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,
#11001
Benjamin Miessner
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Benjamin Franklin Miessner was an American radio engineer and inventor. He is most known for his electronic organ, electronic piano, and other musical instruments. He was the inventor of the Cat's whisker detector.
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John I. Yellott
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
John Ingle Yellott was an American engineer recognized as a pioneer in passive solar energy, and an inventor with many patents to his credit. In his honor the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Solar Division confers a biannual "John I. Yellott Award" which "recognizes ASME members who have demonstrated sustained leadership within the Solar Energy Division, have a reputation for performing high-quality solar energy research and have made significant contributions to solar engineering through education, state or federal government service or in the private sector."
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William Lyman Underwood
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
William Lyman Underwood was an American photographer who was also involved in the research of time-temperature canning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1896. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Underwood was the second son of William James Underwood, one of the nine children of William Underwood, the founder of the William Underwood Company.
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Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity , an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and socia...
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Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
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Robert Peele
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Robert Peele was an American mining engineer. He was an emeritus professor at Columbia University and author of the Mining Engineers' Handbook, which was in print from 1918 to 1989. Biography Peele was born on July 15, 1858, in New York City, the son of Raymond and Anne Westervelt Peele. He received the degree of Engineer of Mining from Columbia School of Mines in 1883 and immediately entered the mining business. He worked in gold and silver mines in North Carolina, Arizona, and Colorado, and performed evaluations of mining fields in New Mexico, Colombia, and Dutch Guiana. He served as superi...
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Edwin Duerr
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Edwin Duerr was a theater and radio director. He was director of the Little Theater at University of California, Berkeley when he discovered Gregory Peck. He wrote the books The Length and Depth of Acting and Radio and Television Acting: Criticism, Theory and Practice. According to author Sean Egan in the James Kirkwood biography Ponies & Rainbows, Duerr co-wrote a play with Kirkwood called The Marriage Habit which failed to get staged.
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Frederick E. Turneaure
1866 - 1951 (85 years)
Frederick Eugene Turneaure was an American civil engineer and academic from Illinois. A graduate of Cornell University, Turneaure briefly worked in the private sector before joining Washington University in St. Louis as an instructor. In 1892, he was named a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Turneaure was Dean of Engineering there from 1902 to 1937.
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Harriett B. Rigas
1934 - 1989 (55 years)
Harriett B. Rigas FIEEE was a Canadian electrical engineer and innovative lecturer who was recognised worldwide for her hybrid computer and computer simulation research. Early life and education Rigas was born on 30 April 1934 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She graduated from Queens University in 1956 with a bachelor's degree. She completed her master's in electrical engineering in 1959, the same year she got married. Rigas completed her doctorate in 1963 also from Kansas University as the first woman to do so.
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Albert Arnulf
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Albert Arnulf was a French engineer and physicist. In 1939, Arnulf received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society.
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George Howe
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
George Howe was an American architect and educator, and an early convert to the International style. His personal residence, High Hollow , established the standard for house design in the Philadelphia region through the early 20th century. His partnership with William Lescaze yielded the design of Philadelphia's PSFS Building , considered the first International style skyscraper built in the United States.
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Charles F. Scott
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
Charles Felton Scott was an electrical engineer, professor at Yale University and known for his invention of the Scott-T transformer in the 1890s. He graduated from Ohio State University in 1885 and went on to graduate study at Johns Hopkins University. Scott joined the engineering staff of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1888. He assisted the inventor Nikola Tesla with his work on the alternating-current induction motor. Scott also carried out experimental high voltage transmission line work at Telluride, Colorado with Ralph D. Mershon.
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Henry Vincent Hubbard
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Henry Vincent Hubbard was an American landscape architect and planner, famous for his unique teaching styles at Harvard University, and his many publications. He was one of the prime supporters for a national system of public parks.
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Halbert Powers Gillette
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Halbert Powers Gillette was an American engineer and prolific author of textbooks and handbooks for the engineering and construction fields. Biography Born on August 5, 1869, in Waverly, Iowa, to Theodore Weld and Laetitia S. , Gillette attended the Hammond Hall Academy in Salt Lake City, from which he graduated in 1886. Six years later in 1892, he received his engineering degree at the School of Mines at Columbia University, where he was classmate of Edward B. Durham.
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Lionel Bailey Budden
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Lionel Bailey Budden FRIBA was an English architect. Born to William Budden and Elizabeth Adams, Budden attended Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby. From 1933 Budden was Roscoe Professor in Architecture in the Liverpool University School of Architecture. He retired in 1952.
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Raffaele Giacomelli
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Raffaele Giacomelli was an aeronautical engineer, linguist, dialectologist, and historian of science. His father was Francesco Giacomelli, of Bolognese origin, first astronomer at the R. Osservatorio del Campidoglio, and his mother was Maria née Marucchi, from a family of scholars. Raffaele Giacomelli's paternal great-grandfather, Raffaele, jurist, had been rector of the University of Bologna, and his uncle, Orazio Marucchi, was a famous archaeologist.
