The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#1101
Steven D. Eppinger
#39235
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Steven D. Eppinger is an American engineer, and Professor of Management, Professor of Management Science and Innovation, and Professor of Engineering Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his work on product design and product development.
Go to Profile#1102
Xuedong Huang
#9096
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Xuedong David Huang is a Chinese American computer scientist and technology executive who has made contributions to spoken language processing and artificial intelligence, including Azure AI Services. He is Zoom's chief technology officer after serving as Microsoft's Technical Fellow and Azure AI Chief Technology Officer for 30 years. Huang is a strong advocate of AI for Accessibility, and AI for Cultural Heritage.
Go to Profile#1103
Tomotaka Takahashi
#25131
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Tomotaka Takahashi is a Japanese roboticist and founder of Kyoto University's ROBO-GARAGE since 2018. Takahashi creates humanoid robots known for their smooth, fluid motions and sleek appearance. Having built many humanoid robots entirely by himself, from simple concepts to production, Takahashi's designs have been featured in several art exhibitions celebrating the creation of Astroboy, Time Magazine's Coolest Inventions of 2004, and promotions for Bandai, Panasonic, and Pepsi. He has also worked with toy companies to produce relatively inexpensive robots for the hobby market, including thos...
Go to Profile#1104
Richard M. Murray
#61708
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#1105
Robert W. Heath Jr.
#58217
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Robert W. Heath Jr. is an American electrical engineer, researcher, educator, wireless technology expert, and a Lampe Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the North Carolina State University. He is also the president and CEO of MIMO Wireless Inc. He was the founding director of the Situation Aware Vehicular Engineering Systems initiative.
Go to Profile#1106
Shahram Amiri
#14781
Overall Influence
1977 - 2016 (39 years)
Shahram Amiri was an Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Iran during 2009–2010 under disputed circumstances, and was executed by the Iranian government in August 2016. In the spring of 2009, he disappeared while apparently on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. On 27 September 2009, Tehran Bureau noted conflicting information regarding the date of his disappearance: the Tehran Times claimed that Amiri disappeared on 31 May, but Press TV claimed he disappeared in June. In the same announcement by Tehran Bureau, it was claimed that Amiri conducted research on particle physics at the...
Go to Profile#1107
Herwig Kogelnik
#27610
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Herwig Kogelnik is an Austrian-American electrical and optical engineer. He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the developments in laser technology, optoelectronics, photonics and lightwave communications systems. His work over a 40-year career at Bell Labs earned him the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the National Medal of Technology and many other awards.
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Ioannis Despotopoulos
#51542
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Ioannis Despotopoulos , also known as Jan Despo, was a Greek architect born in Smyrna , Aidin Vilayet, Ottoman Empire. Biography Despotopoulos was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor in 1903; soon after he was born, his family moved to the island of Chios where he grew up. He moved to Athens to study architecture. He was enrolled student at the National Technical University of Athens until he quit and left to study at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He then moved to Leibniz University Hannover, graduating from there in 1927.
Go to Profile#1109
Arnold Alexander Hall
#16363
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Sir Arnold Alexander Hall was an English aeronautical engineer, scientist and industrialist. Early life Hall was born in Liverpool, and attended Alsop High School in Walton, before going to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took the Mechanical Science Tripos, and was awarded a first class honours degree with distinction in aeronautics, heat engines, applied mathematics and theory of structure. He also won a unique trio of awards – the Rex Moir Prize in Engineering, the John Bernard Seely Prize in Aeronautics, and the Ricardo Prize in Thermodynamics. By now, his interest in aeronautics had...
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James Fujimoto
#13955
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
James G. Fujimoto is Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#1111
R. D. Middlebrook
#41043
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Robert David Middlebrook was a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology . He is most well known in the field of power electronics and as a proponent of design-oriented circuit analysis.
Go to Profile#1112
Michael Cacoyannis
#2150
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
Michael Cacoyannis , sometimes credited as Michael Yannis, was a Greek Cypriot theatre and film director, writer, producer, and actor. Much of his work was rooted in classical texts, especially those of the Greek tragedian Euripides. His most acclaimed work is the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel of the same name. He also directed the 1983 Broadway revival of the musical based on the film. In addition to directing, he also wrote, produced, translated, and designed dozens of stage play and opera productions.
