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,
#11101
Willy Messerschmitt
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Wilhelm Emil "Willy" Messerschmitt was a German aircraft designer and manufacturer. In 1934, in collaboration with Walter Rethel, he designed the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which became the most important fighter aircraft in the Luftwaffe as Germany rearmed prior to World War II. It remains the second most-produced warplane in history, with some 34,000 built, behind the Soviet Ilyushin Il-2. Another Messerschmitt aircraft, first called "Bf 109R", purpose-built for record setting, but later redesignated Messerschmitt Me 209, broke the absolute world airspeed record and held the world speed record for propeller-driven aircraft until 1969.
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Charles Holden
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Charles Henry Holden was an English architect best known for designing many London Underground stations during the 1920s and 1930s, for Bristol Central Library, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London's headquarters at 55 Broadway and for the University of London's Senate House. He created many war cemeteries in Belgium and northern France for the Imperial War Graves Commission.
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Ange-Jacques Gabriel
1698 - 1782 (84 years)
Ange-Jacques Gabriel was the principal architect of King Louis XV of France. His major works included the Place de la Concorde, the École Militaire, and the Petit Trianon and opera theater at the Palace of Versailles. His style was a careful balance between French Baroque architecture and French neoclassicism.
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Filippo Juvarra
1678 - 1736 (58 years)
Filippo Juvarra was an Italian architect, scenographer, engraver and goldsmith. He was active in a late-Baroque architecture style, working primarily in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Biography Juvarra was born in Messina, Sicily, to a family of goldsmiths and engravers. After spending his formative years with his family in Sicily where he designed Messina's festive settings for the coronation of Philip V of Spain and Sicily , Juvarra moved to Rome in 1704. There he studied architecture with Carlo and Francesco Fontana.
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Bertolt Brecht
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht , known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the .
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Carl Ludvig Engel
1778 - 1840 (62 years)
Carl Ludvig Engel, or Johann Carl Ludwig Engel , was a German architect whose most noted work can be found in Helsinki, which he helped rebuild. His works include most of the buildings around the capital's monumental centre, the Senate Square and the buildings surrounding it. The buildings are Helsinki Cathedral, The Senate , the Helsinki City Hall, and the library and the main building of Helsinki University.
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Welton Becket
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Welton David Becket was an American modern architect who designed many buildings in Los Angeles, California. Biography Becket was born in Seattle, Washington and graduated from the University of Washington program in Architecture in 1927 with a Bachelor of Architecture degree .
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Ernest Flagg
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
Ernest Flagg was an American architect in the Beaux-Arts style. He was also an advocate for urban reform and architecture's social responsibility. Early life and education Flagg was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father Jared Bradley Flagg was an Episcopal priest and a notable painter. Ernest left school at 15 to work as an office boy on Wall Street. After working with his father and brothers in real estate for a few years, he designed duplex apartment plans in 1880 with the architect Philip Gengembre Hubert, for the co-operative apartment buildings Hubert was known.
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John Milne
1850 - 1913 (63 years)
John Milne was a British geologist and mining engineer who worked on a horizontal seismograph. Biography Milne was born in Liverpool, England, the only child of John Milne of Milnrow, and at first raised in Tunshill and later moved to Richmond, London, and then in 1895 to the Isle of Wight with his wife. He was educated at King's College London and the Royal School of Mines.
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Heinrich Tessenow
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Heinrich Tessenow was a German architect, professor, and urban planner active in the Weimar era. Biography Tessenow is considered together with Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens, Fritz Höger, Ernst May, Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe as one of the most important personalities of the architectural German panorama during the time of the Weimar Republic.
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James Wyatt
1746 - 1813 (67 years)
James Wyatt was an English architect, a rival of Robert Adam in the neoclassical and neo-Gothic styles. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1785 and was its president from 1805 to 1806. Early life Wyatt was born on 3 August 1746 at Weeford, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, England.
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Giuseppe Gabrielli
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Giuseppe Gabrielli was an Italian aeronautics engineer. He is famous as the designer of numerous Italian military aircraft, including the Fiat G.50 Freccia and G.55 World War II fighters. Biography Giuseppe Gabrielli was born in Caltanissetta, Sicily, and studied at the Politecnico di Torino and at the Technische Hochschule of Aachen, Germany under Theodore von Kármán. Gabrielli began his work as designer at Piaggio, but was soon called to FIAT by Giovanni Agnelli to lead his aeronautics section.
