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,
#401
Angelo Mangiarotti
#18014
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Angelo Mangiarotti was an Italian architect and industrial designer. His designs were mostly for industrial buildings and railway stations. In 1994 he received the Compasso d'Oro award of the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale for his lifetime of achievement.
Go to Profile#402
John W. Cahn
#16674
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
John Werner Cahn was an American scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science. Born in Cologne, Weimar Germany, he was a professor in the department of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1964 to 1978. From 1977, he held a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology . Cahn had a profound influence on the course of materials research during his career. One of the foremost authorities on thermodynamics, Cahn applied the basic laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict a wide range of physical phenomena.
Go to Profile#403
Robb Kulin
#27404
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Robb Michael Kulin is an American aerospace engineer, entrepreneur, and former NASA astronaut candidate. He was a member of NASA Astronaut Group 22 but resigned before completing astronaut training.
Go to Profile#404
Samantha Cristoforetti
#7391
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Samantha Cristoforetti is an Italian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer. She holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut , and she held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson in June 2017, and later by Christina Koch. She is also the first Italian woman in space. She took command of ISS Expedition 68 on 28 September 2022.
Go to Profile#405
John W. Hutchinson
#23775
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John W. Hutchinson is the Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He works in the field of solid mechanics concerned with a broad range of problems in structures and engineering materials.
Go to Profile#406
Jan D. Achenbach
#25433
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Jan Drewes Achenbach was a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Achenbach was born in the northern region of the Netherlands, in Leeuwarden. He studied aeronautics at Delft University of Technology, which he finished with a M.Sc. degree in 1959. Thereafter, he went to the United States, Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1962. After working for a year as a preceptor at Columbia University, he was then appointed as assistant professor at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#407
Réka Albert
#6533
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Go to Profile#408
Harold G. White
#10057
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Harold G. "Sonny" White is a mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, and applied physicist who is known for proposing new Alcubierre drive concepts and promoting advanced propulsion projects. Educational White obtained a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from University of South Alabama, an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Wichita State University in 1999, and a Ph.D. degree in Physics from Rice University in 2008.
Go to Profile#409
Carlo H. Séquin
#13838
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carlo Heinrich Séquin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Séquin is recognized as one of the pioneers in processor design. Séquin has worked with computer graphics, geometric modelling, and on the development of computer-aided design tools for circuit designers. He was born in Zurich, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#410
Kees Schouhamer Immink
#10787
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kornelis Antonie "Kees" Schouhamer Immink is a Dutch engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, who pioneered and advanced the era of digital audio, video, and data recording, including popular digital media such as compact disc , DVD and Blu-ray disc. He has been a prolific and influential engineer, who holds more than 1100 U.S. and international patents. A large portion of the commonly used audio and video playback and recording devices use technologies based on his work. His contributions to coding systems assisted the digital video and audio revolution, by enabling reliable data storage at in...
Go to Profile#411
Andrea Prosperetti
#18332
Overall Influence
Andrea Prosperetti is the Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, the Berkhoff Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012 . He is known for his work in the field of multiphase flows including bubble dynamics and cavitation.
Go to Profile#412
Joan Higginbotham
#13851
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Joan Elizabeth Higginbotham is an electrical engineer and a former NASA astronaut. She flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-116 as a mission specialist and is the third African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison and Stephanie Wilson.
Go to Profile#413
Martha Schwartz
#20754
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Martha Schwartz is an American landscape architect and educator. Schwartz is the founding principal of Martha Schwartz Partners, an architecture firm based in London, New York City, and Shanghai. She is also Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Go to Profile#414
Achille Castiglioni
#12212
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Achille Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer of furniture, lighting, radiogramss and other objects. As a professor of design, he advised his students "If you are not curious, forget it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they act, then being a designer is not the right job for you."
Go to Profile#415
Antony Jameson
#15174
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Guy Antony Jameson, FRS, FREng is Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University. Jameson is known for his pioneering work in the field of computational fluid dynamics. He has published more than 300 scientific papers in a wide range of areas including computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, and control theory.
Go to Profile#416
William McDonough
#4334
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William Andrews McDonough is an American architect and academic. McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners and was the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He works in green and sustainable architecture, often incorporating his theory of cradle-to-cradle design.
Go to Profile#417
Masayoshi Tomizuka
#16211
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Masayoshi Tomizuka is a professor in Control Theory in Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. He holds the Cheryl and John Neerhout, Jr., Distinguished Professorship Chair. Tomizuka received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 1968 and 1970, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February 1974. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.
Go to Profile#418
James Collins
#4706
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
James Joseph Collins is an American bioengineer who serves as the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Collins conducted research showing that artificial intelligence approaches can be used to discover novel antibiotics, such as halicin and abaucin. He serves as the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT, which is supported by The Audacious Project, and is the faculty lead for life sciences at the MIT Jameel Clinic.
