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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Engineering,
#201
Satya N. Atluri
#8558
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Satya Atluri was an American engineer, educator, researcher and scientist in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering and computational sciences, who was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Since 1966, he made fundamental contributions to the development of finite element methods, boundary element methods, Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin methods, Fragile Points Methods , Local Variational Iteration Methods, for general problems of engineering, solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, flexoelectricity, ferromagnetics, ...
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Ian McHarg
#3243
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Ian L. McHarg was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. McHarg was one of the most influential persons in the environmental movement who brought environmental concerns into broad public awareness and ecological planning methods into the mainstream of landscape architecture, city planning and public policy. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning.
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Thomas Heatherwick
#4922
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Thomas Alexander Heatherwick, is an English designer and the founder of London-based design practice Heatherwick Studio. He works with a team of more than 200 architects, designers and artisans from a studio and workshop in King's Cross, London.
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Simon Haykin
#14285
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Simon Haykin is an electrical engineer noted for his pioneering work in Adaptive Signal Processing with emphasis on applications to Radar Engineering and Telecom Technology. He is currently Distinguished University Professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
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Shun'ichi Amari
#1047
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Shun'ichi Amari, is a Japanese scholar born in 1936 in Tokyo, Japan. Overviews He majored in Mathematical Engineering in 1958 from the University of Tokyo then graduated in 1963 from the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo.
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Arogyaswami Paulraj
#6987
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Arogyaswami J. Paulraj is an Indian-American electrical engineer, academic. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Elect. Engg. at Stanford University. Early life Paulraj was born in Pollachi near Coimbatore, British India in 1944, one of six children of Sinappan Arogyaswami and his wife Rose. He attended Montfort Boys' High School in Yercaud, Tamil Nadu. He joined the Indian Navy at age 15 through the National Defense Academy, Khadakvasla and served the Indian Navy for 26 years. Paulraj received a B.E. in electrical engineering from the Naval College of Engineering, Lonavala, India, and a Ph.D.
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Werner J. A. Dahm
#20496
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Werner J.A. Dahm is an ASU Foundation Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Arizona State University. Dahm is the director of the Security & Defense Systems Initiative at ASU. Dahm is Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering at University of Michigan. He is a member of the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.
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Jacob Millman
#13372
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Jacob Millman was a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. He immigrated to the United States in 1913 with his mother, Gertrude Millman and sister Rebecca. Millman received a PhD from MIT in 1935. He joined Columbia University in 1951, and retired in 1975. From 1941 to 1987, Millman wrote eight textbooks on electronics, and he helped develop radar systems. Millman's theorem is named after him. He received in 1970 the IEEE Education Medal.
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Rocky Tuan
#4572
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rocky Tuan Sung-chi is a Hong Kong medical researcher and bioengineer, currently the vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he served as distinguished visiting professor and director of the Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine prior to taking up the vice-chancellorship. Previously he was on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he held a number of roles: Arthur J. Rooney Sr. Professor of Sports Medicine and the executive vice chair of the department of Orthopaedic Surgery, and a professor in the department of bioengineering.
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Peter Cook
#8512
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Peter Cook is an English architect, lecturer and writer on architectural subjects. He was a founder of Archigram, and was knighted in 2007 by the Queen for his services to architecture and teaching. He is also a Royal Academician and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. His achievements with Archigram were recognised by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2004, when the group was awarded the Royal Gold Medal.
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J. Tinsley Oden
#12384
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Tinsley Oden was an American engineer. He was the Associate Vice President for Research, the Cockrell Family Regents' Chair in Engineering #2, the Peter O'Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems, a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, a Professor of Mathematics, and a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. Oden has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
Go to Profile#212
Lawrence Rabiner
#8016
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Lawrence R. Rabiner is an electrical engineer working in the fields of digital signal processing and speech processing; in particular in digital signal processing for automatic speech recognition. He has worked on systems for AT&T Corporation for speech recognition.
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Takeo Kanade
#7662
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publications and holds around 20 patents.
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Stephen P. Boyd
#8210
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering .
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John Summerson
#8413
Overall Influence
1904 - 1992 (88 years)
Sir John Newenham Summerson, was one of the leading British architectural historians of the 20th century. Early life John Summerson was born at Barnstead, Coniscliffe Road, Darlington. His grandfather worked for the Darlington and Stockton Railway and founded the family foundry of Thomas Summerson and Sons in Darlington in 1869. After the premature death of his father, Samuel James Summerson, in 1907, Summerson travelled extensively in England and Europe with his mother Dorothea and then attended a prep school at Riber Castle in Derbyshire before going to Harrow and the Bartlett School of A...
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Mehmet Toner
#11729
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mehmet Toner is a Turkish biomedical engineer. He is currently the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with a joint appointment as professor at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology .
