbook first published in 1930. Grant was the intellectual heir of work performed by John Charles Lounsbury Fish who published Engineering Economics: First Principles in 1923, providing the critical bridge between Grant and the pioneering effort of Arthur M.
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Thomas Church
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Thomas Dolliver Church was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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Charles Frewen Jenkin
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Charles Frewen Jenkin, CBE, FRS was a British engineer and academic. He held the first chair of engineering at the University of Oxford as Professor of Engineering Science. Early life Jenkin was born on 24 September 1865 in Claygate, Surrey. He was the second son of Fleeming Jenkin who was Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, then an all boys private school in Edinburgh. He attended the University of Edinburgh, before matriculating into Trinity College, Cambridge in 1883. As the University of Cambridge had no engineering degree, he instead studied the Mathematical Tripos.
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Svetopolk Pivko
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Svetopolk Pivko was a professor and engineer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade, was a colonel of the Yugoslav Air Force deputy commander of JRV, the founder and the first director of the Aeronautical Technical Institute in Žarkovo. In 1961 he was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and from 1976 he was a full member of the Academy.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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