Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#11201

Katie Atkinson

Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.

#11202

Luciano Orlando

1887 - 1915 (28 years)

Luciano Orlando was an Italian mathematician and military engineer. Biography Orlando received in 1903 his laurea from the University of Messina, where he was a student of Bagnera and Marcolongo. After a year of graduate study at the University of Pisa, he became an assistant and libero docente at the University of Messina. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto superiore di Magistero and at the Aeronautical School of Engineering of the Sapienza University of Rome. He took part in some university competitions but was unsuccessful and when, in 1915...

#11203

Louis Conrad Rosenberg

1890 - 1983 (93 years)

Louis Conrad Rosenberg , was an American artist, architect, author, and educator active between 1914 and 1966 known for his precise staging and rendering of architectural scenes in Europe and the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

#11204

Joseph Henry Keenan

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Joseph Henry Keenan was an American thermodynamicist and mechanical engineer noted for his work in the calculation of steam tables, research in jet-rocket propulsion, and his work in furthering the development in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics in the mid 20th century.

#11205

Comfort A. Adams

Comfort A. Adams

1868 - 1958 (90 years)

Comfort Avery Adams was an American electrical engineer who as a student helped Albert A. Michelson with the Michelson–Morley experiment , which was later viewed as confirming the special relativity theory of Albert Einstein . He was a recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal and AIEE Lamme Medal.

#11206

Charles Stark Draper

1901 - 1987 (86 years)

Charles Stark "Doc" Draper was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, later renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which made the Apollo Moon landingss possible through the Apollo Guidance Computer it designed for NASA.

#11207

Hakaru Masumoto

Hakaru Masumoto

1895 - 1987 (92 years)

Hakaru Masumoto was a pioneer in metal and alloy research. He discovered numerous superior and unique alloys, and contributed to improving the performance of precision machinery. A student of Kotaro Honda, Masumoto developed a magnetic metal powder Sendust in 1936, and was the winner of the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy in 1946.

#11208

Robert Franklin Mehl

1898 - 1976 (78 years)

Robert Franklin Mehl was an American metallurgist. Mehl was noted for transforming of nineteenth-century metallurgy into the modern materials science. He was the founder and the head of a division of Physical metallurgy at the Naval Research Laboratory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers established a gold medal award in his name in 1973.

#11209

Ernst Guillemin

1898 - 1970 (72 years)

Ernst Adolph Guillemin was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent his career extending the art and science of linear network analysis and synthesis. His nephew Victor Guillemin is a math professor at MIT, his nephew Robert Charles Guillemin was a sidewalk artist, his great-niece Karen Guillemin is a biology professor at the University of Oregon, and his granddaughter Mary Elizabeth Meyerand is a Medical Physics Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

#11210

William Littell Everitt

William Littell Everitt

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

William Littell Everitt was a noted American electrical engineer, educator, and founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1933. He was adviser of numerous outstanding scientists at OSU including Karl Spangenberg, and Nelson Wax. His PhD adviser was Frederic Columbus Blake.

#11211

Bill Wittrick

1922 - 1986 (64 years)

Professor William Henry Wittrick FAA FRS was a British engineer and academic who spent 20 years in Australia, including 10 years as Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Sydney . He was Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Birmingham , and Beale Professor of Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham .

#11212

Rufus Oldenburger

1908 - 1969 (61 years)

Rufus Oldenburger was an American mathematician and mechanical engineer. Education and career Oldenburger received an A.B. degree from the University of Chicago in 1928, a master's degree in mathematics in 1930, and a Ph.D. in 1934. After teaching mathematics at the University of Michigan, at the Case Institute of Technology, at Illinois Institute of Technology, and at DePaul University, he changed the focus of his research from pure mathematics to mechanical engineering and automatic control. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1936 at Oslo. For the a...

#11213

George Roger Clemo

1889 - 1983 (94 years)

George Roger Clemo FRS was a British organic chemist. He was born in Slapton, Devon, the eldest son of farmer George and Blanche Ellen Clemo. He attended Kingsbridge Grammar School and went on to study science at the Royal Albert Memorial College Exeter, a forerunner of Exeter University, gaining a Bachelor of Science in 1910. He then commenced training to be a teacher and in 1911 was appointed deputy master at Penzance County School. In 1916, as part of the war effort, he joined the laboratory of William Henry Perkin, Jr. to work on dyestuffs. In 1922 he entered Queen's College, Oxford and gained an Oxford B.Sc.

#11214

Edward Percy Stebbing

1872 - 1960 (88 years)

Edward Percy Stebbing FRSE FRGS FZS was a pioneering English forester and forest entomologist in India. He was among the first to warn of desertification and desiccation and wrote on "The encroaching Sahara".

#11215

Earle Buckingham

1887 - 1978 (91 years)

Earle Buckingham was an American mechanical engineer and pioneer in the theory of gears. Buckingham was one of the founders of the theory of gearing and gear design and made significant contributions to this area. His monographs gained him international recognition in addition to the great respect he had already earned in English-speaking countries.