Go to Profile#419
Raj Mittra
#19506
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Raj Mittra is an Indian-born electrical engineer and academician. He is currently a professor of electrical engineering at University of Central Florida. Previously, he was a faculty member at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Pennsylvania State University, where he was the director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory of the Electrical Engineering department. His specialities include computational electromagnetics and communication antenna design.
Go to Profile#420
Morton Gurtin
#24501
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Morton E. Gurtin was a mechanical engineer who became a mathematician and mathematical physicist. He was an emeritus professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University, where for many years he held an endowed chair as the Alumni Professor of Mathematical Science. His main work is in materials science, in the form of the mathematical, rational mechanics of non-linear continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, in the style of Clifford Truesdell and Walter Noll, a field also known under the combined name of continuum thermomechanics. He has published over 250 papers, many among them ...
Go to Profile#421
Will Alsop
#8528
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
William Allen Alsop was a British architect and Professor of Architecture at University for the Creative Arts's Canterbury School of Architecture. He was responsible for several distinctive and controversial modernist buildings which are usually distinguished by their use of bright colours and unusual avant-garde forms. In 2000, Alsop won the Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architecture award in the United Kingdom, for the Peckham Library in London.
Go to Profile#422
Odile Decq
#12649
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Odile Decq is a French architect, urban planner and academic. She is the founder of the Paris firm, Studio Odile Decq and the architecture school, Confluence Institute. Decq is known for her self-described goth appearance and style.
Go to Profile#423
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
#9987
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is a professor at the University of Miami's School of Architecture and an architect and urban planner in Miami, Florida. Plater-Zyberk is considered to be a representative of the New Urbanism school of urban planning, and an advocate of the New Classical school of architecture. She is also a co-founder and principal of DPZ CoDesign, a Miami-based architecture firm.
Go to Profile#424
Roland Siegwart
#32238
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Roland Siegwart , is director of the Autonomous Systems Lab in Switzerland, of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich and a known robotics expert. Early life Siegwart was born in Lausanne and grew up in the Canton of Schwyz. He received an MA in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich in 1983 and, in 1989, a PhD degree with distinction Silver Medal ETH for his work on Electro-magnetically Suspended Milling Spindle with Active Digital Control.
Go to Profile#425
Cindy Sherman
#1834
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media . In the 1980s, she used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.
Go to Profile#426
Randy Merrill
#5654
Overall Influence
Randy Merrill is an American mastering engineer who has worked with international artists including Blink-182, DAY6, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Harry Styles, One Direction, Adele, Imagine Dragons, Beck, Liam Gallagher, Jonas Brothers, Muse, Cage the Elephant, Maren Morris, Ariana Grande, Mumford & Sons, Paul McCartney, Troye Sivan, Taylor Swift, Lorde, Justin Bieber, Porter Robinson, Ayumi Hamasaki, BUCK-TICK, King Gnu, Little Mix and BTS.
Go to Profile#427
Gerardo Beni
#21411
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gerardo Beni is a professor of electrical engineering at University of California, Riverside who, with Jing Wang, is known as the originator of the term swarm intelligence in the context of cellular robotics and the concept of electrowetting, with Susan Hackwood. He also devised, with Xuan-Li Xie, the Xie–Beni index for measuring the validity of fuzzy clustering.
Go to Profile#428
Alan Bovik
#17978
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#429
Henning Schulzrinne
#10271
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Henning Schulzrinne is a German-American computer scientist who led research and development of the voice over IP network protocols. Life Schulzrinne studied engineering management at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the German Technische Universität Darmstadt in Darmstadt, where he earned his Vordiplom , then went on to earn his M.Sc. at the University of Cincinnati and his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#430
David Turnbull
#24317
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
David Turnbull was an American physical chemist who worked in the interdisciplinary fields of materials science and applied physics. Turnbull made seminal contribution to solidification theory and glass formation. Turnbull was born in Elmira, Elmira Township, Stark County, Illinois. He graduated from high school in 1932 and then received a bachelor's degree in 1936 from Monmouth College , specializing in physical chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under Thomas Erwin Phipps from the University of Illinois in 1939. He was on the faculty of Case Institute of Technology fro...
Go to Profile#431
Farinaz Koushanfar
#12516
Overall Influence
Farinaz Koushanfar is an Iranian-American computer scientist whose research concerns embedded systems, ad-hoc networks, and computer security. She is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#432
Luigi Snozzi
#15208
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Luigi Snozzi was a Swiss architect, born in Mendrisio, Ticino. He worked in Locarno and Lugano. Life He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. From 1962 to 1971, Snozzi worked in association with architect Livio Vacchini. From 1982 to 1984, he was a Visiting Professor and in 1985 he was appointed Professor of Architecture at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Snozzi was a professor of the University of Sassari, at the Faculty of Architecture of Alghero, Sardinia.
Go to Profile#433
Leo Beranek
#9522
Overall Influence
1914 - 2016 (102 years)
Leo Leroy Beranek was an American acoustics expert, former MIT professor, and a founder and former president of Bolt, Beranek and Newman . He authored Acoustics, considered a classic textbook in this field, and its updated and extended version published in 2012 under the title Acoustics: Sound Fields and Transducers. He was also an expert in the design and evaluation of concert halls and opera houses, and authored the classic textbook Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, revised and extended in 2004 under the title Concert Halls and Opera Houses: Music, Acoustics, and Architecture.
