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,
#2101
Yvonne Clark
#53324
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Yvonne Y. Clark was a pioneer for African-American and women engineers. Also known as Y.Y., she was the first woman to get a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering at Howard University, the first woman to earn a master's degree in Engineering Management from Vanderbilt University, and the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Tennessee State University, afterward becoming a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#2102
Clemens van Blitterswijk
#20370
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Clemens A. van Blitterswijk is a Dutch tissue engineer who contributed to the use of biomaterials to heal bone injuries, especially using osteoinductive ceramics. In collaboration with Jan de Boer and others, he has contributed to screening microtextures to study cell-biomaterial interactions, an approach termed materiomics.
Go to Profile#2103
Hu Haichang
#71177
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Hu Haichang was a Chinese mechanical and aerospace engineer. He was in charge of the early phase development for the Dong Fang Hong I, China's first artificial satellite. Hu was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2104
Susan S Taylor
#89842
Overall Influence
#2105
Nada Golmie
#36829
Overall Influence
Nada Taleb Golmie is an American computer scientist and engineer. She is chief of the wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Go to Profile#2106
Robert Doisneau
#6513
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Go to Profile#2107
Anna Menon
#44601
Overall Influence
Anna Menon is an American engineer scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private space mission. Menon worked for NASA for seven years before joining SpaceX, where she works as a lead engineer of space operations.
Go to Profile#2108
Josephine Webb
#40125
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Josephine Webb is an American electrical engineer who obtained two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, known colloquially as "switchgear". She designed an eighteen-inch, full newspaper size fax machine with superior resolution. She co-founded Webb Consulting Company with her husband, also an electrical engineer. She is one of the first female electrical engineers, and considered a pioneer by the Society of Women Engineers. At Purdue University, she was one out of a total of five women engineers. She turned 100 in June 2018.
Go to Profile#2109
Richard L Wahl
#89944
Overall Influence
#2110
Mathias Klotz
#74787
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Mathias Klotz Germain is a Chilean architect. He studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he graduated in 1991. Winner of the Borromini Prize of Architecture in 2001 for under-40 architects.
Go to Profile#2111
Andrzej Jajszczyk
#63392
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Andrzej Bogdan Jajszczyk is a professor at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, and President of the Krakow Branch of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 2011 to 2015 he served as the founding Director of the National Science Center. a Polish research funding agency. He graduated from Poznan University of Technology. He was a visiting professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne, France.
Go to Profile#2112
Kristine Bell
#67405
Overall Influence
Kristine Bell from Metron, Inc. of Reston, Virginia, is an electronics engineer. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for her contributions to statistical signal processing with radar and sonar applications. Bell earned her B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1985 from Rice University in Houston, Texas. She continued on to receive her M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Bell stayed at GMU and earned her Ph.D. in information technology in 1995. She has currently authored or coaut...
Go to Profile#2113
Angus Wilkinson
#78702
Overall Influence
Angus J Wilkinson is a professor of materials science based at University of Oxford. He is a specialist in micromechanics, electron microscopy and crystal plasticity. He assists in overseeing the MicroMechanics group while focusing on the fundamentals of material deformation. He developed the HR-EBSD method for mapping stress and dislocation density at high spatial resolution used at the micron scale in mechanical testing and micro-cantilevers to extract data on mechanical properties that are relevant to materials engineering.
Go to Profile#2114
William Wegman
#20166
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
William Wegman is an American artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses. Life and career Wegman originally intended to pursue a career as a painter. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1965 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1967.
Go to Profile#2115
James S. Santa Barbara Speck
#90065
Overall Influence
#2116
Yannis C. Yortsos
#64292
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yannis C. Yortsos is a Greek-American chemical engineer and academic, currently serving as Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Early life Yannis Yortsos was born in 1951 in Athens, Greece. He attended the 1st Lyceum Venetokleion of Rhodes and in 1968 he enrolled in the National Technical University of Athens, where he obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering, graduating first in his class in 1973. He continued his studies at the Institute of Technology, earning his M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1979, with his doctoral ...
Go to Profile#2117
Artem Oganov
#26849
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Artem R. Oganov is a Russian theoretical crystallographer, mineralogist, chemist, physicist, and materials scientist. He is known mostly for his works on computational materials discovery and crystal structure prediction, studies of matter at extreme conditions, including matter of planetary interiors.
Go to Profile#2118
Dean Hawkes
#71610
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Dean Hawkes is a British architect and award-winning academic. Born in 1938 he studied at Regional College of Art, Manchester and Clare College, University of Cambridge. His career combined practice, teaching and research:
Go to Profile#2119
Nobukazu Teranishi
#35898
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#2120
Somchai Wongwises
#90173
Overall Influence
#2121
Kazım Ergin
#67391
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Kazim Ergin was a Turkish geophysicist. Early years Ergin was born on May 21, 1915, in Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey. He completed his primary, secondary and high school education in Gaziantep under difficult conditions, with many interruptions due to the French occupation of the city during World War I. After completing his basic education, he received his B.Sc. degree in mathematics at Istanbul University. In June 1937, he was sent by the Mineral Research and Exploration Institute of Turkey to study mining, metallurgical and petroleum engineering at Bergakademie Freiberg near Dresden, Germany.
