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).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Engineering,

#151

Rafael Viñoly

#1199

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Rafael Viñoly Beceiro was an Uruguayan-born architect based in New York. He was the principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects, which he founded in 1983. The firm has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires. Viñoly designed landmark buildings internationally.

#152

Norman Abramson

Norman Abramson

#3122

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Norman Manuel Abramson was an American engineer and computer scientist, most known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication. Early life Abramson was born on April 1, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to immigrant Jewish parents Edward and Esther. His father was born in Lithuania, and worked in commercial photography. His mother was born in Ukraine, and managed the house.

#153

Alec Skempton

#11998

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Sir Alec Westley Skempton was an English civil engineer internationally recognised, along with Karl Terzaghi, as one of the founding fathers of the engineering discipline of soil mechanics. He established the soil mechanics course at Imperial College London, where the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department's building was renamed after him in 2004, and was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to engineering. He was also a notable contributor on the history of British civil engineering.

#154

Suhas Patankar

#12506

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Suhas V. Patankar is an Indian mechanical engineer. He is a pioneer in the field of computational fluid dynamics and Finite volume method. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He is also president of Innovative Research, Inc. Patankar was born in Pune, Maharashtra, India.

#155

Eric Laithwaite

#8067

Overall Influence

1921 - 1997 (76 years)

Eric Roberts Laithwaite was a British electrical engineer, known as the "Father of Maglev" for his development of the linear induction motor and maglev rail system. Biography Eric Roberts Laithwaite was born in Atherton, Lancashire, on 14 June 1921, raised in the Fylde, Lancashire and educated at Kirkham Grammar School. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. Through his service in World War II, he rose to the rank of Flying Officer, becoming a test engineer for autopilot technology at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.

#156

Greg Lynn

#8546

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Greg Lynn is an American architect, founder and owner of the Greg Lynn FORM office, an o. University Professor in the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and a professor at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. He is CEO and co-founder of the Boston based robotics company Piaggio Fast Forward. He won a Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2010 Lynn was named a fellow by United States Artists. He is a member of the board of trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

#157

Mark Wigley

#7154

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect and author based in the United States. From 2004 to 2014, he was the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

#158

Robert A. Brown

#2626

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Robert A. Brown is a chemical engineer and university administrator. He was the 10th president of Boston University and a former provost of Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In 1991, Brown was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for the application of computing techniques to fundamental and practical problems in fluid mechanics, rheology, and crystal growth.

#159

Mohamed M. Atalla

Mohamed M. Atalla

#1666

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Mohamed M. Atalla was an Egyptian-American engineer, physicist, cryptographer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was a semiconductor pioneer who made important contributions to modern electronics. He is best known for the inventing the MOSFET in 1959 , which along with Atalla's earlier surface passivation processes, had a significant impact on the development of the electronics industry. He is also known as the founder of the data security company Atalla Corporation , founded in 1972. He received the Stuart Ballantine Medal and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his impor...

#160

James S. Albus

#6001

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

James Sacra Albus was an American engineer, Senior NIST Fellow and founder and former chief of the Intelligent Systems Division of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology .

#161

James Gowan

#9445

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

James Gowan was a Scottish-born architect known for his post-modernist designs of the "engineering style" which influenced a generation of British architects. Life Gowan was born in Pollokshields, Glasgow in 1923. He was brought up by his grandparents in Partick after his parents' separation, but went to live with his mother aged 12 and attended Hyndland Secondary School. He studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art before joining the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was stationed in Palestine as a radar operator. After the war, he moved to London and completed his studies at Kingston School of Architecture.

#162

Kiyonori Kikutake

#8302

Overall Influence

1928 - 2011 (83 years)

was a prominent Japanese architect known as one of the founders of the Japanese Metabolist group. He was also the tutor and employer of several important Japanese architects, such as Toyo Ito, Shōzō Uchii and Itsuko Hasegawa.

#163

Jörg Schlaich

#14020

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Jörg Schlaich was a German structural engineer and is known internationally for his ground-breaking work in the creative design of bridges, long-span roofs, and other complex structures. He was a co-founder of the structural engineering and consulting firm Schlaich Bergermann Partner.