Go to Profile#434
Anthony Vidler
#12376
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Anthony Vidler was an English architectural historian and critic. He was Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. Life and career Vidler was born in Mere, Wiltshire, in 1941, and grew up in Shenfield, Essex. His interest in architecture and its sociopolitical relevance began when he saw an air raid on a neighbouring town during World War II. He received a B.A. and Dipl.Arch. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Technical University Delft.
Go to Profile#435
Carlo Aymonino
#20192
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Carlo Aymonino was an Italian architect and urban planner best known for the Monte Amiata housing complex in Milan. Early life Born in Rome, he studied at the University of Rome, obtaining his degree in 1950. In the same years, he also got trained by Marcello Piacentini.
Go to Profile#436
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic
#15496
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic FRSC is a Serbian American biomedical engineer and university professor. She is a University Professor at Columbia University, as well as the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Sciences. She also heads the laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia University. She is part of the faculty at the Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Center for Human Development, both found at Columbia University. She is also an honorary professor at the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy at the University of Belgrade, an honorary p...
Go to Profile#437
David J. Mooney
#30083
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
David James Mooney is Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a founding core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#438
Kaveh Pahlavan
#10421
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kaveh Pahlavan , is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies , Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts. Pahlavan started doing research on Wi-Fi when it was in its infancy, and has worked on wireless indoor geolocation, and Body Area Networking.
Go to Profile#439
George W. Housner
#26442
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
George W. Housner was a professor of earthquake engineering at the California Institute of Technology and National Medal of Science laureate. Biography Housner received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Michigan where he was influenced by Stephen Timoshenko. He earned his masters' and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology where he had been a professor of earthquake engineering from 1945 to 1981, and Professor Emeritus thereafter.
Go to Profile#440
Rolf Landauer
#6485
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Rolf William Landauer was a German-American physicist who made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1950, and then spent most of his career at IBM.
Go to Profile#441
Abraham H. Haddad
#13854
Overall Influence
Abraham H. Haddad is an Israeli control theorist and the Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States. Haddad is known for his contributions to the theory of hybrid systems.
Go to Profile#442
Hubert Chanson
#27434
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hubert Chanson is a professional engineer and academic in hydraulic engineering and environmental fluid mechanics. Since 1990 he has worked at the University of Queensland. Research Chanson completed a PhD at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 1988.
Go to Profile#443
Huajian Gao
#19555
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Huajian Gao is a Chinese-American mechanician who is widely known for his contributions to the field of solid mechanics, particularly on the micro- and nanomechanics of thin films, hierarchically structured materials, and cell-nanomaterial interactions. He is a Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and Walter H. Annenberg Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Brown University. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.
Go to Profile#444
Andreas Gursky
#5488
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often using a high point of view. His works reach some of the highest prices in the art market among living photographers. His photograph Rhein II was sold for $4,338,500 on 8 November 2011.
Go to Profile#445
Sergei Khrushchev
#3610
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev was a Soviet-born American engineer and the second son of the Cold War-era Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with his wife Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva. He moved to the United States in 1991 and became a naturalized American citizen.
Go to Profile#446
Jesse Russell
#19067
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jesse Eugene Russell is an American inventor. He was trained as an electrical engineer at Tennessee State University and Stanford University, and worked in the field of wireless communication for over 20 years. He holds patents and continues to invent and innovate in the emerging area of next generation broadband wireless networks, technologies and services, often referred to as 4G. Russell was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of wireless communication. He pioneered the field of digital cellular communication in the 1980s through the use ...
Go to Profile#447
Max Abramovitz
#12517
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Max Abramovitz was an American architect. He was best known for his work with the New York City firm Harrison & Abramovitz. Life Abramovitz was the son of Romanian Jewish immigrant parents. He graduated in 1929 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture. While at Illinois, Abramovitz was a member of the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity. He later received an M.S. from Columbia University's architecture school in 1931. He also was the recipient of a two-year fellowship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before returning to the US and becoming partners with Wallace Harrison from 1941 to 1976.
Go to Profile#448
Roddam Narasimha
#10385
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Roddam Narasimha FRS was an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was a professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science , director of the National Aerospace Laboratories and the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research . He was the DST Year-of-Science Chair Professor at JNCASR and concurrently held the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. Narasimha was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award, in 2013. for his contributions to...
Go to Profile#449
Timothy Sands
#13804
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Timothy D. Sands is an American materials engineer, researcher and the 16th president of Virginia Tech. Sands previously served as the acting president and as the provost of Purdue University. Education Sands earned his B.S. with Highest Honors in Engineering Physics in 1980, his M.S. in Material Science and Engineering in 1981, and his Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering in 1984, all from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#450
Luc J. Van Gool
#34803
Overall Influence