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Giacomo Quarenghi
1744 - 1817 (73 years)
Giacomo Quarenghi was an Italian architect who was the foremost and most prolific practitioner of neoclassical architecture in Imperial Russia, particularly in Saint Petersburg. He brought into vogue an original monumental style, of Palladian inspiration, which was a reference for many architects who worked in Russia as well as the Grand Duchy of Finland.
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Reginald Fessenden
1866 - 1932 (66 years)
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was a Canadian-born inventor, who did a majority of his work in the United States and also claimed U.S. citizenship through his American-born father. During his life he received hundreds of patents in various fields, most notably ones related to radio and sonar.
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Balthasar Neumann
1687 - 1753 (66 years)
Johann Balthasar Neumann , usually known as Balthasar Neumann, was a German architect and military artillery engineer who developed a refined brand of Baroque architecture, fusing Austrian, Bohemian, Italian, and French elements to design some of the most impressive buildings of the period, including the Würzburg Residence and the Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers .
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Henry Hobson Richardson
1838 - 1886 (48 years)
Henry Hobson Richardson, FAIA was an American architect, best known for his work in a style that became known as Richardsonian Romanesque. Along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture".
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Augustus Pugin
1812 - 1852 (40 years)
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was an English architect, designer, artist and critic with French and Swiss origins. He is principally remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival style of architecture. His work culminated in designing the interior of the Palace of Westminster in Westminster, London, and its iconic clock tower, later renamed the Elizabeth Tower, which houses the bell known as Big Ben. Pugin designed many churches in England, and some in Ireland and Australia. He was the son of Auguste Pugin, and the father of Edward Welby Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin, who continued h...
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Jakob Ackeret
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
Jakob Ackeret, FRAeS was a Swiss aeronautical engineer. He is widely viewed as one of the foremost aeronautics experts of the 20th century. Birth and education Jakob Ackeret was born in 1898 in Switzerland. He received his diploma degree in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich in 1920 under the supervision of Aurel Stodola. From 1921 to 1927 he worked with Ludwig Prandtl at the "Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt" in Göttingen, witnessing a legendary period in the development of modern fluid dynamics. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 1927.
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Ebenezer Howard
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
Sir Ebenezer Howard was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform , the description of a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in the founding of the garden city movement, and the building of the first garden city, Letchworth Garden City, commenced in 1903.
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André Le Nôtre
1613 - 1700 (87 years)
André Le Nôtre , originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles; his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin à la française.
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George Gilbert Scott
1811 - 1878 (67 years)
Sir George Gilbert Scott , largely known as Sir Gilbert Scott, was a prolific English Gothic Revival architect, chiefly associated with the design, building and renovation of churches and cathedrals, although he started his career as a leading designer of workhouses. Over 800 buildings were designed or altered by him.
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George Stephenson
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution. Renowned as the "Father of Railways", Stephenson was considered by the Victorians as a great example of diligent application and thirst for improvement. His chosen rail gauge, sometimes called "Stephenson gauge", was the basis for the standard gauge used by most of the world's railways.
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Francesco Borromini
1599 - 1667 (68 years)
Francesco Borromini , byname of Francesco Castelli , was an Italian architect born in the modern Swiss canton of Ticino who, with his contemporaries Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.
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Johannes Itten
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.
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William Le Baron Jenney
1832 - 1907 (75 years)
William Le Baron Jenney was an American architect and engineer known for building the first skyscraper in 1884. In 1998, Jenney was ranked number 89 in the book 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium.
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Ilya Golosov
1883 - 1945 (62 years)
Ilya Alexandrovich Golosov was an architect from the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. A leader of Constructivism in 1925-1931, Ilya Golosov later developed his own style of early stalinist architecture known as postconstructivism. Не was a brother of Panteleimon Golosov.
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Raymond Hood
1881 - 1934 (53 years)
Raymond Mathewson Hood was an American architect who worked in the Neo-Gothic and Art Deco styles. He is best known for his designs of the Tribune Tower, American Radiator Building, and Rockefeller Center. Through a short yet highly successful career, Hood exerted an outsized influence on twentieth century architecture.
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Gordon Bunshaft
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Gordon Bunshaft, , was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century. A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill , Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years. His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway , and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York.
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Marian Mazur
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Marian Mazur was a Polish scientist who specialized in electrothermics and cybernetics, and the founding father of the Polish school of cybernetics. Scientific work In 1937 Mazur pioneered work on automatic telephone switchboards, and developed a working prototype just before World War II. After the war he established a thermoelectrical laboratory and researched infrared heating. Mazur attained professorship in 1954 and later worked on standardizing terminology related to electrical engineering and wrote numerous of articles and a book on the subject. Mazur was a member of numerous Polish and...
