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,
#251
M. George Craford
#13117
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
M. George Craford is an American electrical engineer known for his work in Light Emitting Diodes . Raised in an Iowa farming community, he studied physics at the University of Iowa, where he earned his BA in 1961. Craford received his MS and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1967, began his professional career at the Monsanto Chemical Company, where he discovered the "Yellow light". When Monsanto sold its LED and compound semiconductor business in 1979, Craford went to Hewlett Packard, where in 1982 he became the research and development manager of the HP Optoelectronics Division.
Go to Profile#252
Michael F. Ashby
#18851
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Michael Farries Ashby is a British metallurgical engineer. He served as Royal Society Research Professor, and a Principal Investigator at the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is known for his contributions in Materials Science in the field of material selection.
Go to Profile#253
Giovanni Azzone
#22999
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Giovanni Azzone is an Italian engineer and academic, rector of the Polytechnic University of Milan between 2010 and 2016. In 1986 Azzone graduated in industrial engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan.
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Robert N. Hall
#11711
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Robert Noel Hall was an American engineer and applied physicist. He demonstrated the first semiconductor laser and invented a type of magnetron commonly used in microwave ovens. He also contributed to the development of rectifiers for power transmission.
Go to Profile#255
Miomir Vukobratović
#16067
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Miomir Vukobratović was a Serbian mechanical engineer and pioneer in humanoid robots. His major interest laid in the development of efficient modeling and control of robot dynamics. He was born in Botoš, near Zrenjanin, Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Go to Profile#256
Vinod Dham
#5120
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vinod Dham is an Indian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is known as the 'Father of the Pentium Chip' for his contribution to the development of Intel's Pentium micro-processor. He is also a mentor and advisor, and sits on the boards of companies, including startups funded through his India-based fund Indo-US Venture Partners, where he is the founding managing director.
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Andrea Branzi
#11755
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Andrea Branzi was an Italian architect, designer, and academic. He was born and raised in Florence, though he lived and worked in Milan for much of his career. He was a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan until 2009.
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Chenming Hu
#9254
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Chenming Calvin Hu is a Chinese-American electronic engineer who specializes in microelectronics. He is TSMC Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the electronic engineering and computer science department of the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. In 2009, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers described him as a “microelectronics visionary … whose seminal work on metal-oxide semiconductor MOS reliability and device modeling has had enormous impact on the continued scaling of electronic devices”.
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Michael Wilford
#11223
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Michael James Wilford CBE was an English architect from Hartfield, East Sussex. Wilford studied at the Northern Polytechnic School of Architecture, London, from 1955 to 1962, and at the Regent Street Polytechnic Planning School, London, in 1967. In 1960, he joined the practice of James Stirling and in 1971 together established the Stirling/Wilford partnership. He designed the British Embassy in Berlin.
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Frede Blaabjerg
#17878
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Frede Blaabjerg is a Danish professor at Aalborg University. At Aalborg, he works in the section of Power Electronic Systems of the department of Energy Technology. Blaabjerg's research concerns the applications of power electronics, including adjustable-speed drives, microgrids, photovoltaic systems, and wind turbines. By the number of citations, he is the most cited author of several IEEE journals: IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics.
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Stuart R. Bell
#14707
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stuart Ray Bell is an American academic. He was named the 29th president of The University of Alabama, located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on July 15, 2015. Early life Stuart R. Bell was born in Abilene, Texas in 1957. He graduated from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering in 1979. He received his master's and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M in 1981 and 1986, respectively.
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C. L. Max Nikias
#3372
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Chrysostomos Loizos "Max" Nikias is a Cypriot-American academic, and served as the 11th University of Southern California president, a position he held from August 3, 2010, to August 7, 2018. He holds the Malcolm R. Currie Chair in Technology and the Humanities and is president emeritus of the university. He had been at USC since 1991, as a professor, director of national research centers, dean, provost, and president. He also served as chair of the College Football Playoff Board of Managers as chair of the board of the Keck Medical Center at USC , as member of the board of directors of the...