Go to Profile#2122
Stephen Jacobsen
#55296
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Stephen Charles Jacobsen was an American bioengineer, a pioneer in his field, specifically in developing medical devices and tools, including an artificial kidney and an exoskeleton, and was Distinguished Professor at University of Utah. He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2123
Andrew Richard Teel
#90225
Overall Influence
#2124
Adrian Farrel
#25929
Overall Influence
Adrian Farrel is a British engineer and author, specialising in developing computer network protocols for the Internet. He is active in the Internet Engineering Task Force. He was a founder of Aria Networks Ltd, who manufacture sophisticated, next-generation network modelling, path computation, and optimisation tools for MPLS, GMPLS, and IP networks, and served as their Chief Technology Officer for two years. He also runs a consulting company specialising in MPLS and GMPLS. Previously he was an MPLS architect and development manager at software house Data Connection Ltd., and director of protocol development for Movaz Networks Inc.
Go to Profile#2125
Olivier de Weck
#82607
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Olivier L. de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He has authored and co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications. He is a Fellow of the INCOSE and a Fellow of the AIAA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. From 2013-2018 de Weck served as the Editor-in-Chief for Systems Engineering, the leading journal of INCOSE. He is best known for contributions to the fields of Systems Engineering, Design optimization, and Space Logistics, where together with colleagues from JPL he coined the term Interplanetary Supply Chain.
Go to Profile#2126
David A. Nethercot
#88972
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
David A. Nethercot OBE, FREng, FIStructE, FICE, FCGI is a British structural engineer. He was the Head of the Civil Engineering Department at Imperial College London until September 2011. He was president of the Institution of Structural Engineers in 2003-04 and the 2009 recipient of their Gold Medal.
Go to Profile#2127
Marjolein van der Meulen
#68499
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Marjolein Christine Hermance van der Meulen is an American engineer who currently serves as James M. and Marsha McCormick Director of Biomedical Engineering and Swanson Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University and is a Senior Scientist in the Research Division of the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Go to Profile#2128
Nemkumar Banthia
#44808
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Nemkumar Banthia FRSC, is an Indian-born Canadian engineer and professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia and the CEO of IC-IMPACTS. He is best known for his research in the fields of cement-based and polymer-based fiber reinforced composites, particularly on testing and standardization, fracture behavior, strain-rate effects, durability and development of sustainable materials.
Go to Profile#2129
Alan Pritsker
#51143
Overall Influence
1933 - 2000 (67 years)
A. Alan B. Pritsker was an American engineer, pioneer in the field of Operations research, and one of the founders of the field of computer simulation. Over the course of a fifty-five-year career, he made numerous contributions to the field of simulation and to the larger fields of industrial engineering and operations research.
Go to Profile#2130
Kane S. Yee
#39047
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Kane Shee-Gong Yee is a Chinese-American electrical engineer and mathematician. He is best known for introducing the finite-difference time-domain method in 1966. His research interests include numerical electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics and numerical analysis of partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#2131
Yuri Bazilevs
#79776
Overall Influence
Yuri Bazilevs is the E. Paul Sorensen Chair at the Brown University School of Engineering. His research is highly cited. Before coming to Brown in 2018, Bazilevs taught at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#2132
James Anderson
#65888
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James M. Anderson is an American professor of pathology, macromolecular science and biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He received the Elsevier Biomaterials Gold Medal for the most significant contributions to biomaterials science by an individual from 1980 to 2005. He has been a leader in the development of prosthetics, and has been called an "internationally recognized scientist who has made pioneering and significant advancements in the understanding of the inflammatory cell biology of tissue interactions with biomaterials and implantable medical devices." Anderson...
Go to Profile#2133
Metin Sitti
#90465
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#2134
Keith Fox
#90468
Overall Influence
#2135
Kenneth A. Loparo
#64022
Overall Influence
Kenneth A. Loparo is Nord Professor of Engineering and Chair of Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Case Western Reserve University, OH, USA, where has been affiliated with since 1979. He was an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Cleveland State University from 1977 to 1979.
Go to Profile#2136
Sami Rintala
#68392
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sami Rintala is a Finnish architect and artist. He studied architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, completing his studies in 1999. Rintala’s own work is based on narrative and conceptualism. The resulting work is a layered interpretation of the physical, mental and poetic resources of the site.
Go to Profile#2137
Mark G. Allen
#73085
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mark G. Allen is a professor specializing in microfabrication, nanotechnology, and microelectromechanical systems at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering Director of the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, and leader of the Microsensor and Microactuator Research Group. Prior to his joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, he was with the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was Regents' Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the J.M. Pettit Professor in Microelectronics. While at Georgia...