#164

Laurie Baker

#5080

Overall Influence

1917 - 2007 (90 years)

Lawrence Wilfred "Laurie" Baker was a British-born Indian architect, renowned for his initiatives in cost-effective energy-efficient architecture and designs that maximized space, ventilation and light and maintained an uncluttered yet striking aesthetic sensibility. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and his own experiences in the remote Himalayas, he promoted the revival of regional building practices and use of local materials; and combined this with a design philosophy that emphasized a responsible and prudent use of resources and energy. He was a pioneer of sustainable architecture as well as ...

#165

Gordon S. Brown

#10044

Overall Influence

1907 - 1996 (89 years)

Gordon Stanley Brown was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. He originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools. From 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of MIT's engineering school. With his former student Donald P. Campbell, he wrote Principles of Servomechanisms in 1948, which is still a standard reference in the field.

#166

Alireza Mashaghi

Alireza Mashaghi

#2395

Overall Influence

Alireza Mashaghi is a physician-scientist and biophysicist at Leiden University. He is known for his contributions to single-molecule analysis of chaperone assisted protein folding, molecular topology and medical systems biophysics and bioengineering. He is a leading advocate for interdisciplinary research and education in medicine and pharmaceutical sciences.

#167

Charles Gwathmey

#8294

Overall Influence

1938 - 2009 (71 years)

Charles Gwathmey was an American architect. He was a principal at Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, as well as one of the five architects identified as The New York Five in 1969. Gwathmey was perhaps best known for the 1992 renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

#168

Justus Dahinden

#8502

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Justus Dahinden was a Swiss architect, teacher and writer about architecture. Life Dahinden was born in Zürich. From 1945 to 1949, he studied architecture at ETH Zürich , graduating in 1956 with his PhD. In 1955 he started his own architecture office in Zürich. In 1974 Justus Dahinden became Professor of Architecture at TU Wien School of Architecture, Vienna University of Technology. He was Director of the Institute of Space and Interior Design in Vienna, from 1974 to 1995. He was appointed Life Professor at the International Academy of Architects of Sofia in 1988, helping establish its...

#169

Ryue Nishizawa

#9689

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Ryue Nishizawa is a Japanese architect based in Tokyo. He is a graduate of Yokohama National University, and is director of his own firm, Office of Ryue Nishizawa, established in 1997. In 1995, he co-founded the firm SANAA with the architect Kazuyo Sejima. In 2010, he became the youngest recipient ever of the Pritzker Prize, together with Sejima.

#170

Paolo Portoghesi

Paolo Portoghesi

#9049

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Paolo Portoghesi was an Italian architect, theorist, historian, and professor of architecture at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was president of the architectural section of the Venice Biennale , editor-in-chief of the journal Controspazio , and dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano university .

#171

Johann-Dietrich Wörner

Johann-Dietrich Wörner

#8846

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Johann-Dietrich "Jan" Wörner is a German civil engineer, university professor and former president of Technische Universität Darmstadt. He served as chairman of the executive board of the German Aerospace Center DLR from 1 March 2007 to 30 June 2015. On 1 July 2015, he succeeded Jean-Jacques Dordain as Director General of the European Space Agency.

#172

Calvin Quate

#4623

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Calvin Forrest Quate was one of the inventors of the atomic force microscope. He was a professor emeritus of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Education He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah College of Engineering in 1944, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1950.

#173

Marco Zanuso

#8557

Overall Influence

1916 - 2001 (85 years)

Marco Zanuso was an Italian Modernist architect and designer. Early life Marco Zanuso was born in Milan 14 May 1916. He was one of a group of Italian designers from Milan shaping the international idea of "good design" in the postwar years. He began his studies in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano university in 1934 and graduated in 1939. During the Second World War he served for the Axis in the Italian Navy, following which he opened his own design office in 1945. From the beginning of his career, at Domus where he served as the editor from 1947–49 and at Casabella where he was e...