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Mimar Kemaleddin
1870 - 1927 (57 years)
Ahmed Kemaleddin , widely known as Mimar Kemaleddin was a renowned Turkish architect during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. He was among the pioneers of the first national architectural movement, a type of Ottoman Revivalism. His lifetime saw intense and important changes for Turkish history and culture.
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Elisha Gray
1835 - 1901 (66 years)
Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him. Although Gray had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years previously, Bell's telephone patent was upheld in numerous court decisions.
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Raphael Soriano
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Raphael S. Soriano, FAIA, was an architect and educator, who helped define a period of 20th-century architecture that came to be known as Mid-century modern. He pioneered the use of modular prefabricated steel and aluminum structures in residential and commercial design and construction.
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Charles Robert Cockerell
1788 - 1863 (75 years)
Charles Robert Cockerell was an English architect, archaeologist, and writer. He studied architecture under Robert Smirke. He went on an extended Grand Tour lasting seven years, mainly spent in Greece. He was involved in major archaeological discoveries while in Greece. On returning to London, he set up a successful architectural practice. Appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, he served in that position between 1839 and 1859. He wrote many articles and books on both archaeology and architecture. In 1848, he became the first recipient of the Royal Gold Medal.
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Charles Bulfinch
1763 - 1844 (81 years)
Charles Bulfinch was an early American architect, and has been regarded by many as the first American-born professional architect to practice. Life Bulfinch split his career between his native Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., where he served as Commissioner of Public Building and built the intermediate United States Capitol rotunda and dome. His works are notable for their simplicity, balance, and good taste, and as the origin of a distinctive Federal style of classical domes, columns, and ornament that dominated early 19th-century American architecture.
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Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola
1507 - 1573 (66 years)
Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola , often simply called Vignola, was one of the great Italian architects of 16th century Mannerism. His two great masterpieces are the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the Jesuits' Church of the Gesù in Rome. The three architects who spread the Italian Renaissance style throughout Western Europe are Vignola, Serlio and Palladio. He is often considered the most important architect in Rome in the Mannerist era.
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Wells Coates
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Wells Wintemute Coates OBE was an architect, designer and writer. He was, for most of his life, an expatriate Canadian who is best known for his work in England, the most notable of which is the Modernist block of flats known as the Isokon building in Hampstead, London.
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A. Quincy Jones
1913 - 1979 (66 years)
Archibald Quincy Jones was a Los Angeles-based architect and educator known for innovative buildings in the modernist style and for urban planning that pioneered the use of greenbeltss and green design.
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Martin Wagner
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Martin Wagner was a German architect, city planner, and author, best known as the driving force behind the construction of modernist housing projects in interwar Berlin. Germany Tall, angular, loyally Socialist, and uncompromising in his opinions, Wagner was educated at the Technical University of Berlin and worked as a draftsman in the office of planner Hermann Muthesius, before being appointed the City Building Commissioner for Schöneberg in 1918 .
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William Burn
1789 - 1870 (81 years)
William Burn was a Scottish architect. He received major commissions from the age of 20 until his death at 81. He built in many styles and was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial Revival, often referred to as the golden age of Scottish architecture.
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Aleister Crowley
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, philosopher, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
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Serge Chermayeff
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Serge Ivan Chermayeff was a Russian-born British architect, industrial designer, writer, and co-founder of several architectural societies, including the American Society of Planners and Architects.
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John Vanbrugh
1664 - 1726 (62 years)
Sir John Vanbrugh was an English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife , which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy. He was knighted in 1714.
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Robert Smirke
1780 - 1867 (87 years)
Sir Robert Smirke was an English architect, one of the leaders of Greek Revival architecture, though he also used other architectural styles. As architect to the Board of Works, he designed several major public buildings, including the main block and façade of the British Museum. He was a pioneer of the use of concrete foundations.
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Robert Stephenson
1803 - 1859 (56 years)
Robert Stephenson FRS HFRSE FRSA DCL was an English civil engineer and designer of locomotives. The only son of George Stephenson, the "Father of Railways", he built on the achievements of his father. Robert has been called the greatest engineer of the 19th century.