#11216

Stephen Timoshenko

Stephen Timoshenko

1878 - 1972 (94 years)

Stepan Prokopovich Timoshenko , later known as Stephen Timoshenko, was an ethnic Ukrainian, citizen of the Russian Empire and later, an American engineer and academician. He is considered to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. An inventor and one of the pioneering mechanical engineers at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Timoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in the Russi...

#11217

Nils Otto Myklestad

Nils Otto Myklestad

1909 - 1972 (63 years)

Nils Otto Myklestad was an American mechanical engineer and engineering professor. An authority on mechanical vibration, he was employed by a number of important US engineering firms and served on the faculty of several major engineering universities. Myklestad made significant contributions to both engineering practice and engineering education, publishing a number of widely influential technical journal papers and textbooks. He also was granted five US patents during his career.

#11218

Kaoru Ishikawa

1915 - 1989 (74 years)

was a Japanese organizational theorist and a professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo who was noted for his quality management innovations. He is considered a key figure in the development of quality initiatives in Japan, particularly the quality circle. He is best known outside Japan for the Ishikawa or cause and effect diagram , often used in the analysis of industrial processes.

#11219

Forest Baskett

Forest Baskett is an American venture capitalist, computer scientist and former professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates. Baskett designed the operating system for the original Cray-1 supercomputer, was an original pioneer of Very Large Scale Integration, and co-introduced the eponymous BCMP networks.

#11220

Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff

1897 - 1992 (95 years)

Sergei Alexander Schelkunoff , who published as S. A. Schelkunoff, was a distinguished mathematician, engineer and electromagnetism theorist who made noted contributions to antenna theory. Biography Schelkunoff was born in Samara, Russia in 1897, attended the University of Moscow before being drafted in 1917. He crossed Siberia into Manchuria and then Japan before settling in Seattle in 1921. There he received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from the State College of Washington, now Washington State University, and in 1928 received his Ph.D. from Columbia University for his diss...

#11221

William Grey Walter

William Grey Walter

1910 - 1977 (67 years)

William Grey Walter was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the only child of Minerva Lucrezia Hardy , an American journalist and Karl Wilhelm Walter , a British journalist who was working on the Kansas City Star at the time. His parents had met and married in Italy, and during the First World War the family moved from to Britain. Walter's ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to Engl...

#11222

Geoffrey Raynor

1913 - 1983 (70 years)

Geoffrey Vincent Raynor FRS was an English metallurgist and university academic. Life Raynor was educated at Nottingham High School before studying Chemistry at Keble College, Oxford, obtaining a first-class degree in 1936. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Oxford, working with William Hume-Rothery, and carried out metallurgical research for the Ministry of Supply and Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War. In 1945, he moved to the University of Birmingham as a research fellow, with the course that he taught in structural and theoretical metallurgy becoming "the forerunner for the development of metallurgical teaching all over the world".

#11223

Lan Jen Chu

1913 - 1973 (60 years)

Lan Jen Chu was a noted electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Chu is noted for his work on the fundamental limitations for small antennas, also known as Chu's limit.

#11224

Harold Barlow

1899 - 1989 (90 years)

Harold Everard Monteagle Barlow FRS was a British engineer. He was born in Islington, London, the son of Leonard Barlow, an electrical engineer. He entered University College, London where, apart from the World War II years , he spent most of his working life. He was taught by Ambrose Fleming, who held the Pender Chair there. Barlow went on to succeed Fleming in that chair, and hence also in the post of head of department. Among his students, Barlow supervised Charles Kao, the 2009 Nobel Laureate for Physics, for a doctoral degree.

#11225

Albert H. Taylor

Albert H. Taylor

1879 - 1961 (82 years)

Albert Hoyt Taylor was an American electrical engineer who made important early contributions to the development of radar. Biography Taylor entered Northwestern University in 1896. In 1899 he was employed by Western Electric Co. He returned to Northwestern in 1900, lacking only one semester of graduating when lack of funds forced him to accept a position as an instructor at Michigan State College. He was awarded his Bachelor of Science degree by Northwestern University in 1902. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1903 to 1908 before going to Germany for his graduate studies, receiving a Ph.D.

#11226

Dietrich Küchemann

1911 - 1976 (65 years)

Dietrich Küchemann CBE FRS FRAeS was a German aerodynamicist who made several important contributions to the advancement of high-speed flight. He spent most of his career in the UK, where he is best known for his work on Concorde.

#11227

Katsutada Sezawa

Katsutada Sezawa

1895 - 1944 (49 years)

Katsutada Sezawa was a Japanese geophysicist . Sezawa's key work was on the mathematical aspects of wave transmission in media of different viscosities and the Sezawa wave mode of surface waves is named after him.

#11228

Frederick Vinton Hunt

Frederick Vinton Hunt

1905 - 1972 (67 years)

Frederick Vinton Hunt was an inventor, a scientist and a professor at Harvard University who worked in the field of acoustic engineering. He made significant contributions to room acoustics, regulated power supply, lightweight phonograph pickups and electronic reproduction equipment, and notably, during World War II, invented new techniques for sonar . He developed the first efficient and modern sonar system, for this work he received the Medal for Merit from President Truman , and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. Navy in 1970.

