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,
#11151
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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Jaap Bakema
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Jacob Berend "Jaap" Bakema was a Dutch modernist architect, notable for design of public housing and involvement in the reconstruction of Rotterdam after the Second World War. Born in Groningen, Bakema studied at the Groningen Higher Technical College and the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, where he studied among others with Mart Stam. In 1946 he began attending meetings of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, became its Secretary in 1955, and was a core member of its offshoot Team 10.
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Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach
1656 - 1723 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was an Austrian architect, sculptor, engraver, and architectural historian whose Baroque architecture profoundly influenced and shaped the tastes of the Habsburg Empire. His influential book A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture was one of the first and most popular comparative studies of world architecture. His major works include Schönbrunn Palace, Karlskirche, and the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and Schloss Klessheim, Holy Trinity Church, and the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg.
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Jules Hardouin-Mansart
1646 - 1708 (62 years)
Jules Hardouin-Mansart was a French Baroque architect and builder whose major work included the Place des Victoires ; Place Vendôme ; the domed chapel of Les Invalides , and the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles. His monumental work was designed to glorify the reign of Louis XIV of France.
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Pierre Cuypers
1827 - 1921 (94 years)
Petrus Josephus Hubertus "Pierre" Cuypers was a Dutch architect. His name is most frequently associated with the Amsterdam Central Station and the Rijksmuseum , both in Amsterdam. More representative for his oeuvre, however, are numerous churches, of which he designed more than 100. Moreover, he restored many monuments.
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Laurynas Gucevičius
1753 - 1798 (45 years)
Laurynas Gucevičius was an 18th-century architect from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and all of his designs were built there. In his youth he travelled to Italy and Paris and other countries in Western Europe, where he studied architecture under the notable contemporary neo-classical French architects, Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Later he was appointed professor at the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius, the predecessor of the University of Vilnius. Among the best known of his works are the Vilnius Cathedral, the Vilnius Town Hall and the summer palace of bishops in Verkiai. Th...
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Friedrich Zander
1887 - 1933 (46 years)
Georg Arthur Constantin Friedrich Zander , was a Baltic German pioneer of rocketry and spaceflight in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He designed the first liquid-fueled rocket to be launched in the Soviet Union, GIRD-X, and made many important theoretical contributions to the road to space.
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Otto Krause
1856 - 1920 (64 years)
Otto Krause was an Argentine engineer and educator. Early life Krause was born in the Buenos Aires Province town of Chivilcoy to Leopoldina and Carl August Krause, both German Argentine immigrants arrived in 1851. Tending his farm with implements he brought from Germany, Carl Krause instilled an interest in machinery to his five children, though the family eventually relocated to Buenos Aires in 1870. Otto subsequently finished his secondary school studies at the prestigious Buenos Aires National College, a public college preparatory school.
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Lazare Carnot
1753 - 1823 (70 years)
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription , were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.
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Samuel Jefferson Mason
1921 - 1974 (53 years)
Samuel Jefferson Mason was an American electronics engineer. Mason's invariant and Mason's rule are named after him. He was born in New York City, but he grew up in a small town in New Jersey. It was so small, in fact, that it only had a population of 26. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1942, and after graduation, he joined the Antenna Group of MIT Radiation Laboratory as a staff member. Mason went on to earn his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1947 and 1952, respectively. After World War II, the Radiation Laboratory was renamed the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he became the associate director in 1967.
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Luigi Vanvitelli
1700 - 1773 (73 years)
Luigi Vanvitelli , known in Dutch as , was an Italian architect and painter. The most prominent 18th-century architect of Italy, he practised a sober classicising academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism.
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Gustav Niemann
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Gustav Niemann was a mechanical engineering professor who is regarded as an expert in machine elements. Biography Niemann studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt from 1919 to 1923. In 1928 he was promoted at the Technische Hochschule Berlin with the doctoral dissertation Über Wippkrane mit wagrechtem Lastwippweg . He taught at the Braunschweig University of Technology from 1934 to 1950, and at the Technische Universität München from 1951 to 1968. He was a recipient of the Grashof medal from the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure and the E. P. Connell medal from the Ame...
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Nicholas Roerich
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , better known as Nicholas Roerich , was a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.
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Joseph Paxton
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Sir Joseph Paxton was an English gardener, architect, engineer and Member of Parliament, best known for designing the Crystal Palace and for cultivating the Cavendish banana, the most consumed banana in the Western world.
