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,
#11051
George Fillmore Swain
1857 - 1931 (74 years)
George Fillmore Swain was a civil engineer from the United States. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later at Harvard University. Biography He was graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877 and then studied in Berlin, German Empire, for three years. On his return to the United States, he settled in Boston. In 1887 he became professor of civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was then located in Boston. He remained at MIT until 1909, when he became professor of civil engineering at the Harvard Graduate School of Applied Science.
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August von Borries
1852 - 1906 (54 years)
August Friedrich Wilhelm von Borries was one of Germany's most influential railway engineers, who was primarily concerned with developments in steam locomotives. Von Borries graduated from the Royal Institute of Trade in Charlottenburg, and then spent a year working at the Bergisch-Märkische railway. In 1875, he joined the service of the Hanover division of the Prussian state railways and subsequently became their Chief Mechanical Engineer. In 1880 he designed the first Prussian compound locomotive, built by Schichau in Elbląg. This showed significant fuel savings. His work on compound locom...
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Max Reinhardt
1873 - 1943 (70 years)
Max Reinhardt was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his innovative stage productions, he is regarded as one of the most prominent directors of German-language theatre in the early 20th century. In 1920, he established the Salzburg Festival with the performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann.
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Howard T. Fisher
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Howard T. Fisher was an American architect, city planner, and educator. Early life Howard Taylor Fisher was born October 30, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Walter Lowrie Fisher and Mabel Taylor. He graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, in 1926. He attended the School of Architecture, Harvard University, from 1926 to 1928.
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Lee Yuk-wing
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Lee Yuk-wing was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known for adapting and popularizing the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener and for his own research on statistical communication theory.
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Francis B. Foley
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Francis B. Foley , was an American ferrous metallurgist. Biography Foley was born July 7, 1887, in Philadelphia. His father, Dennis Foley, died in 1889 in Dakota Territory, leaving a wife, daughter, and three sons . Francis was enrolled in Girard College, a free boarding school, at that time limited to fatherless white boys, from which he graduated in 1904, after completing a high school education. He worked for a year in the art department of the Philadelphia North American, a daily morning newspaper.
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Vyacheslav Golubtsov
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Vyacheslav Alekseyevich Golubtsov was a Soviet and Russian scientist and a specialist in the field of thermal engineering. Biography He was born on 29 March in 1894 in Nizhny Novgorod in the family of a teacher. He was a brother of Valeria Golubtsova, the wife of the Soviet statesman Georgy Malenkov.
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Laurie D. Cox
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Laurie Davidson Cox was a leading American landscape architect and Hall of Fame coach and contributor to the sport of lacrosse. He was professor of Landscape Engineering at the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, where he was responsible for establishing Syracuse University's lacrosse program. Cox later became the president of New England College.
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John Dexter
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
John Dexter was an English theatre, opera and film director. Theatre Born in Derby, Derbyshire, England, Dexter left school at the age of fourteen to serve in the British Army during the Second World War. Following the war, he began working as a stage actor before turning to producing and directing shows for repertory companies. In 1957, he was appointed Associate Director of the English Stage Company based at the Royal Court.
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Boris Shavyrin
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Boris Ivanovich Shavyrin was a Soviet artillery and rocket engineer who developed the first air-augmented rocket, Gnom, or Gnome , as well as many other Soviet mortars and rockets. He was the first Head and Chief Designer of KB Mashinostroyeniya.
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Emanuele Luigi Galizia
1830 - 1907 (77 years)
Emanuele Luigi Galizia was a Maltese architect and civil engineer, who designed many public buildings and several churches. He is regarded as "the principal Maltese architect throughout the second half of the nineteenth century".
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Giorgio Pullicino
1779 - 1851 (72 years)
Giorgio Pullicino was a Maltese painter, architect, and professor of drawing and architecture at the University of Malta. He is known for his harbour views painted in a number of media, and he is also considered to be one of the first neoclassical architects in Malta. He produced designs for a number of buildings, but the only structure which is definitely proven to have been designed by him is a monumental obelisk known as the Spencer Monument. However, several other buildings including the Monument to Sir Alexander Ball are widely attributed to him.