Go to Profile#263
Wesley A. Clark
#2815
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Wesley Allison Clark was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
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Karl Johan Åström
#9153
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Karl Johan Åström is a Swedish control theorist, who has made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control. In 1965, he described a general framework of Markov decision processes with incomplete information, what ultimately led to the notion of a Partially observable Markov decision process.
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Ricardo Legorreta
#4712
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Ricardo Legorreta Vilchis was a Mexican architect. He was a prolific designer of private houses, public buildings and master plans in Mexico, the United States and some other countries. He was awarded the prestigious UIA Gold Medal in 1999, the AIA Gold Medal in 2000, and the Praemium Imperiale in 2011.
Go to Profile#266
Carol E. Reiley
#7268
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine,...
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Lihong V. Wang
#11382
Overall Influence
Lihong V. Wang is the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering at California Institute of Technology and was formerly the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Wang is renowned for his contributions to the field of Photoacoustic imaging technologies and inventing the world's fastest camera with more than 10 trillion frames per second. Wang was elected as the member of National Academy of Engineering in 2018.
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Robert Cailliau
#1715
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
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Ken Goldberg
#7050
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences , Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Fritz Leonhardt
#11671
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
Fritz Leonhardt was a German structural engineer who made major contributions to 20th-century bridge engineering, especially in the development of cable-stayed bridges. His book Bridges: Aesthetics and Design is well known throughout the bridge engineering community.
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Ali H. Sayed
#9160
Overall Influence
Ali H. Sayed is the dean of engineering at EPFL , where he teaches and conducts research on Adaptation, Learning, Statistical Signal Processing, and Signal Processing for Communications. He is the Director of the EPFL Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He has authored several books on estimation and filtering theories, including the textbook Adaptive Filters, published by Wiley & Sons in 2008. Professor Sayed received the degrees of Engineer and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree i...
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Giorgio Grassi
#12787
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Giorgio Grassi is one of Italy's most important modern architects, and part of the so-called Italian rationalist school, also known as La Tendenza, associated most famously with Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi that emerged in Italy in the 1960s. Much influenced by Ludwig Hilberseimer, Heinrich Tessenow and Adolf Loos, Grassi's architecture is the most severely rational of the group: his extremely formal work is predicated on absolute simplicity, clarity, and honesty without ingratiation, rhetoric, or spectacular shape-making; it refers to historical archetypes of form and space and has a strong concern with the making of urban space.
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Sandra Magnus
#12617
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Sandra Hall Magnus is an American engineer and a former NASA astronaut. She returned to Earth with the crew of STS-119 Discovery on March 28, 2009, after having spent 134 days in orbit. She was assigned to the crew of STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle. She is also a licensed amateur radio operator with the call sign KE5FYE. From 2012 until 2018 Magnus was the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
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Stuart Umpleby
#8304
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stuart Anspach Umpleby is an American cybernetician and professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at the George Washington University.
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Henry Paynter
#17335
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
Henry Martyn Paynter was an American scientist and professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is best known as the inventor of bond graphs, a methodology to describe dynamic systems.
Go to Profile#276
Shree K. Nayar
#5508
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Shree K. Nayar is an engineer and computer scientist known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision, computational imaging, and computer graphics. He is the T. C. Chang Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering at Columbia University. Nayar co-directs the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center and is the head of the Computer Vision Laboratory , which develops advanced imaging and computer vision systems. Nayar also serves as a director of research at Snap Inc. He was elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts a...
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Hod Lipson
#7249
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Hod Lipson is an Israeli - American robotics engineer. He is the director of Columbia University's Creative Machines Lab. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating machines that can demonstrate some aspects of human creativity. His publications have been cited more than 43,000 times, and he has an h-index of 86, . Lipson is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?
