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,
#2851
Jesse A Berlin
#104903
Overall Influence
#2852
Vaughan Hart
#75755
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Vaughan Hart is a leading architectural historian, and Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath. He served as head of department between 2008 and 2010.
Go to Profile#2853
Naomi Stead
#82921
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Naomi Stead is an architectural academic, scholar and critic, based in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently the Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT University, Australia.
Go to Profile#2854
Mohamed Eddaoudi
#104940
Overall Influence
#2855
Paolo Maria Comoglio
#104943
Overall Influence
#2856
Robert J Wood
#104944
Overall Influence
#2857
Auke Ijspeert
#90161
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Auke Jan Ijspeert is a Swiss-Dutch roboticist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of biorobotics in the Institute of Bioengineering at EPFL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the head of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#2858
Stephen W. Keckler
#77165
Overall Influence
Stephen W. Keckler is an American computer scientist and the current Vice President of Architecture Research at NVIDIA. Keckler received a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1990 and an MS and PhD in computer science from MIT in 1992 and 1998, respectively. He then joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served from 1998 to 2012. He joined NVIDIA in 2009. In 2003, he received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in leading the TRIPS architecture research group. He became an ACM Senior Member in 2006 and an ACM Fellow in 2011.
Go to Profile#2859
Marian. K. Kazimierczuk
#105008
Overall Influence
#2860
Anthony G. Constantinides
#58653
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Anthony George Constantinides FREng FIET is a professor of signal processing and the founder of the Communications and Signal Processing Group of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in Imperial College London. He has been actively involved with research in various aspects of digital filter design, digital signal processing, and communications for more than 40 years. Professor Constantinides' research spans a wide range of digital signal processing and communications, both from the theoretical as well as the practical points of view. His recent work has been directed towar...
Go to Profile#2861
Paolo Prandoni
#105052
Overall Influence
#2862
Jean-Loup Baer
#82693
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Jean-Loup Baer is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. Biography Jean-Loup Baer received the Diplome d'Ingénieur in Electrical Engineering and the Doctorat 3e cycle in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble and the Ph.D. from UCLA in 1968 under the supervision of Gerald Estrin.
Go to Profile#2863
Tong‐heng Lee
#105076
Overall Influence
#2864
Stanislav Emelianov
#97148
Overall Influence
Stanislav Emelianov is a former professor of biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founder of Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Laboratory. Since August 2015, he moved to Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been appointed as the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Microelectronics and as a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He is based in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Go to Profile#2865
Svein-Erik Hamran
#46397
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Svein-Erik Hamran is a Norwegian professor in radar remote sensing at the University of Oslo. He led the development of the Radar Imager for Mars' subsurface experiment for the Mars rover Perservance as Principal Investigator for the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment , and is a Co-Principal Investigator for the WISDOM radar on the European Space Agency Rosalind Franklin rover.
Go to Profile#2866
Sanjay Banerjee
#94432
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Sanjay Banerjee is an American engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, director of Microelectronics Research Center, and director of the Southwest Academy of Nanoelectronics — one of three such centers in the United States funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation to develop a replacement for MOSFETs as part of their Nanoelectronics Research Initiative .
Go to Profile#2867
Florian R. Menter
#105176
Overall Influence
#2868
Nathan Newman
#93827
Overall Influence
Nathan Newman is an engineering professor who is Lamonte H. Lawrence Chair in Sold State Science, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Go to Profile#2869
Esther Takeuchi
#53342
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Esther Sans Takeuchi is a materials scientist and chemical engineer, working on energy storage systems and power sources for biomedical devices. She is also a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and a chief scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She holds more than 150 U.S. patents. “The battery was invented once and reinvented over 100 times. I don’t own the patent. The company does. It was called Greatbatch. Now it’s called Integer Corp. When you join a company, you sign over your patent rights to the company.”
Go to Profile#2870
Alberto Camenzind
#45425
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Alberto Camenzind was a Swiss architect from Ticino. He also became a professor at the prestigious Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich . Early years Alberto Camenzind was the son of, Eduard Camenzind, a hotelier originally from Gersau in the Canton of Schwyz, by his marriage to Chiara d'Ambrogio. He attended secondary school in Lugano. Between 1933 and 1939 he studied architecture with, among others, Professor William Dunkel at the Zürich Technical University, where fellow architecture students included Max Frisch and Justus Dahinden.
Go to Profile#2871
Michael Steer
#68975
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael B. Steer is a Lampe professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University and one of the leading electrical engineers in today's analog/RF and microwave world. He has published numerous articles in the "IEEE Microwave and Antennas" journal, along with leading the NCSU Dinosauria project. He is credited with being the first IEEE Fellow to fine-tune all of his constitutive relations and as a result, creating a paperless office.
Go to Profile#2872
Buzz Aldrin
#52104
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Buzz Aldrin is an American former astronaut, engineer and fighter pilot. He made three spacewalks as pilot of the 1966 Gemini 12 mission. He was the Lunar Module Eagle pilot on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission and became the second person to walk on the Moon after mission commander Neil Armstrong.
Go to Profile#2873
Billie F. Jr. Spencer
#105296
Overall Influence
#2874
Masaomi Nangaku
#105318
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#2875
Jianping Yao
#105341
Overall Influence
#2876
Heinz Graffunder
#84559
Overall Influence
1926 - 1994 (68 years)
Heinz Graffunder was a German architect. Life Early years Heinz Graffunder as born into a working-class family in Berlin. His father worked as a pipefitter. Like others of his generation, the final part of his schooling was accelerated due to the pressures of World War II. He was then conscripted into the German army, which led to a period as a prisoner of war. The war itself ended approximately five months after his eighteenth birthday with Berlin occupied by Soviet troops. They would remain in the eastern part of what remained of Germany for nearly five decades. On his release G...