#11229

Frank Benford

1883 - 1948 (65 years)

Frank Albert Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and physicist best known for rediscovering and generalizing Benford's Law, an earlier statistical statement by Simon Newcomb, about the occurrence of digits in lists of data.

#11230

Ben Shahn

1898 - 1969 (71 years)

Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.

#11231

Horst Rittel

1930 - 1990 (60 years)

Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem, but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.

#11232

Alan Mara Bateman

1889 - 1971 (82 years)

Alan Mara Bateman was an economic geologist who worked on mining in North America and a professor at Yale University who also served as a long-standing editor of the journal Economic Geology. He also wrote several textbooks on mining including the Formation of Mineral Deposits.

#11233

Herbert Reich

1900 - 2000 (100 years)

Herbert Reich was a pioneering figure in electrical engineering. Reich made substantial contributions towards the design of early oscilloscopes as a graduate student at Cornell University. Reich later taught as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois and Yale University . From 1944 to 1946 he worked at the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University with Frederick Terman. After his retirement from Yale, he periodically taught courses at Deep Springs College.

#11234

Rupert Cross

1912 - 1980 (68 years)

Sir Alfred Rupert Neale Cross was an English legal scholar. He was the second of two sons of Arthur George Cross, an architect in Hastings, and Mary Elizabeth . Biography He was born with cancer of the eyes and was completely blind after an operation at the age of 1. Worcester College for the Blind provided his education before he went to Worcester College, Oxford in 1930 where he took a Second in Modern History in 1933.

#11235

Moshé Feldenkrais

Moshé Feldenkrais

1904 - 1984 (80 years)

Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist, known as the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, a system of physical exercise that aims to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement.

#11236

Félix Pollaczek

1892 - 1981 (89 years)

Félix Pollaczek was an Austrian-French engineer and mathematician, known for numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and probability theory. He is best known for the Pollaczek–Khinchine formula in queueing theory , and the Pollaczek polynomials.

#11237

H. L. D. Kirkham

1887 - 1949 (62 years)

Harold Laurens Dundas Kirkham was an Anglo-American plastic surgeon. He was the first Professor of Plastic Surgery at Baylor University, Texas and also served with the US Navy Medical Corps, becoming head of plastic surgery at the United States Naval Medical Center San Diego during the Second World War.

#11238

Mayo D. Hersey

1886 - 1978 (92 years)

Mayo Dyer Hersey was an American engineer, physicist at the National Bureau of Standards and other government agencies, and Professor of Engineering at Brown University. He received the 1957 ASME Medal, and the first Mayo D. Hersey award in 1965.

#11239

Vikram Sarabhai

Vikram Sarabhai

1919 - 1971 (52 years)

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai Jain was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped to develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.

#11240

Daniel Frost Comstock

Daniel Frost Comstock

1883 - 1970 (87 years)

Daniel Frost Comstock was an American physicist and engineer. Biography Comstock attained a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. He also studied in Berlin, Zürich, and Basel, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1906. At the University of Cambridge he studied under J. J. Thomson. Beginning in 1904 he was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics .

#11241

Robert Lumiansky

1913 - 1987 (74 years)

Robert Mayer Lumiansky was an American scholar of Medieval English and president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Robert Lumiansky received a bachelor's degree from The Citadel, a master's degree from the University of South Carolina, and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina. He was professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1973 and professor of English at New York University from 1975 to 1983. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

#11242

William M. Harlow

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

William M. Harlow was an American professor of engineering and silviculture at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was also a nature photographer and filmmaker, particularly of time-lapse films.

#11243

Clark Blanchard Millikan

1903 - 1966 (63 years)

Clark Blanchard Millikan was a distinguished professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology , and a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. Biography Millikan's parents were noted physicist Robert A. Millikan and Greta Erwin Blanchard. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, graduated from Yale College in 1924, then earned his PhD in physics and mathematics at Caltech in 1928 under Professor Harry Bateman. He became a professor upon receiving his degree, full professor of aeronautics in 1940, and director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical La...

#11244

Wilhelm Flügge

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Gottfried Wilhelm Flügge was a German engineer, and Professor of Applied Mechanics at Stanford University. He is known as recipient of the 1970 Theodore von Karman Medal in Engineering Mechanics, and the 1970 Worcester Reed Warner Medal.

#11245

Shintaro Uda

1896 - 1976 (80 years)

Shintaro Uda was a Japanese inventor, and assistant to Professor Hidetsugu Yagi at Tohoku Imperial University, where together they invented the Yagi–Uda antenna in 1926. In February 1926, Yagi and Uda published their first report on the wave projector antenna in a Japanese publication. Yagi applied for patents on the new antenna both in Japan and the United States. His was issued in May 1932 and assigned to the Radio Corporation of America.

#11246

Albert Francis Zahm

1862 - 1954 (92 years)

Albert Francis Zahm was an early aeronautical experimenter, a professor of physics, and a chief of the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Library of Congress. He testified as an aeronautical expert in the 1910–14 lawsuits between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss.

Image Attributions