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Ali Erdemir
#13597
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ali Erdemir, born on July 2, 1954, in Kadirli, Adana, Turkey, is a Turkish American materials scientist specializing in surface engineering and tribology. Education and career Erdemir graduated from the Metallurgy Department of the Istanbul Technical University in 1977. After working for two years at the İskenderun Iron and Steel Company in Turkey as an engineer, he went to the USA for doctoral studies. Erdemir received a master's degree in materials engineering and a doctorate in materials science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1986, respectively. After c...
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Susan Rogers
#7140
Overall Influence
Susan Rogers is an American professor, sound engineer, and record producer best known for being Prince's staff engineer during his commercial peak , including on albums like Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o' the Times, and The Black Album." During this time, Rogers laid the foundations for Prince's now-famous vault by beginning the process of collecting and cataloguing all his studio and live recordings. She has also worked as a sound engineer and record producer for other musical artists such as Barenaked Ladies , David Byrne, Robben Ford, Jeff Black, Rusted Root, Tricky, Michael Penn, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Tevin Campbell.
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Adrian Smith
#9880
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Adrian D. Smith is an American architect. He designed the world's tallest structure, Burj Khalifa, as well as the building projected to surpass it, the Jeddah Tower. A long-time principal of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he founded his own architectural partnership firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture in Chicago in 2006. Among his other projects, he was the senior architect for Central Park Tower in New York City, Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, and Zifeng Tower in Nanjing.
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Ellsworth Kelly
#3001
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
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Ron Herron
#14131
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Ronald James Herron was an English architect and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his work with the seminal experimental architecture collective Archigram, which was formed in London in the early 1960s. Herron was the creator of one of the group's best known and celebrated projects, the Walking City.
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Allan Cullimore
#4970
Overall Influence
Allan R. Cullimore was an American academic administrator. He was the 3rd President of New Jersey Institute of Technology from 1920 until 1947. Cullimore was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Hiroshi Ishiguro
#9307
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Hiroshi Ishiguro is a Japanese engineer and director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. A notable development of the laboratory is the Actroid, a humanoid robot with lifelike appearance and visible behaviour such as facial movements.
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Parviz Jabehdar Maralani
#15532
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Parviz Jabehdar Maralani is an Iranian electrical engineering emeritus professor and fellow of the Academy of Sciences of Iran. He has contributed significantly to the education of electrical engineering in Iran and trained many students.
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Ray William Clough
#24583
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Ray William Clough, , was Byron L. and Elvira E. Nishkian Professor of structural engineering in the department of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the founders of the finite element method . His article in 1956 was one of the first applications of this computational method. He coined the term “finite elements” in an article in 1960. He was born in Seattle.
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Dennis Assanis
#17968
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Dionissios N. "Dennis" Assanis is a Greek academic administrator, scientist, engineer and author. He is the 28th president of the University of Delaware, a position he has held since June 6, 2016. Biography Assanis was born and raised in Athens, Greece, Assanis earned his bachelor's degree in Marine Engineering from Newcastle University in England . At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned three master's degrees: Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering , Mechanical Engineering and Management . Also at MIT, he earned a Ph.D. in Power and Propulsion .
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Konstantin Feoktistov
#7299
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov , was Russian engineer and a cosmonaut in the former Soviet space program. As a cosmonaut Feoktistov flew on Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry three crew members. Feoktistov also wrote several books on space technology and exploration. The Feoktistov crater on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor.
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Victor Scheinman
#13844
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Victor David Scheinman was an American pioneer in the field of robotics. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, where his father Léonard was stationed with the US Army. At the end of the war the family moved to Brooklyn and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry. His mother taught at a Hebrew school.
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Alphonse Chapanis
#9408
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Alphonse Chapanis was an American pioneer in the field of industrial design, and is widely considered one of the fathers of ergonomics or human factors – the science of ensuring that design takes account of human characteristics.
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Ramesh K. Agarwal
#17697
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ramesh K. Agarwal is the William Palm Professor of Engineering in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also the director of Aerospace Engineering Program, Aerospace Research and Education Center and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at WUSTL. From 1994 to 1996, he was the Sam Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and Chair of Aerospace Engineering department at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. From 1996 to 2001, he was the Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and the executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University.