#174

Cecil Balmond

#8873

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#175

Brian Spalding

#14040

Overall Influence

1923 - 2016 (93 years)

Dudley Brian Spalding, FRS FREng was Professor of Heat Transfer and Head of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Unit at Imperial College, London. He was one of the founders of computational fluid dynamics and an internationally recognized contributor to the fields of heat transfer, fluid mechanics and combustion. He created the practice of CFD – its application to problems of interest to engineers. Most of today’s commercially available CFD software tools trace their origin to the work done by Spalding's group in the decade spanning the mid-60s and mid-70s. Spalding became a Fellow of the Royal...

#176

Jerome Wiesner

#2527

Overall Influence

1915 - 1994 (79 years)

Jerome Bert Wiesner was a professor of electrical engineering, chosen by President John F. Kennedy as chairman of his Science Advisory Committee . Educated at the University of Michigan, Wiesner was associate director of the university's radio broadcasting service and provided electronic and acoustical assistance to the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. During World War II, he worked on microwave radar development at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He worked briefly after the war at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, then returned to MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics from 1946 to 1961.

#177

David Childs

#4486

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

David Magie Childs is an American architect and chairman emeritus of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He is the architect of the new One World Trade Center in New York City. Early life and education Childs graduated from Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1959 and from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1963. He first majored in zoology before he then turned to architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and earned his master's degree in 1967.

#178

J. N. Reddy

#12717

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Junuthula N. Reddy is a Distinguished Professor, Regent's Professor, and inaugural holder of the Oscar S. Wyatt Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA.[1] He is an authoritative figure in the broad area of mechanics and one of the researchers responsible for the development of the Finite Element Method . He has made significant seminal contributions in the areas of finite element method, plate theory, solid mechanics, variational methods, mechanics of composites, functionally graded materials, fracture mechanics, plasticity, biomechanics, classical and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, and applied functional analysis.

#179

Jinde Cao

#13471

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Jinde Cao is an Endowed Chair Professor at Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He is a Distinguished Professor, the Dean of School of Mathematics and the Director of the Research Center for Complex Systems and Network Sciences at Southeast University.

#180

Enric Miralles

#9680

Overall Influence

1955 - 2000 (45 years)

Enric Miralles Moya was a Spanish architect from Barcelona, Catalonia. He graduated from the Barcelona School of Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 1978. After establishing his reputation with a number of collaborations with his first wife Carme Pinós, the couple separated in 1991. Miralles later married fellow architect Benedetta Tagliabue, and the two practiced together as EMBT Architects. Miralles' magnum opus and his largest project, the new Scottish Parliament Building, was unfinished at the time of his death.

#181

Naoko Yamazaki

#12904

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

is a Japanese engineer and former astronaut at JAXA. She was the second Japanese woman to fly in space. The first was Chiaki Mukai. Early life Yamazaki was born Naoko Sumino in Matsudo City. She spent two years of her childhood in Sapporo. After graduating from Ochanomizu University Senior High School in 1989, Yamazaki earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1993 and a Master of Science degree with a major in Aerospace Engineering in 1996.

#182

Hiroshi Amano

#6201

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Hiroshi Amano is a Japanese physicist, engineer and inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology. For his work he was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for "the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources".

#183

Vincent Poor

#11965

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Harold Vincent Poor FRS FREng is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the Interim Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a specialist in wireless telecommunications, signal processing and information theory. He has received many honorary degrees and election to national academies. He was also President of IEEE Information Theory Society . He is on the board of directors of the IEEE Foundation.

#184

Cini Boeri

#9775

Overall Influence

1924 - 2020 (96 years)

Maria Cristina Mariani Dameno, known as "Cini Boeri" was an Italian architect and designer. She was considered "one of the great pioneering women in Italian design and architecture", who was described as a "formidable architect and designer, paragon of Milanese elegance and verve."

#185

Wolfram Burgard

Wolfram Burgard

#6042

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Wolfram Burgard is a German roboticist. He is a full professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg where he heads the Laboratory for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is known for his substantial contributions to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.

