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,
#10951
Paul Davidoff
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Paul Davidoff was an American planner, planning educator, and planning theoretician who conceptualized "advocacy planning" with his wife, Linda Stone Davidoff. In legal scholarship, he is known as the primary litigant in the Mount Laurel decision, which established a state-constitutional basis for inclusionary zoning in New Jersey, a doctrine which has been accepted in other United States jurisdictions. Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute and the urban planning department at Hunter College, and also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University during his career...
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Mayo D. Hersey
1886 - 1978 (92 years)
Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.
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Joseph Paul Robinson
1900 - Present (126 years)
J. Paul Robinson is an Australian/American educator, biologist, biomedical engineer, and expert in the applications of flow cytometry. He is a Distinguished Professor of Cytometry in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Basic Medical Sciences, a professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, a professor of Computer and Information Management at Purdue University, an adjunct professor of Microbiology & Immunology at West Lafayette Center for Medical Education, Indiana University School of Medicine, and the Director of Purdue U...
Go to Profile#10954
Frederick Terman
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Frederick Emmons Terman was an American professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of the school of engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 at Stanford University. He is widely credited as being the father of Silicon Valley.
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William B. Kouwenhoven
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
William Bennet Kouwenhoven , also known as the "Father of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation," is famous for his contributions to the development of the closed-chest cardiac massage and his invention of the cardiac defibrillator. After obtaining his doctorate degree in engineering from the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in Germany, Kouwenhoven began his career as the dean at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Kouwenhoven focused his research mainly on improving and saving lives of patients through the application of electricity. With the help and cooperation of the Johns Hopkins School of ...
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Doc Edgerton
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton , also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
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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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Herbert Reich
1900 - 2000 (100 years)
Herbert Reich was a pioneering figure in electrical engineering. Reich made substantial contributions towards the design of early oscilloscopes as a graduate student at Cornell University. Reich later taught as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Yale University . From 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University with Frederick Terman. After his retirement from Yale, he periodically taught courses at Deep Springs College.
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Harry Platt
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Sir Harry Platt, 1st Baronet, FRCS, KStJ was an English orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He was a founder of the British Orthopaedic Association, of which he became president in 1934–1935.
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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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Eli Sternberg
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Eli Sternberg was a researcher in solid mechanics and was considered to be the "nation's leading elastician" at the time of his death. He earned his doctorate in 1945 under Michael Sadowsky at the Illinois Institute of Technology with a dissertation entitled Non-Linear Theory of Elasticity and Applications. He made contributions widely in elasticity, especially in mathematical analysis, the theory of stress concentrations, thermo-elasticity, and visco-elasticity.
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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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Maurice Anthony Biot
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Maurice Anthony Biot was a Belgian-American applied physicist. He made contributions in thermodynamics, aeronautics, geophysics, earthquake engineering, and electromagnetism. Particularly, he was accredited as the founder of the theory of poroelasticity.
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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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Stephen Timoshenko
1878 - 1972 (94 years)
Stepan Prokopovich Timoshenko , later known as Stephen Timoshenko, was an ethnic Ukrainian, citizen of the Russian Empire and later, an American engineer and academician. He is considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. An inventor and one of the pioneering mechanical engineers at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in the Russi...
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Forest Baskett
Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration, and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.
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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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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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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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King-Sun Fu
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.
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Harry Bolton Seed
1922 - 1989 (67 years)
Harry Bolton Seed was an educator, scholar, former professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was regarded as the founding father of geotechnical earthquake engineering. Biography Early life Harry Bolton Seed was born in Bolton, England, on August 19, 1922, into a family of a cotton mill manager. His father was Arthur Bolton Seed, and his mother's maiden name was Annie Wood; his sister Dorothy was nine years older than he was. He spent his childhood in Lancashire and attended Farnworth Grammar School, where he exhibited talent both at sports and academics. At the age of eighteen he chose a scholarship to King's College London over a possible professional soccer career.
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Alan Mara Bateman
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.
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Nathan M. Newmark
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Nathan Mortimore Newmark was an American structural engineer and academic, who is widely considered one of the founding fathers of earthquake engineering. He was awarded the National Medal of Science for engineering.
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Jesse Francis McClendon
1880 - 1976 (96 years)
Jesse Francis McClendon was an American chemist, zoologist, and physiologist known for the first pH measurement of human stomach in situ. McClendon made substantial contributions in a variety of fields, including invertebrate zoology, nutrition, life processes of cell membranes, the importance of pH control, the role of iodine in human health, and specifically its relation to prevention of goiters.
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Robert W. Newcomb
Robert W. Newcomb is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He obtained a BSEE degree from Purdue University in 1955, an MS from Stanford University in 1957, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He was a professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University through 1968, and from 1969 onward has been a professor in the electrical engineering department at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has graduated over 70 Ph.D. students from both Stanford and the University of Maryland, including Brian D.
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Gerald T. Heydt
Gerald Thomas Heydt is an American electrical engineer and Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Heydt was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for contributions to the technology of electric power quality.
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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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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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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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Dallas B. Phemister
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.
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Abel Wolman
1892 - 1989 (97 years)
Abel Wolman was an American engineer, educator and pioneer of modern sanitary engineering. His professional career left impacts in academia, sanitary engineering research, environmental and public health services, engineering professional societies, and journal publications. Wolman is best known for his research with Linn Enslow in the chlorination of Baltimore's municipal water supply, which has contributed to the distribution of safe municipal water supplies globally.
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Theodore Theodorsen
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Theodore Theodorsen was a Norwegian-American theoretical aerodynamicist noted for his work at NACA and for his contributions to the study of turbulence. Early years Theodorsen was born at Sandefjord in Vestfold, Norway to parents Ole Christian Theodorsen, a chief engineer in the Norwegian merchant marine, and his wife Andrea Larsen. He was the oldest of six children. When Theodore’s father took the examinations for a merchant marine engineer's license, he was the only applicant who correctly answered a particularly difficult question. To his father’s surprise his then 12-year-old son was als...
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Hans Albert Einstein
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Hans Albert Einstein was a Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of physicists Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. He was a long-time professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
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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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Leo M. Davidoff
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Leo M. Davidoff was a professor, associate dean and chairman of the departments of surgery and neurological surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School.
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Pol Duwez
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Pol Duwez was a Belgian-born materials scientist. While working at Caltech in 1960, he first introduced metallic glasseses made through rapid liquid cooling using a technique known as splat quenching.
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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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Horst Rittel
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.
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Theodore Paul Wright
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Theodore Paul Wright , also known as T. P. Wright, was a U.S. aeronautical engineer and educator. Biography He was born in Galesburg, Illinois on May 25, 1895. His father was the economist Philip Green Wright and his brothers were the geneticist Sewall Wright and the political scientist Quincy Wright. He graduated from Lombard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in World War I.
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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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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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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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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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