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Johann Friedrich Höger
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Johann Friedrich Höger was a German architect from Bekenreihe, Steinburg, Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany. Although never qualified as an architect, he became known for his Brick Expressionist style of architecture.
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Franz Grashof
1826 - 1893 (67 years)
Franz Grashof was a German engineer. He was a professor of Applied Mechanics at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe. Biography Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, as the son of Elisabeth Brüggemann and Karl Grashof, who taught at an upper secondary school, Franz Grashof visited the elementary and lower secondary school in Düsseldorf and the industrial school in Hagen.
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Adolf Meyer
1881 - 1929 (48 years)
Adolf Meyer was a German architect. A student and employee of both Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, Meyer became the office boss of the firm of Walter Gropius around 1915 and a full partner afterwards. In 1919, Gropius appointed Meyer as a master at the Bauhaus, where he taught work drawing and construction technique. Meyer is also credited as co-designer of the Gropius entry for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition.
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Frank Bunker Gilbreth
1868 - 1924 (56 years)
Frank Bunker Gilbreth was an American engineer, consultant, and author known as an early advocate of scientific management and a pioneer of time and motion study, and is perhaps best known as the father and central figure of Cheaper by the Dozen.
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Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was an American landscape architect and city planner known for his wildlife conservation efforts. He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, and worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. He gained national recognition by filling in for his father on the Park Improvement Commission for the District of Columbia beginning in 1901, and by contributing to the famous McMillan Commission Plan for redesigning Washington according to a revised version of the original L’Enfant plan. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Fall...
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Drago Ibler
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Drago Ibler was a Croatian architect and pedagogue. His style can be described as pure simplicity and functional architecture. Ibler was born in Zagreb. He gained his diploma in architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. In 1921, he joined the group around Le Corbusier and L'Esprit Nouveau in Paris. He then studied from 1922 to 1924 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Berlin, in the studio of German architect Hans Poelzig which influenced his work during 1920s.
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Andrey Kryachkov
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Andrey Dmitriyevich Kryachkov was a Russian and Soviet architect. Biography Kryachkov was a graduate of St. Petersburg institute of civil engineering. He was a leading architect in Novosibirsk in the first half of the 20th century.
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Robert Fulton
1765 - 1815 (50 years)
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the . In 1807, that steamboat traveled on the Hudson River with passengers from New York City to Albany and back again, a round trip of , in 62 hours. The success of his steamboat changed river traffic and trade on major American rivers.
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Giulio Romano
1499 - 1546 (47 years)
Giulio Pippi , known as Giulio Romano , was an Italian painter and architect. He was a pupil of Raphael, and his stylistic deviations from High Renaissance classicism help define the sixteenth-century style known as Mannerism. Giulio's drawings have long been treasured by collectors; contemporary prints of them engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi were a significant contribution to the spread of sixteenth-century Italian style throughout Europe.
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Ithiel Town
1784 - 1844 (60 years)
Ithiel Town was an American architect and civil engineer. One of the first generation of professional architects in the United States, Town made significant contributions to American architecture in the first half of the 19th century. His work, in the Federal and revivalist Greek and Gothic revival architectural styles, was influential and widely copied.
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Frontinus
30 - 103 (73 years)
Sextus Julius Frontinus was a prominent Roman civil engineer, author, soldier and senator of the late 1st century AD. He was a successful general under Domitian, commanding forces in Roman Britain, and on the Rhine and Danube frontiers. A novus homo, he was consul three times. Frontinus ably discharged several important administrative duties for Nerva and Trajan. However, he is best known to the post-Classical world as an author of technical treatises, especially De aquaeductu, dealing with the aqueducts of Rome.
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Isak Gustaf Clason
1856 - 1930 (74 years)
Isak Gustaf Clason was a Swedish architect. Biography Clason studied engineering and later architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he was a student of Albert Theodor Gellerstedt , and later at the architectural school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, at the time headed by Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander . He received the royal medal in 1881 and studied abroad 1883-1886. He was elected member of the Academy of Arts in 1889, appointed professor of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1889 and became first surveyor in the Chief Surveyor's Office in 1904.
