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
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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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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Max Ernst
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages.
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Edward Durell Stone
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Edward Durell Stone was an American architect known for the formal, highly decorative buildings he designed in the 1950s and 1960s. His works include the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India, The Keller Center at the University of Chicago, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
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Franz Reuleaux
1829 - 1905 (76 years)
Franz Reuleaux , was a German mechanical engineer and a lecturer of the Berlin Royal Technical Academy, later appointed as the president of the academy. He was often called the father of kinematics. He was a leader in his profession, contributing to many important domains of science and knowledge.
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Sebastiano Serlio
1475 - 1554 (79 years)
Sebastiano Serlio was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treatise variously known as I sette libri dell'architettura or Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva .
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Nikolai Ladovsky
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Ladovsky was a Russian avant-garde architect and educator, leader of the rationalist movement in 1920s architecture, an approach emphasizing human perception of space and shape. Ladovsky is known as the founder of modern Soviet and Russian schools of architectural training; his classes of 1920–1932 in VKhUTEMAS shaped the generation of Soviet architects active throughout the period of Stalinist architecture and subsequent decades.
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Maxwell Fry
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Edwin Maxwell Fry, CBE, RA, FRIBA, FRTPI, known as Maxwell Fry , was an English modernist architect, writer and painter. Originally trained in the neo-classical style of architecture, Fry grew to favour the new modernist style, and practised with eminent colleagues including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Fry was a major influence on a generation of young architects. Among the younger colleagues with whom he worked was Denys Lasdun.
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Viktor Kaplan
1876 - 1934 (58 years)
Viktor Kaplan was an Austrian engineer and the inventor of the Kaplan turbine. Life Kaplan was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria into a railroad worker's family. He graduated from high school in Vienna in 1895, after which he attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied mechanical engineering and specialised in diesel engines. From 1900 to 1901 he was drafted into military service in Pula.
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Vladimir Shchuko
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Vladimir Alekseyevich Shchuko was a Russian architect, member of the Saint Petersburg school of Russian neoclassical revival notable for his giant order apartment buildings "rejecting all trace of the moderne". After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Shchuko gradually embraced modernist ideas, developing his own version of modernized neoclassicism together with his partner Vladimir Gelfreikh. Shchuko and Gelfreikh succeeded through the prewar period of Stalinist architecture with high-profile projects like the Lenin Library, Moscow Metro stations and co-authored the unrealized Palace of Soviets....
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Filippo Brunelleschi
1377 - 1446 (69 years)
Filippo di ser Brunellesco di Lippo Lapi , commonly known as Filippo Brunelleschi and also nicknamed Pippo by Leon Battista Alberti, was an Italian architect, designer, goldsmith and sculptor. He is considered to be a founding father of Renaissance architecture. He is recognized as the first modern engineer, planner, and sole construction supervisor. In 1421, Brunelleschi became the first person to receive a patent in the Western world. He is most famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, and for the mathematical technique of linear perspective in art which governed pictorial depictions of space until the late 19th century and influenced the rise of modern science.
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