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G. V. Loganathan
#9168
Overall Influence
1954 - 2007 (53 years)
Gobichettipalayam Vasudevan "G. V." Loganathan was an Indian-American professor, who, at the time of his death, was a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, part of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, United States.
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Lawrence Halprin
#5818
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Lawrence Halprin was an American landscape architect, designer and teacher. Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects. These figures included William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, Mario J. Ciampi, and others associated with UC Berkeley. Gradually accumulating a regional reputation in the northwest, Halprin first came to national attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis.
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Farah Pahlavi
#950
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Farah Pahlavi is the widow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was successively Queen and Empress of Iran from 1959 to 1979. She was born into a prosperous family whose fortunes were diminished after her father's early death. While studying architecture in Paris, she was introduced to the Shah at the Iranian embassy, and they were married in December 1959. The Shah's first two marriages had not produced a son—necessary for royal succession—resulting in great rejoicing at the birth of Crown Prince Reza in October of the following year. Diba was then free to pursue interests other than domestic duties, though she was not allowed a political role.
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Rob Pike
#1181
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Pike is a Canadian programmer and author. Life and works He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and, earlier, at Bell Labswhere he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language.
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Thomas J.R. Hughes
#10862
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Thomas Joseph Robert Hughes is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and currently holds the Computational and Applied Mathematics Chair at the Oden Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. Hughes has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
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Antoine Predock
#5284
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Antoine Predock is an American architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the principal of Antoine Predock Architect PC, the studio he founded in 1967. Predock first gained national attention with the La Luz community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first national design competition he won was held by the Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University. Predock's work includes the Turtle Creek House, built in 1993 for bird enthusiasts along a prehistoric trail in Texas, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and a new ballpark for the San Diego Padres, the Petco Park.
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Klaus Krippendorff
#6179
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Klaus Krippendorff was a communication scholar, social science methodologist, and cyberneticist. and was the Gregory Bateson professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. He wrote an influential textbook on content analysis and is the creator of the widely used and eponymous measure of interrater reliability, Krippendorff's alpha. In 1984–1985, he served as the president of the International Communication Association, one of the two largest professional associations for scholars for communication.
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Yury Gogotsi
#10632
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Yury Georgievich Gogotsi is a Ukrainian scientist in the field of material chemistry, professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA since the year 2000 in the fields of Materials Science and Engineering and Nanotechnology. Distinguished University and Trustee Chair professor of materials science at Drexel University — director of the A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute .
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Douglas McIlroy
#498
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processorss and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
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Dina Katabi
#5052
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Wireless Center. Academic biography Katabi received a bachelor's degree from the University of Damascus in 1995 and M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1998 and 2003 respectively. In 2003, Katabi joined MIT, where she holds the title of Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the co-director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science a...
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Francine Houben
#8651
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Francine Marie Jeanne Houben is a Dutch architect. She graduated with cum laude honours from the Delft University of Technology. She is the founding partner and creative director of Mecanoo architecten, based in Delft, The Netherlands.
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H. T. Kung
#2659
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Hsiang-Tsung Kung is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit . Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active r...
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Dean Wooldridge
#7924
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Dean Everett Wooldridge was a prominent engineer in the aerospace industry. Something of a prodigy, Wooldridge graduated from high school at the age of 14. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Oklahoma. Like his future colleague Simon Ramo, Wooldridge went on to study at the California Institute of Technology under William Smythe, from which he received his PhD in physics in 1936, studying the separation of isotopes.
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Arthur Erickson
#4241
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Arthur Charles Erickson was a Canadian architect and urban planner. He studied Engineering at the University of British Columbia and, in 1950, received his B.Arch. from McGill University. He is known as Canada's most influential architect and was the only Canadian architect to win the American Institute of Architects AIA Gold Medal . When told of Erickson's award, Philip Johnson said, "Arthur Erickson is by far the greatest architect in Canada, and he may be the greatest on this continent."
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Jack Ruina
#5703
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Jack P. Ruina was an American electrical engineer who was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963 until 1997 and thereafter an MIT professor emeritus. From 1966 to 1970, he was also vice president for special laboratories at MIT.
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Patrik Schumacher
#8161
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Patrik Schumacher is a London based architect and architectural theorist. He is the principal architect of Zaha Hadid Architects. Education and early career Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn in the early 1980s. In the mid-eighties he studied architecture in Stuttgart and in 1987 continued his architecture study at London Southbank University. In 1988, Schumacher worked in the design studio of Zaha Hadid, on the Vitra Firestation. In 1990, he returned to University of Stuttgart to complete his Diploma in Architecture and then re-joined Hadid.
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Kalyanmoy Deb
#11841
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kalyanmoy Deb is an Indian computer scientist. Deb is the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering at Michigan State University. Deb is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University.