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Victor F. Tapson
#11064
Andrew D. Blann
#11065
Morton Lippmann
#11066
Charles Wellford Leavitt
1871 - 1928 (57 years)
Charles Wellford Leavitt was an American landscape architect, urban planner, and civil engineer who designed everything from elaborate gardens on Long Island, New York and New Jersey estates to federal parks in Cuba, hotels in Puerto Rico, plans of towns in Florida, New York and elsewhere. New York publisher Julius David Stern called Leavitt "a rare combination of engineer, artist, and diplomat", and the multi-faceted career chosen by Leavitt, veering between public and private commissions and embracing everything from hard-edged engineering to sensuous garden design, and calling for negotiat...
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John Thomson
1837 - 1921 (84 years)
John Thomson FRGS was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer, and traveller. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artefacts of eastern cultures. Upon returning home, his work among the street people of London cemented his reputation, and is regarded as a classic instance of social documentary which laid the foundations for photojournalism. He went on to become a portrait photographer of High Society in Mayfair, gaining the Royal Warrant in 1881.
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Enrique Seoane Ros
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Enrique Buenaventura Juan Seoane Ros was a Peruvian modernist architect of the 20th century. Early life Seoane was born in Lima on January 12, 1915, to parents Buenaventura Guillermo Seoane García and Rosario Ros Gutiérrez. He studied at the Colegio de La Inmaculada and followed architecture courses at the National School of Engineers, predecessor of the National University of Engineering .
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Thomas Arthur Rickard
1864 - 1953 (89 years)
T. A. Rickard , formally known as Thomas Arthur Rickard was born on 29 August 1864 in Italy. Rickard's parents were British, and he became a mining engineer practising in the United States, Europe and Australia. He was also a publisher and author on mine engineering subjects.
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Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was a Soviet and Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer and theatre administrator, who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with his colleague, Konstantin Stanislavski, in 1898.
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Bryant Fleming
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Bryant Fleming was an American architect and landscape architect. Early life Fleming was born on July 19, 1877, in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Cornell University in 1901, where he studied horticulture, architecture, architectural history, and art.
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Koichi Kawana
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Koichi Kawana was a post-war Japanese American garden designer, landscape architect and teacher. He designed gardens in San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Colorado, Chicago, Illinois, Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri. Some of his major works include the Seiwa-en Japanese Garden in the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden and a dry landscape garden at Sawtelle, Los Angeles. He designed the bonsai collection for the Pavilion of Japanese Art at LACMA in the 90s.
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John Benjamin Henck
1815 - 1903 (88 years)
John Benjamin Henck although educated as a classical scholar and graduating as valedictorian of the Harvard class of 1840 yet, during his career, transitioned to a practicing civil engineer. As an engineering educator, Henck required a strict knowledge of classical literature" and a "thorough and accurate knowledge of science". One of his notable students was Arthur M Wellington, author of The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways.
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Daryl E. Hooper
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
Daryl Egbert Hooper was an electronic engineer notable for pioneering engineering at La Trobe University and heading up the GEC Research Hirst Centre in the 1980s. He is also notable for his textbook on amplifier design.
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Mario Romañach
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Mario Romañach was a Cuban modernist architect, planner, and university professor. Biography Mario Romañach finished his higher studies at the University of Havana and, along with Max Borges Jr., Frank Martinez, Nicolás Quintana, Ricardo Porro, Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Emilio del Junco, was one of the architects students who participated in the "Burning of Vignola" event. They sought to rebel against the education system in force until then in Cuba. The event took place in the courtyard of the School of Architecture of the University of Havana in 1944, when a group of students and recen...
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Rudolf Wiegmann
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Ernst Gottfried Rudolf Wiegmann was a German painter, archaeologist, art historian, graphic artist and architect. He worked in the Classical style and, as a painter, is best known for his vedute. His wife, Marie Wiegmann, whom he married in 1841, was also a painter of some note.
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Henry Langley
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Henry Langley was a Canadian architect based in Toronto. He was active from 1854 to 1907. Among the first architects born and trained in Canada, he was a founding members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1880 and was instrumental in establishing the Ontario Association of Architects in 1889. A conservative in architectural design, he is primarily known for designing numerous churches in the Toronto area, although he designed many secular buildings as well including residential, commercial and public buildings. Langley designed 70 churches throughout Ontario. He was the first chair of ...