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Steve Mann
#2985
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
William Stephen George Mann is a Canadian engineer, professor, and inventor who works in augmented reality, computational photography, particularly wearable computing, and high-dynamic-range imaging. Mann is sometimes labeled the "Father of Wearable Computing" for early inventions and continuing contributions to the field. He cofounded InteraXon, makers of the Muse brain-sensing headband, and is also a founding member of the IEEE Council on Extended Intelligence . Mann is currently CTO and cofounder at Blueberry X Technologies and Chairman of MannLab. Mann was born in Canada, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two children.
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Jeanne Gang
#9593
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jeanne Gang is an American architect and the founder and leader of Studio Gang , an architecture and urban design practice with offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Gang was first widely recognized for the Aqua Tower, the tallest woman-designed building in the world at the time of its completion. Aqua has since been surpassed by the nearby St. Regis Chicago, also of her design. Surface has called Gang one of Chicago's most prominent architects of her generation, and her projects have been widely awarded.
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Jane Drew
#7041
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Dame Jane Drew , was an English modernist architect and town planner. She qualified at the Architectural Association School in London, and prior to World War II became one of the leading exponents of the Modern Movement in London.
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Ouriel Zohar
#8024
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ouriel Zohar , is an Israeli and French theater director, playwright, poet and translator from French to Hebrew. Professor at the Department of Humanities & Arts at the Technion University, created the Technion theater in 1986. Has been full professor at the University of Paris VIII since 1997 and at HEC Paris since 1995.
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Michael J. Flynn
#4063
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Michael J. Flynn is an American professor emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Flynn was born in New York City. Career Flynn proposed Flynn's taxonomy, a method of classifying parallel digital computers, in 1966.
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Sanjay Sarma
#5090
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sanjay E. Sarma an Indian mechanical engineer who is the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers professor of mechanical engineering and the Vice President for Open Learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is credited with developing many standards and technologies in the commercial RFID industry. Sarma is co-author of The Inversion Factor: How to Thrive in the IOT Economy , along with Linda Bernardi and the late Kenneth Traub. Sarma also serves on the board of the MOOC provider edX as a representative of MIT.
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Itsuko Hasegawa
#19757
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
is a Japanese architect. Biography Itsuko Hasegawa was born in Yaizu City, Japan in 1941. She studied at the Department of Architecture at Kanto Gakuin University, graduating in 1964. From then until 1969, she worked with Kiyonori Kikutake and then spent two years studying at Tokyo Institute of Technology. From 1971-78 she worked under Kazuo Shinohara at the institute. She has lectured in Rotterdam, Australia, Norway and Los Angeles between 1984-7. She became the principal of her own design studio in Tokyo, called Itsuko Hasegawa Architectural Design Studio in 1976, which was renamed the Arch...
Go to Profile#299
Watts Humphrey
#3007
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Watts S. Humphrey was an American pioneer in software engineering who was called the "father of software quality." Biography Watts Humphrey was born in Battle Creek, Michigan on July 4, 1927. His uncle was US Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey. In 1944, he graduated from high school and served in the United States Navy. Despite dyslexia, he received a bachelor of science in physics from the University of Chicago, a master of science in physics from Illinois Institute of Technology physics department, and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago Graduate Sc...
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Romaldo Giurgola
#10118
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Romaldo "Aldo" Giurgola AO was an Italian academic, architect, professor, and author. Giurgola was born in Rome, Italy in 1920. After service in the Italian armed forces during World War II, he was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome. He studied architecture at the University of Rome, completing the equivalent of a B.Arch. with honors in 1949. That same year, he moved to the United States and received a master's degree in architecture from Columbia University. In 1954, Giurgola accepted a position as an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter, Giurgola formed Mitchell/Giurgola Architects in Philadelphia with Ehrman B.
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