Go to Profile#1113
Elizabeth Croft
#46706
Overall Influence
Elizabeth A. Croft is a Canadian roboticist known for her work on human–robot interaction. She is the vice president and provost of the University of Victoria. Education and career Croft graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1988, she earned a master's degree at the University of Waterloo in 1992, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1995.
Go to Profile#1114
Harold J. Kushner
#30693
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Harold Joseph Kushner is an American applied mathematician and a Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. He is known for his work on the theory of stochastic stability , the theory of non-linear filtering , and for the development of numerical methods for stochastic control problems such as the Markov chain approximation method. He is commonly cited as the first person to study Bayesian optimization, based on work he published in 1964.
Go to Profile#1115
Jacob Abraham
#40883
Overall Influence
Jacob A. Abraham is an American computer scientist and engineer who is currently the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#1116
Jesco von Puttkamer
#32954
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Jesco Hans Heinrich Max Freiherr von Puttkamer was a German-American aerospace engineer, senior manager at NASA, and a pulp science fiction writer. He was an advocate of human space exploration, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . While at NASA, he served as the program manager in charge of long-range planning of deep space crewed activities . He was regarded as an expert on the Russian space program.
Go to Profile#1117
Mauro Ferrari
#25627
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mauro Ferrari is a nanoscientist and leader in the field of nanomedicine. He served as special expert on nanotechnology for the National Cancer Institute and was instrumental in establishing the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer in 2004. On 1 January 2020, Ferrari was made president of the European Research Council . Following a vote of no confidence, on 27 March 2020, "all 19 active members of the ERC’s Scientific Council individually and unanimously requested that Mauro Ferrari resign from his position as ERC’s President", due to poor conduct in office, exploiting the position to further his own projects, and for consistently failing to represent the interests of the ERC.
Go to Profile#1118
Neil Leach
#15545
Overall Influence
Neil Leach is a British architect and theorist. He is also a licensed architect, registered to practice in the United Kingdom. Education Leach holds a Master of Arts degree and a Diploma of Architecture degree from the University of Cambridge, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Nottingham.
Go to Profile#1119
Reynold Xin
#11826
Overall Influence
Reynold Xin is a computer scientist and engineer specializing in big data, distributed systems, and cloud computing. He is a co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks. He is best known for his work on Apache Spark, a leading open-source Big Data project. He was designer and lead developer of the GraphX, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming components and he co-designed DataFrames, all of which are part of the core Apache Spark distribution; he also served as the release manager for Spark's 2.0 release.
Go to Profile#1120
Edward S. Davidson
#30752
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Edward S. Davidson is a professor emeritus in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research interests His research interests include computer architecture, pipelining theory, parallel processing, performance modeling, intelligent caches, and application tuning. In the 1970s, he developed the reservation table approach to optimum design and cyclic scheduling of pipelines, designed and implemented an eight-node symmetric multiprocessor system in 1976, and developed a variety of systematic methods for modeling performance and enhancing systems, in...
Go to Profile#1121
Michael A. Unser
#62315
Overall Influence
#1122
Tejal A. Desai
#44094
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Tejal Ashwin Desai is Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she was the Deborah Cowan Endowed Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at University of California, San Francisco, Director of the Health Innovations via Engineering Initiative , and head of the Therapeutic Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. She was formerly an associate professor at Boston University and an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago . She is a researcher in the area of therapeutic micro and nanotechnology and has authored ...
Go to Profile#1123
Mark S. Fox
#30100
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mark Stephen Fox is a Canadian computer scientist, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering at the University of Toronto, known for the development of Constraint Directed Scheduling in the 1980s and the TOVE Project to develop an ontological framework for enterprise modeling and enterprise integration in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#1124
Edward A. Lee
#37590
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Edward Ashford Lee is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and author. He is Professor of the Graduate School and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. Lee works in the areas of cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, and the semantics of programming languages. He is particularly known for his advocacy of deterministic models for the engineering of cyber-physical systems.