Go to Profile#2877
Yun Hang Hu
#105387
Overall Influence
#2878
Michaele Pride-Wells
#62416
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michaele Pride-Wells , is an American architect and educator. She is a professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico. She was the first woman-owned and operated architecture firm in the state of California. Pride-Wells was the founder of the firm RE: Architecture in California. She was also the first African American woman to head an architecture program in a majority institution when she joined the University of Kentucky in 1996.
Go to Profile#2879
Charles Arntzen
#33322
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Charles Joel Arntzen is a plant molecular biologist. His major contributions are in the field of "plant molecular biology and protein engineering, as well as the utilization of plant biotechnology for enhancement of food quality and value, for expression of pharmacological products in transgenic plants, and for overcoming health and agricultural constraints in the developing world."
Go to Profile#2880
Robert William Kerr Honeycombe
#105425
Overall Influence
#2881
Manfred Lenzen
#105482
Overall Influence
#2882
Lei Xing
#105490
Overall Influence
#2883
Don Chaffin
#86246
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Don Chaffin is an American engineer currently the R. G. Snyder Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan and an Elected Fellow to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, American Industrial Hygiene Association, Society of Automotive Engineers, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ergonomics Society, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Go to Profile#2884
Zhou Bangxin
#105395
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Zhou Bangxin , academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering , professor of material science and engineering at Shanghai University.
Go to Profile#2885
Paul V. Roberts
#71745
Overall Influence
1938 - 2006 (68 years)
Paul V. Roberts was a prominent environmental engineer. He made major contributions to environmental engineering by applying fundamental principles of mass transport and chemistry to drinking water treatment and wastewater reclamation research. An author of more than 200 scientific publications, he was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Swiss Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2886
Peter Gouras
#105570
Overall Influence
#2887
Yoshiyuki Tomino
#27615
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Yoshiyuki Tomino is a Japanese anime director, screenwriter, songwriter and novelist best known for creating the Gundam anime franchise. Early life and family Tomino was born on November 5, 1941, in Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, to an old family of regional landowners in Ōjima . His grandfather Kiheiji Tomino was the mayor of Ōjima and statutory auditor of Ōtsuka Rubber Works. His father Kihei Tomino was an employee at Japan Processed Fabrics, and his mother Sachiko was the daughter of town councillor and celluloid toy manufacturer Sakichi Tanaka. His uncle Kiheiji Tomino was a member of the T...
Go to Profile#2888
Michael P. Païdoussis
#105574
Overall Influence
#2889
Allan D. Struthers
#105584
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#2890
Ferdinand Ludwig
#87951
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ferdinand Ludwig is a German architect and the head of the professorship for Green Technologies in Landscape Architecture at the Technical University of Munich. Ludwig is a pioneer of and innovator in the field of Baubotanik, the architectural realm of living plant construction.
Go to Profile#2891
Donald A. Nield
#105614
Overall Influence
#2892
Mark Cousins
#40171
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Mark Cousins was a British cultural critic and architectural theorist. He studied Art History at Merton College, Oxford and was a research student at the Warburg Institute. From 1993 he was the Director of General Studies and Head of the Graduate Programme in Histories and Theories at the Architectural Association. He was also Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and at Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
Go to Profile#2893
Ragunathan Rajkumar
#80303
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Ragunathan "Raj" Rajkumar is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also affiliated with the Robotics Institute and the Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as the Director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute and as the Director of the Mobility21 USDOT National University Transportation Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also leads the General Motors-CMU Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Laboratory ,...
Go to Profile#2894
Irwin Sandberg
#95278
Overall Influence
Irwin Sandberg is an American engineer, who is currently the Cockrell Family Regents Chair Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . In 1981, Sandberg was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering for fundamental contributions to the understanding and analysis of nonlinear systems and for applying new methods to nonlinear engineering problems. He is also a member of the Soc...
Go to Profile#2895
Gavriel Salvendy
#105084
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Gavriel Salvendy is a pioneer in the field of human factors and ergonomics. In 1990, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for fundamental contributions to and professional leadership in human, physical and cognitive aspects of engineering systems.
Go to Profile#2896
Leonie Sandercock
#36628
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leonie Sandercock is an urban planner and academic focusing on community planning and multiculturalism. Her work spans the interdisciplinary fields of urban studies, urban policy and planning and elucidates issues of difference, social justice and possibility. She has been teaching at the School of Community & Regional Planning at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, since 2001.
Go to Profile#2897
George Edward Alcorn Jr.
#49877
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
George Edward Alcorn Jr. is an American physicist, engineer, inventor, and professor. He taught at Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia, and worked primarily for IBM and NASA. He has over 30 inventions and 8 patents resulting in his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.
Go to Profile#2898
Peter Mitchell Grant
#84250
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#2899
F. Alton Everest
#73283
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
F. Alton Everest was an American acoustical engineer, a cofounder of the American Scientific Affiliation, and its first president. Academic and acoustic research career He held electrical engineering degrees from Oregon State and Stanford University, where he conducted his early work with such prominent engineers as Lee DeForest and Hewlett Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard, then taught at Oregon State College at Corvallis from 1936, specialising in radio and television.
Go to Profile#2900
Otto J. M. Smith
#90972
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Otto J. M. Smith was an educator, inventor and author in the fields of engineering and electronics. He spent most of his career as a professor at University of California Berkeley. Dr. Smith is probably best known for the invention of the Smith predictor, a method of handling deadtime in feedback control systems:
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