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Genrikh Graftio
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Genrikh Osipovich Graftio was a Russian and Soviet engineer credited as a pioneer of the hydroelectric station construction, as one of the founders of the GOELRO plan, and notable for the construction of the first hydroelectric stations in the Soviet Union, the Volkhov Hydroelectric Station in Volkhov and the Lower Svir Hydroelectric Station in Svirstroy.
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Alberto Cruz Montt
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Alberto Cruz Montt , was a Chilean architect and professor who was an exponent of the Neoclassical style. Early life Alberto Cruz Montt was son of Ramón Cruz Moreno and Eloísa Montt Montt. He was educated at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris.
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Albert Cassell
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Albert Irvin Cassell was a prominent mid-twentieth-century African-American architect in Washington, D.C., whose work shaped many academic communities in the United States. He designed buildings for Howard University in Washington D.C., Morgan State University in Baltimore, and Virginia Union University in Richmond. Cassell also designed and built civic structures for the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia.
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Arthur Bridgman Clark
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Arthur Bridgman Clark an American architect, printmaker, author, and professor, as well as the first mayor of Mayfield, California , and first head of Art and Architecture Department at Stanford University. He taught classes at Stanford University from 1893 until 1931.
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Klavdy Ippolitovich Shenfer
1885 - 1946 (61 years)
Claudius Ippolitovich Shenfer was a Soviet scientist in the field of Electrical engineering, professor, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1885 in the Radviliškis.
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Ottó Benedikt
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Ottó Benedikt was a Hungarian scientist in the field of Electrical engineering, professor, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1897 in the Budapest. After graduation from the age of 18, he fought on the fronts of the First World War.
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Andrew Taylor
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Sir Andrew Thomas Taylor, JP, RCA, FSA, FRIBA was a British architect and councillor. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and practised architecture in Scotland and London before emigrating to Montreal, Quebec, in 1883, where he designed many of the buildings of McGill University. He retired from architecture in 1904 and returned to London, where he served on London County Council from 1908 to 1926. He was knighted for his political services in 1926.
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Kenjiro Takayanagi
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Kenjiro Takayanagi was a Japanese engineer and a pioneer in the development of television. Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television".
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George Westinghouse
1846 - 1914 (68 years)
George Westinghouse Jr. was an American entrepreneur and engineer based in Pennsylvania who created the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry, receiving his first patent at the age of 19. Westinghouse saw the potential of using alternating current for electric power distribution in the early 1880s and put all his resources into developing and marketing it. This put Westinghouse's business in direct competition with Thomas Edison, who marketed direct current for electric power distribution. In 1911 Westinghouse received the American Institute of Electrical Engineers's ...
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Wunibald Deininger
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Wunibald Deininger was an Austrian architect and art teacher. Life and work His father , uncle and brother Theodor were all architects. His mother Ludmilla, née Schönfuss, was originally from Moravia.
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Francis Thompson
1808 - 1895 (87 years)
Francis Thompson was an English architect particularly well known for his railway work. Early life Thompson was born in Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, the second of seven children of George Thompson and his wife Elizabeth . George Thompson was a builder and the Suffolk county surveyor, descended from a family of farmers in the nearby village of Bredfield. Francis' grandfather Jacob was also a builder and two of his uncles were architects. Thompson attended Woodbridge Grammar School and his family's background instilled him with an interest in architecture.
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Guglielmo Marconi
1874 - 1937 (63 years)
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
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Mogens Koch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Mogens Koch was a Danish architect and furniture designer and, from 1950 to 1968, a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Early life and education Mogens Koch was Koch in the Frederiksberg district of Copenhagen. He attended the architecture school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and between 1925 and 1932 worked for Carl Petersen, Ivar Bentsen and Kaare Klint, where he was trained in the Danish functional tradition.