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Babak Hassibi
#5942
Overall Influence
Babak Hassibi is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and applied mathematician who is the inaugural Mose and Lillian S. Bohn Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology . From 2011 to 2016 he was the Gordon M Binder/Amgen Professor of Electrical Engineering. During 2008-2015 he was the Executive Officer of Electrical Engineering and Associate Director of Information Science and Technology.
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Henry T. Yang
#7889
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Henry Tzu-Yow Yang is a Chinese American mechanical engineer, university administrator, and the fifth and current chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a post he has held since 1994.
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Dalibor Vesely
#8076
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Dalibor Vesely was a Czech-born architectural historian and theorist who was influential through his teaching and writing in promoting the role of hermeneutics and phenomenology as part of the discourse of architecture and of architectural design.
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Burn-Jeng Lin
#15414
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Burn-Jeng Lin is a Taiwanese electrical engineer. Education After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1963 with a degree in electrical engineering, Lin earned his doctorate in the same subject from Ohio State University in 1970.
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Ranulph Glanville
#12886
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Ranulph Glanville was an Anglo-Irish cybernetician and design theorist. He was a founding vice-president of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences and president of the American Society for Cybernetics .
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Mona Jarrahi
#14743
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Mona Jarrahi is an Iranian Engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She investigates novel materials, terahertz/millimeter-wave electronics and optoelectronics, microwave photonics, imaging and spectroscopy systems.
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Harold Chestnut
#13018
Overall Influence
1917 - 2001 (84 years)
Harold Chestnut was an American electrical engineer, control engineer and manager at General Electric and author, who helped establish the fields of control theory and systems engineering. Biography Born in Albany, New York, where his father, educated as a civil engineer, worked in the family candy business. Chestnut was raised in the 1920s and went on a scholarship to MIT in 1934 to study chemical engineering. In the first year he was awarded for his outstanding performance in chemistry, but switched anyway to electrical engineering and became co-op student. After five years of study he received a combined B.S.
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Joseph W. Goodman
#18486
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Joseph Wilfred Goodman is an engineer and physicist. Education Goodman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in engineering and applied physics from Harvard University in 1958 and Master of Science and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1960 and 1963, respectively.
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Oswald Mathias Ungers
#8956
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Oswald Mathias Ungers was a German architect and architectural theorist, known for his rationalist designs and the use of cubic forms. Among his notable projects are museums in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne.
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Léon Krier
#10348
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Léon Krier CVO is a Luxembourgish architect, architectural theorist, and urban planner, a prominent critic of modernist architecture and advocate of New Classical architecture and New Urbanism. Krier combines an international architecture and planning practice with writing and teaching. He is well known for his master plan for Poundbury, in Dorset, England. He is the younger brother of architect Rob Krier.
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Mohammad Shahidehpour
#11098
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dr. Mohammad Shahidehpour is a Carl Bodine Distinguished Professor and Chairman in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Illinois Institute of Technology. He is the author of more than 300 technical papers and five books on electric power systems planning, operation, and control.
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James Corner
#9182
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
James Corner is a landscape architect and theorist whose works exhibit a focus on "developing innovative approaches toward landscape architectural design and urbanism." His designs of note include Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island and the High Line in Manhattan, and Domino Park in Brooklyn, all in New York City.
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Chih-Tang Sah
#4650
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Chih-Tang "Tom" Sah is a Chinese-American electronics engineer and condensed matter physicist. He is best known for inventing CMOS logic with Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1963. CMOS is now used in nearly all modern very large-scale integration semiconductor devices.
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Álvaro Siza Vieira
#5961
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira is a Portuguese architect, and architectural educator. He is internationally known as Álvaro Siza and in Portugal as Siza Vieira . Early life and education Siza was born in Matosinhos, a small coastal town near Porto. He graduated in architecture in 1955, at the former School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, the current FAUP – Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto. There he met his wife, Maria Antónia Siza , with whom he had a daughter and son.
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Homayoon Kazerooni
#12180
Overall Influence
Homayoon Kazerooni is an Iranian-born American roboticist, mechanical engineering, and professor. He serves as a professor of mechanical engineering, and the director of the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley . Kazerooni is also the co-founder of Ekso Bionics and SuitX. As a noted authority on robotics, he is frequently profiled and quoted in the media.
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Nikos Salingaros
#5460
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Nikos Angelos Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.
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Joseph Francis Shea
#7983
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Joseph Francis Shea was an American aerospace engineer and NASA manager. Born in the New York City borough of the Bronx, he was educated at the University of Michigan, receiving a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 1955. After working for Bell Labs on the radio inertial guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile, he was hired by NASA in 1961. As Deputy Director of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight, and later as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Shea played a key role in shaping the course of the Apollo program, helping to lead NASA to the decision in favor of lunar orbit rendezvous and supporting "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket.
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