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Ven Te Chow
1919 - 1981 (62 years)
Ven Te Chow , was a Chinese-American engineer. He was a widely recognized hydrologist and hydraulic engineer, acclaimed for his contributions to hydrology and water resources development. He was a professor of Civil and Hydrosystems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. degree in civil engineering from the National Chiao Tung University in 1940, his M.S. degree in engineering mechanics from Pennsylvania State University in 1948, and his Ph.D. degree in hydraulic engineering from the University of Illinois in 1950.
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Theophil Hansen
1813 - 1891 (78 years)
Baron Theophil Edvard von Hansen was a Danish architect who later became an Austriann citizen. He became particularly well known for his buildings and structures in Athens and Vienna, and is considered an outstanding representative of Neoclassicism and Historicism.
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Ernesto Nathan Rogers
1909 - 1969 (60 years)
Ernesto Nathan Rogers was an Italian architect, writer and educator. Biography Born in Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he graduated from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 1932. He is the uncle of the renowned English-Italian architect Richard Rogers.
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Ivan Meštrović
1883 - 1962 (79 years)
Ivan Meštrović was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's Stone Workshop in Split and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he was formed under the influence of the Secession. He traveled throughout Europe and studied the works of ancient and Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, and French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol. He was the initiator of the national-romantic group Medulić . During the First World War, he lived in emigration.
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Harold Locke Hazen
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Harold Locke Hazen was an American electrical engineer. He contributed to the theory of servomechanisms and feedback control systems. In 1924 under the lead of Vannevar Bush, Hazen and his fellow undergraduate Hugh H. Spencer built a prototype AC network analyzer, a special-purpose analog computer for solving problems in interconnected AC power systems. Hazen also worked with Bush over twenty years on such projects as the mechanical differential analyzer. This early work, and the binary algebra used, would be foundational to the emergence of electromechanical and digital computers in later d...
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Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet
1817 - 1898 (81 years)
Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet, KCMG, LLD, FRSE was an English civil engineer specialising in the construction of railways and railway infrastructure. In the 1850s and 1860s, he was engineer for the world's first underground railway, London's Metropolitan Railway, built by the "cut-and-cover" method under city streets. In the 1880s, he was chief engineer for the Forth Bridge, which opened in 1890. Fowler's was a long and eminent career, spanning most of the 19th century's railway expansion, and he was engineer, adviser or consultant to many British and foreign railway companies and governments....
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William Rutherford Mead
1846 - 1928 (82 years)
William Rutherford Mead was an American architect who was the "Center of the Office" of McKim, Mead, and White, a noted Gilded Age architectural firm. The firm's other founding partners were Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White .
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Franz Heinrich Schwechten
1841 - 1924 (83 years)
Franz Heinrich Schwechten was one of the most famous German architects of the Wilhelmine era, and contributed to the development of historicist architecture. Life Schwechten was born in Cologne, the son of a district court judge. He attended Gymnasium, taking his Abitur in 1860, and went on to work as an apprentice of master builder Julius Carl Raschdorff, who would later design the new Berlin Cathedral. In 1861, Schwechten enrolled in the Bauakademie in Berlin, where he studied under Karl Bötticher and Friedrich Adler. During a practical training period following the completion of his studi...
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Richard Upjohn
1802 - 1878 (76 years)
Richard Upjohn was a British-born American architect who emigrated to the United States and became most famous for his Gothic Revival churches. He was partially responsible for launching the movement to popularity in the United States. Upjohn also did extensive work in and helped to popularize the Italianate style. He was a founder and the first president of the American Institute of Architects. His son, Richard Michell Upjohn, , was also a well-known architect and served as a partner in his continued architectural firm in New York.
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Marc Isambard Brunel
1769 - 1849 (80 years)
Sir Marc Isambard Brunel was a French-British engineer who is most famous for the work he did in Britain. He constructed the Thames Tunnel and was the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Born in France, Brunel fled to the United States during the French Revolution. In 1796, he was appointed Chief Engineer of New York City. He moved to London in 1799, where he married Sophia Kingdom. In addition to the construction of the Thames Tunnel, his work as a mechanical engineer included the design of machinery to automate the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy.
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Pyotr Baranovsky
1892 - 1984 (92 years)
Pyotr Dmitrievich Baranovsky was a Russian architect, preservationist and restorator who reconstructed many ancient buildings in the Soviet Union. He is credited with saving Saint Basil's Cathedral from destruction in the early 1930s, founding and managing the Kolomenskoye and Andrei Rublev museums, and developing modern restoration technologies.
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