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Gudmund Nyeland Brandt
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Gudmund Nyeland Brandt was a Danish landscape architect who was internationally renowned. Career Brandt was born at Frederiksberg, Denmark. His father, Peter Christoffer Brandt, was a gardener, bank manager and parish bailiff in Ordrup, Denmark. His mother was Anna Kirstine Nyeland. He graduated from Ordrup Gymnasium 1897 and earned a M.A. in Philosophy the following year. Then he was trained as a gardener by trade gardener N. Jensen, Valby 1899–1901, was in England 1901-02 and at the Jardin des plantes, Paris 1902. He came to Germany in 1903 and was later in Belgium.
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Alfred Neumann
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Alfred Neumann was an Austrian-born Israeli architect known for his modernist buildings. Biography Alfred Neumann was born in Vienna to Siegmund Neumann and Hermina Hickl. In 1910, Neumann's family moved to Brünn , for his father's job at a joinery workshop. Neumann attended the German Building Technical College. Following his graduation, Neumann served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. After the war, he returned to his architecture studies, enrolling at the German Technical University in Brno. In 1922, Neumann returned to Vienna, where he attended Architecture College of the Arts Academy in Vienna, studying under Peter Behrens.
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Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne was a French engineer and mathematician. He founded the field of nomography, the graphic computation of algebraic equations, on charts which he called nomogram. Biography Philbert-Maurice Ocagne was born in Paris on 25 March 1862. He attended high school at the Lycée Fontanges school in Paris, and studied at Chaptal college. In 1877, he published his first mathematical work. In 1880, he entered the École Polytechnique. He published many articles on math. Starting in 1885, he served for six years as engineer, supporting waterworks projects in Rochefort and Cherbourg, then worked at Seine-et-Oise, at the residence of Pontoise.
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B. R. Panthulu
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Budaguru Ramakrishnaiah Panthulu was an Indian film director, producer and actor. He is best known for directing films in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. His most popular films are Karnan, Veerapandiya Kattabomman, Sri Krishnadevaraya, School Master and Kittur Channamma, B. R. Panthulu, is a successful actor and converted Ma. Po. Si.'s biographic works Veerapandiya Kattabomman and Kappalottiya Thamizhan to celluloid.
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George Checkley
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
George Checkley was a New Zealand-born architect and academic, who predominantly worked in the UK. He is known for being among the architects to introduce Modernist buildings to the UK, particularly with two of his houses in Cambridge – the White House and Thurso, now known as Willow House . Willow House has been described as "close to being a text-book demonstration of Le Corbusier's architectural principles". After teaching at the University of Cambridge's School of Architecture , Checkley successively headed the Schools of Architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic and the University of N...
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Peeter Tarvas
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Peeter Tarvas was an Estonian architect and professor. From 1935 until 1940, he studied at Brno University of Technology. From 1944 until 1957, he worked at the architectural bureau Eesti Projekt. In 1949, he was awarded the title of associate professor by a decision of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the USSR. During the period between 1945 and 1954, he taught at the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute, and from 1947 until in 1987, he was a professor at the Estonian SSR State Art Institute faculty . Tarvas published articles in Sirp ...
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Brassaï
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Brassaï was a Hungarian–French photographer, sculptor, medalist, writer, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the world wars.
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Stephen Butterworth
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Stephen Butterworth was a British physicist who invented the filter that bears his name, a class of electrical circuits that separates electrical signals of different frequencies. Biography Stephen Butterworth was born on 11 August 1885 in Rochdale, Lancashire, England . He was the son of Alexander Butterworth, a postman, and Elizabeth . He was the second of four children. In 1904, he entered the Victoria University of Manchester, from which he received, in 1907, both a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and a teacher's certificate . In 1908 he received a Master of Science degree in physics.
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Hermann Billing
1867 - 1946 (79 years)
Hermann Billing was a German Art Nouveau architect and designer. He attended high school, Kunstgewerbeschule and architectural college, but completed none of them. Funded by his wealthy first wife, he started his work by taking part in competitions. He gained reputation for his avantgarde ideas and subsequently contracts for public buildings. After 1920, he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe and the University of Technology.
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Henry Bovey
1852 - 1912 (60 years)
Henry Taylor Bovey, LLD, DCL, FRS was an engineering science academic. He was the first Rector of Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Early life Henry Bovey was born in 1852 in Devon. He was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1873. He was subsequently elected a Fellow of the college.
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