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John Nash
1752 - 1835 (83 years)
John Nash was one of the foremost British architects of the Georgian and Regency eras, during which he was responsible for the design, in the neoclassical and picturesque styles, of many important areas of London. His designs were financed by the Prince Regent and by the era's most successful property developer, James Burton. Nash also collaborated extensively with Burton's son, Decimus Burton.
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Mimar Sinan
1490 - 1588 (98 years)
Mimar Sinan also known as Koca Mi'mâr Sinân Âğâ, was the chief Ottoman architect, engineer, mathematician for sultans Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II and Murad III. He was responsible for the construction of more than 300 major structures such as the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, the Kanuni Sultan Suleiman Bridge in Büyükçekmece, the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad, and other more modest projects such as madrasa's, külliyes, bridges, etc. His apprentices would later design the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul and Stari Most bridge in Mostar.
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Man Ray
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
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Kurt H. Debus
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Kurt Heinrich Debus was a German-American rocket engineer and NASA director. Born in Germany, he was a member of the Schutzstaffel during World War II, where he served as a V-weapons flight test director. Following the war, he was brought to the United States via Operation Paperclip, and directed the design, development, construction and operation of NASA's Saturn launch facilities. He became the first director of NASA's Launch Operations Center , and, under him, NASA conducted 150 launches of military missiles and space vehicles, including 13 launches of the Saturn V rocket as part of the A...
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Calvert Vaux
1824 - 1895 (71 years)
Calvert Vaux FAIA was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protégé and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York City's Central Park.
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Félix Vallotton
1865 - 1925 (60 years)
Félix Édouard Vallotton was a Swiss and French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as . He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut. He painted portraits, landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and other subjects in an unemotional, realistic style.
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William Burges
1827 - 1881 (54 years)
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
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Lee de Forest
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Lee de Forest was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first practical electronic amplifier, the three-element "Audion" triode vacuum tube in 1906. This helped start the Electronic Age, and enabled the development of the electronic oscillator. These made radio broadcasting and long distance telephone lines possible, and led to the development of talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
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Wunibald Kamm
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Wunibald Kamm was an automobile designer, engineer, and aerodynamicist. He is best known for his breakthrough in reducing car turbulence at high speeds; the style of car bodywork based on his research has come to be known as a Kammback or a Kamm-tail.
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Kaare Klint
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Kaare Klint was a Danish architect and furniture designer, known as the father of modern Danish furniture design. Style was epitomized by clean, pure lines, use of the best materials of his time and superb craftsmanship.
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Aurel Stodola
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Aurel Boleslav Stodola was a Slovak engineer, physicist, and inventor. He was a pioneer in the area of technical thermodynamics and its applications and published his book Die Dampfturbine in 1903. In addition to the thermodynamic issues involved in turbine design the book discussed aspects of fluid flow, vibration, stress analysis of plates, shells and rotating discs and stress concentrations at holes and fillets. Stodola was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Swiss Polytechnical Institute in Zurich. He maintained friendly contact with Albert Einstein. In 1892, Stodola founded t...
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Alexander Jackson Davis
1803 - 1892 (89 years)
Alexander Jackson Davis was an American architect known particularly for his association with the Gothic Revival style. Education Davis was born in New York City and studied at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Drawing Association, and from the antique casts of the National Academy of Design. Dropping out of school, he became a lithographer and from 1826 he worked as a draftsman for Josiah R. Brady, a New York architect who was an early exponent of the Gothic Revival style. Brady's Gothic 1824 St. Luke's Episcopal Church is the oldest surviving structure in Rochester, New York.
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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was a Russian and Soviet rocket scientist who pioneered astronautics. Along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Hermann Oberth, Fritz von Opel and Robert H. Goddard, he is one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics. His works later inspired leading Soviet rocket engineerss Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, who contributed to the success of the Soviet space program. Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a log house on the outskirts of Kaluga, about southwest of Moscow. A recluse by nature, his unusual habits made him seem bizarre to his fe...
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Decimus Burton
1800 - 1881 (81 years)
Decimus Burton was one of the foremost English architects and landscapers of the 19th century. He was the foremost Victorian architect in the Roman revival, Greek revival, Georgian neoclassical and Regency styles. He was a founding fellow and vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and from 1840 architect to the Royal Botanic Society, and an early member of the Athenaeum Club, London, whose clubhouse he designed and which the company of his father, James Burton, the pre-eminent Georgian London property developer, built.
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Herbert Baker
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Sir Herbert Baker was an English architect remembered as the dominant force in South African architecture for two decades, and a major designer of some of New Delhi's most notable government structures. He was born and died at Owletts in Cobham, Kent.
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Tatsuno Kingo
1854 - 1919 (65 years)
Tatsuno Kingo was a Japanese architect born in Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, Kyushu. Doctor of Engineering. Conferred Jusanmi and Kunsanto . Former dean of Architecture Department at Tokyo Imperial University.
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Charles Follen McKim
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Charles Follen McKim was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White, he provided the architectural expertise as a member of the partnership McKim, Mead & White.
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