Go to Profile#2138
Esra Akcan
#46210
Overall Influence
Esra Akcan is a Turkish-American architect, academic and author. Currently, she is the Michael A. McCarthy Professor in the Department of Architecture and the director of European Studies at Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#2139
R. Kerry Rowe
#81272
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ronald Kerry Rowe, OC, BSc, BE, PhD, D.Eng, DSc , FRS, FREng, NAE, FRSC, FCAE, Dist.M.ASCE, FEIC, FIE, FCSCE, PEng., CPEng. is a Canadian civil engineer of Australian birth, one of the pioneers of geosynthetics.
Go to Profile#2140
Jack Yang
#30312
Overall Influence
Jack Y. Yang is an American computer scientist and biophysicist. As of 2011, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. Biography Yang received his Ph.D. and MS degrees from Purdue University, West Lafayette, under the supervision of Okan Ersoy and Albert Overhauser , receiving the grade of summa cum laude and the award of Ph.D. thesis of the year in the USA. His post-doctoral training was from Harvard Medical School and Indiana University School of Medicine, and he received training in biostatistics and bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University, and in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#2141
Branko Kovačević
#68212
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Branko D. Kovačević is a Serbian academic. He served as the rector of the University of Belgrade from 2006 to 2012. Education and career He received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Electrical Engineering in 1975, 1980, and 1984, respectively. He is currently a full professor of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, teaching courses in control systems theory and its applications.
Go to Profile#2142
Gary Anderson
#25437
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gary Dean Anderson is an American graphic designer and architect. He is most well known as the designer of the recycling symbol, one of the most readily recognizable logos in the world. Gary Anderson's contribution to modern graphic design has been compared to those of early pioneering modernist graphic designers such as Herbert Bayer. His design for a symbol to embody the concept of recycling has been compared to iconic trademarks such as those for Coca-Cola and Nike. It has been called one of America's "most important design icons," it is one of the most recognizable graphic symbols in the world and has helped to encourage global recycling.
Go to Profile#2143
Kayvan Najarian
#47644
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kayvan Najarian is an Iranian-American scientist, who is a Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Department of Emergency Medicine, and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the director of Biomedical and Clinical Informatics University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Additionally, he is an Associate Director of Michigan Institute for Data Sciences . He is also serving as an Associate Director of the MCIRCC's . Kayvan Najarian has over 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, as well as several US and international patents.
Go to Profile#2144
Eduardo Bayo
#68808
Overall Influence
Eduardo Bayo is a professor in the Department of Structural Design and Analysis at the University of Navarra. He graduated with honors in civil engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1976. After 2 years of consulting as a structural engineer with Gibbs & Hill, he attended U.C. Berkeley receiving his master's degree in Engineering in June 1980 and his PhD in January 1983, in the field of structural mechanics. He specialized in structural analysis, finite element technology and computational dynamics. After completing his PhD he led a research group at INITEC, one of the large...
Go to Profile#2145
Michael Wright
#49350
Overall Influence
1912 - 2018 (106 years)
Alec Michael John Wright, CMG was a chartered surveyor and Director of Public Works of Hong Kong. He was a longtime colonial civil servant and chief architect of the Public Works Department. He was also an official member of the Legislative Council and Urban Council. He was responsible for many infrastructure and housing projects and advocated for private bathroom and kitchen in every unit of the housing estate which is known as the "Wright Principle". He was the founding member and president of the Hong Kong Institute of Architects.
Go to Profile#2146
Wes Jones
#79393
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Wesley Jones is an American architect, educator and author. Founding partner of Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones, in 1987 and then Jones, Partners: Architecture in 1993, Jones is a leading architectural voice of his generation, advocating for a continuing appreciation of the physical side of technology within a world increasingly enamored of the virtual. For most of his career this has taken the form of an overt fascination with mechanical expression, both static and moving, and his designs have been celebrated for their "engaging operability” and humor. In his early writings he focused on making the ...
Go to Profile#2147
Jef Caers
#60446
Overall Influence
Jef Caers, born in Belgium, is an academic working as a Professor at the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Stanford University. He was awarded the Andrei Borisovich Vistelius Research Award and the William Christian Krumbein Medal by the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences in 2001 and 2014 respectively. He is Editor-in-Chief of Computers & Geosciences.
Go to Profile#2148
Sokrates Pantelides
#88235
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sokrates Pantelides from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to point-defect dynamics in semiconductor devices.
Go to Profile#2149
Hussein T. Mouftah
#82946
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hussein Mouftah is a Canadian computer scientist and electrical engineer, currently the Canada Research Chair and Distinguished University Professor at University of Ottawa, and also a published author.
Go to Profile#2150
Sanjiva K. Lele
#90708
Overall Influence