#186

Alejandro Aravena

Alejandro Aravena

#7234

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Alejandro Gastón Aravena Mori is a Chilean architect and executive director of the firm Elemental S.A. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016, and was the director and curator of the Architecture Section of the 2016 Venice Biennale.

#187

Edgar Cardoso

#13730

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Edgar Cardoso was a noted Portuguese civil engineer and university professor. In Portugal, Edgar Cardoso was a pioneer of experimental analysis of structures and of high precision instruments developed to measure parameters affecting structural behavior on small models of his own works.

#188

Yale Patt

#4098

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. He is a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

#189

Alan V. Oppenheim

#11038

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alan Victor Oppenheim is a professor of engineering at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics , at the Digital Signal Processing Group.

#190

Joel S. Engel

#7368

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Joel Stanley Engel is an American electrical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks. Born in New York City, he obtained a B.Sc. in engineering at City College of New York . While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the research staff at Draper Laboratory on inertial guidance and stabilization systems, he also obtained an M.Sc. in electrical engineering . He then moved to New Jersey and worked for Bell Labs most of his active research career , and also earned a Ph.D. from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn on a thesis on data tra...

#191

John Argyris

#9830

Overall Influence

1913 - 2004 (91 years)

Johann Hadji Argyris FRS was a Greek pioneer of computer applications in science and engineering, among the creators of the finite element method , and lately Professor at the University of Stuttgart and Director of the Institute of Structural Mechanics and Dynamics in Aerospace Engineering.

#192

Alireza Rahai

#12947

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Alireza Rahai is an Iranian engineer, academic, scholar and professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Amirkabir University of Technology. He is also a member of the Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame and Vice President for Academic and Post Graduate Affairs of Islamic Azad University. He has been the Chancellor of the Amirkabir University of Technology in three terms: from 1996 to 1997, from 2005 to 2014 and from 2023 until now .

#193

John Young

#1964

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

John Watts Young was an American astronaut, naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer. He became the 9th person to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. He is the only astronaut to fly on four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command and service module, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.

#194

Derek Hitchins

#6521

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Derek K. Hitchins is a British systems engineer and was professor in engineering management, in command & control and in systems science at Cranfield University at Cranfield, Bedfordshire, England. Biography Hitchins joined the Royal Air Force in 1952 as an apprentice and retired as a wing commander in 1973 to join industry. From 1975 to 1976 he worked as the system design manager of the Tornado ADV aviation company and technical coordinator for UKAIR CCIS. From 1975 to 1979 he was head of Integrated sciences in a grammar school, teaching physics, integrated science, mathematics, electronics,...

#195

Robert Trappl

#5969

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Robert Trappl is an Austrian scientist and head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna, which was founded in 1984. He is known for his work in the field of cybernetics and artificial intelligence.

#196

John L. Lumley

#12712

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

John Leask Lumley was an American fluid dynamicist and a professor at Cornell University. He is widely known for his research in turbulence and is the coauthor of A First Course in Turbulence along with Hendrik Tennekes.

#197

Charles Elachi

#4345

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Charles Elachi is a Lebanese-American professor of electrical engineering and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology . From 2001 to 2016 he was the 8th director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and vice president of Caltech.

#198

Lawrence Roberts

Lawrence Roberts

#1280

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002. As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and Polish-American engineer Paul Baran. The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn who worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman . Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure th...

#199

Daniel D. Joseph

#16697

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Daniel Donald Joseph was an American mechanical engineer. He was the Regents Professor Emeritus and Russell J. Penrose Professor Emeritus of Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota. He was widely known for his research in fluid dynamics.

#200

Kamal Sarabandi

Kamal Sarabandi

#10068

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Kamal Sarabandi is an Iranian-American scientist and the Fawwaz T. Ulaby Distinguished University Professor of EECS and the Rufus S. Teesdale endowed Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and conducts research on the science and technology of microwave and millimeter wave radar remote sensing, wireless technology, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering, metamaterials, antenna miniaturization, and nano antennas.

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