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William Robert Ware
1832 - 1915 (83 years)
William Robert Ware , born in Cambridge, Massachusetts into a family of the Unitarian clergy, was an American architect, author, and founder of two important American architectural schools. He received his own professional education at Milton Academy, Harvard College and Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In 1859, he began working for Richard Morris Hunt, the founder of the first American architectural school, the AIA, and the first American to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Soon afterward Ware formed a partnership with the civil engineer Edward S. Philbrick, Philbrick and Ware, a...
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Hermann Ende
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Hermann Gustav Louis Ende was a German architect noted for his work in Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Biography Ende was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, Province of Brandenburg,Prussia . In 1836 he moved with family to Berlin, where, after graduating from the Köllnisches Gymnasium in 1852, he studied architecture at the Bauakademie, a Berlin architectural school housed in what is considered one of the forerunners of modern architecture due to its theretofore uncommon use of red brick and a relatively streamlined façade. His studies were interrupted for a year by military service, and by another year spent travelling abroad with his friend Wilhelm Böckmann.
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Berenice Abbott
1898 - 1991 (93 years)
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
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Louis Le Vau
1613 - 1670 (57 years)
Louis Le Vau was a French Baroque architect, who worked for Louis XIV of France. He was an architect that helped develop the French Classical style in the 17th century. Early life and career Born Louis Le Veau, he was the son of Louis Le Veau , a stonemason, who was active in Paris. His younger brother François Le Vau also became an architect. The father and his two sons worked together in the 1630s and 1640s. The two brothers later changed the spelling of their surname from "Le Veau" to "Le Vau" to avoid its association with the French word veau .
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Philipp Forchheimer
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Philipp Forchheimer was an Austrian engineer, a pioneer in the field of civil engineering and practical hydraulics, who also contributed to the archaeological study of Byzantine water supply systems. He was professor in Istanbul, Aachen and Graz.
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Egon Eiermann
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Egon Eiermann was one of Germany's most prominent architects in the second half of the 20th century. He was also a furniture designer. From 1947, he was Professor for architecture at the Technical University of Karlsruhe.
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George B. Post
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
George Browne Post was an American architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition. Active from 1869 almost until his death, he was recognized as a master of several prominent contemporary American architectural genres, and instrumental in the birth of the skyscraper.
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Francisco J. Serrano
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Francisco J. Serrano y Alvarez de la Rosa was a Mexican civil engineer and architect. Serrano studied civil engineering and afterwards architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , where later taught as professor of civil engineering and architecture, and researched influences of climatic phenomenons on architecture. His son J. Francisco Serrano Cacho became also a notable architect.
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Beatrix Farrand
1872 - 1959 (87 years)
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden , and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
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Gilmore David Clarke
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Gilmore David Clarke was an American civil engineer and landscape architect who designed many parks and public spaces in and around New York City. Biography Born in New York, Clarke went to Cornell University to study landscape architecture and civil engineering, graduating in 1913 with a B.S. degree. After World War I, during which he served as an engineer in the U.S. Army, he served on several architectural commissions, ranging from local to federal level. Amongst others, he was a member of the Architectural Advisory Board for the U.S. Capitol and of the New York State Council of Parks. He ...
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Carlo Maderno
1556 - 1629 (73 years)
Carlo Maderno was an Italian architect, born in today's Ticino, who is remembered as one of the fathers of Baroque architecture. His façades of Santa Susanna, St. Peter's Basilica and Sant'Andrea della Valle were of key importance in the evolution of the Italian Baroque. He is often referred to as the brother of sculptor Stefano Maderno, but this is not universally agreed upon.
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Clemens Holzmeister
1886 - 1983 (97 years)
Clemens Holzmeister was a prominent Austrian architect and stage designer of the early twentieth century. The Austrian Academy of Fine Arts listed his life's work as containing 673 projects. He was the father of Judith Holzmeister.
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Aston Webb
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Sir Aston Webb, was a British architect who designed the principal facade of Buckingham Palace and the main building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, among other major works around England, many of them in partnership with Ingress Bell. He was President of the Royal Academy from 1919 to 1924. He was also the founding Chairman of the London Society.
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Herbert A. Wagner
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Herbert Alois Wagner was an Austrian scientist who developed numerous innovations in the fields of aerodynamics, aircraft structures and guided weapons. He is most famous for Wagner's function describing unsteady lift on wings and developing the Henschel Hs 293 glide bomb.
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