Go to Profile#1125
William Bonfield
#44060
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
William Bonfield CBE, FREng, FRS is a British material scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Medical Materials in the University of Cambridge. Life He earned a BSc with First Class Honours, and PhD at Imperial College, London. He was a senior research scientist at the Honeywell Research Center from 1961 to 1968. He taught at Queen Mary College, becoming the chairman of the school of engineering, and dean of engineering. He was director of the University of London Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Biomedical Materials. In 1991 he was awarded the A. A. Griffith Medal and Prize.
Go to Profile#1126
Tsuneo Nakahara
#36345
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Tsuneo Nakahara was a Japanese communications engineer, executive advisor to the CEO of Sumitomo Electric. He was one of the main researchers contributing to the development of optical fiber technology.
Go to Profile#1127
Percy A. Pierre
#37435
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Percy Anthony Pierre is an American electrical engineer. He was the first African-American Ph.D. in electrical engineering, appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for Research and Development, and appointed acting Secretary of the Army. Pierre was the principal architect of the national minority engineering effort. He currently is vice president emeritus and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#1128
Bernd Kröplin
#50865
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Bernd-Helmut Kröplin was a German engineer and academic. Life After a trade apprenticeship as a bricklayer, Kröplin studied Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1977 and received a PhD for a thesis on the elastoplastic stability of steel bridges.
Go to Profile#1129
Sebastian Möller
#21897
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sebastian Möller is an expert for quality of experience and speech technology. Biography Sebastian Möller studied electrical engineering at the universities in Bochum , Orléans and Bologna . From 1994 to 2005, he was a scientific researcher and later lecturer at the Institute of Communication Acoustics at Ruhr Universität Bochum specializing in speech transmission, speech technology and communication acoustics, as well as the quality of speech-based systems. Möller earned his habilitation at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Ruhr Universität Bochum in 2004 with a book discussing the quality of telephone-based speech dialog systems.
Go to Profile#1130
William Hanna
#1349
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
William Denby Hanna was an American animator, cartoonist and occasional musician who was the creator of Tom and Jerry as well as the voice actor for the two titular characters. Alongside Joseph Barbera, he also founded the animation studio and production company Hanna-Barbera.
Go to Profile#1131
Catherine Ingraham
#41173
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Catherine Ingraham is a professor of architecture in the graduate architecture program at Pratt Institute in New York City, a program for which she was chair from 1999 to 2005. Biography Ingraham was born to Gordon Ingraham and Elizabeth Wright Ingraham. Ingraham was raised in Colorado and earned her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. Ingraham has held academic appointments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University and been a visiting professor at Princeton, the GSD, and Columbia University, before joining Pratt as chair in 1999.
Go to Profile#1132
Dolores Hayden
#23601
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Dolores Hayden is an American professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University. She is an urban historian, architect, author, and poet. Hayden has made innovative contributions to the understanding of the social importance of urban space and to the history of the built environment in the United States.
Go to Profile#1133
Moshe Kam
#16428
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#1134
Stefan Schaal
#19667
Overall Influence
Stefan Schaal is a German-American computer scientist specializing in robotics, machine learning, autonomous systems, and computational neuroscience. Education and career Schaal was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, Schaal grew up in the North Bavarian town of Nürnberg. After graduating from school, he served in the German army in the Ski Patrol Division of Bad Reichenhall, where he honorably discharged with the rank of a Lieutenant. Schaal studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich, graduating in 1987 with a Diploma degree . Subsequently, Schaal did his Ph.D. in...
Go to Profile#1135
Pramod Viswanath
#33547
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pramod Viswanath is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to the theory and practice of wireless communications.
Go to Profile#1136
J. Karl Hedrick
#52273
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
J. Karl Hedrick was an American control theorist and a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He made seminal contributions in nonlinear control and estimation. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1974 to 1988. Hedrick received a bachelor's degree in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Michigan and a M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University .
Go to Profile#1137
Ken P. Chong
#29695
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ken P. Chong Chong grew up and obtained high school education at the Queen Elizabeth School, Hong Kong. He pursued higher education for the B.S. degree in Civil Engineering with major in Structures at the Taiwan National Cheng Kung University, and M.S. degree for Structural Mechanics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He also obtained advanced degrees at Princeton University: M.A., M.S. in Engineering, and completed the Ph.D. in Mechanics, 1969. After that he received post-doctoral management training at the Federal Executive Institute, for senior federal executives, Class 221, 1996....
Go to Profile#1138
Andres Serrano
#4962
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist. His work, often considered transgressive art, includes photos of corpses and uses feces and bodily fluids. His Piss Christ is a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. He also created the artwork for the heavy metal band Metallica's Load and Reload albums.
Go to Profile#1139
Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte
#25053
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hugh Francis Durrant-Whyte is a British-Australian engineer and academic. He is known for his pioneering work on probabilistic methods for robotics. The algorithms developed in his group since the early 1990s permit autonomous vehicles to deal with uncertainty and to localize themselves despite noisy sensor readings using simultaneous localization and mapping .
Go to Profile#1140
Otto Königsberger
#13089
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Otto H. Königsberger was a German architect who worked mainly in urban development planning in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with the United Nations. He also proposed some plans for developing new cities like Bhubaneswar and Jamshedpur under the vision of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who wanted to build planned cities in India.
Go to Profile#1141
Gretar Tryggvason
#43277
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Gretar Tryggvason is Department Head of Mechanical Engineering and Charles A. Miller Jr. Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for developing the front tracking method to simulate multiphase flows and free surface flows. Tryggvason was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Computational Physics from 2002–2015.
Go to Profile#1142
Jean-Louis Cohen
#32296
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Jean-Louis Cohen was a French architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and city planning. Since 1994 he had been the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#1143
Charles Bouman
#40249
Overall Influence
Charles Addison Bouman Jr. is the Showalter Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University, where he has taught since 1989. His research focuses on applications of image processing in various contexts, including medicine, materials science, and consumer imaging. His work led to the development of the first commercial CT scan technology to use model-based iterative reconstruction. He is a co-inventor on over fifty patents in the field of consumer imaging. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, as well as a fellow of the Institute ...
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Julia Hsu
#37062
Overall Influence
Julia Wan-Ping Hsu is an American materials scientist. In her research, she uses scanning probe microscopy to study the nanostructure, optics, and photoelectric properties of thin films and crystal surfaces, with particular application to solar cells, and has used nanotransfer printing to make electrical connections to single-molecule sensing devices. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she holds the Texas Instruments Distinguished Chair in Nanoelectronics.
Go to Profile#1145
Pier Carlo Bontempi
#40328
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Pier Carlo Bontempi is an Italian architect. He is a representative of New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture, with a particular emphasis on urban context and the continuity of architectural traditions.
Go to Profile#1146
C. Allin Cornell
#33235
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Carl Allin Cornell was an American civil engineer, researcher, and professor who made important contributions to reliability theory and earthquake engineering and, along with Luis Esteva, developed the field of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis by publishing the seminal document of the field in 1968.
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Matthias Kleiner
#31413
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Matthias Kleiner is a German engineer and professor for forming technology at Technical University Dortmund. He served as president of the Leibniz Association from 2014 to 2022 and as president of the German Research Foundation from 2007 to 2012, where he played an instrumental role in a number of international and interdisciplinary research projects. Kleiner currently serves as advisor to industrial companies such as on the board of advisors of Siepmann. He is the recipient of a Leibniz Prize.
Go to Profile#1148
Steve Badanes
#48981
Overall Influence
Steve Badanes is widely known for his practice and teaching of design/build. He is a founding member of the Jersey Devil design/build practice, and is currently a Professor in the University of Washington Department of Architecture, where he holds the Howard S. Wright Endowed Chair of the University of Washington College of Built Environments.
Go to Profile#1149
Carlos Mijares Bracho
#33167
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Carlos G. Mijares Bracho was a Mexican architect and founder of the "grupo Menhir". Mijares studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arquitectura of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from 1948 to 1952. After 1954 he lectured in architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana . He was considered to have been a master of brick wall work. His works include religious, industrial and residential architecture. An influence of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is quite distinctive in several of his works. Later he taught at the UNAM. He was a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte .
Go to Profile#1150
Bruce R. Ellingwood
#60410
Overall Influence
Bruce Russell Ellingwood is an American civil engineer and a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado State University. He became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for leadership in the use of probability and statistics in the design of structures and in the development of new design criteria. And, he is a two-time recipient of the Norman Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Society of Civil Engineers for a technical paper judged worthy of special commendation for its merit as a contribution to the Engineering Science. Ellingwood also received the Walter P.
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