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,
#451
Willi H. Hager
#27968
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Willi H. Hager is a Swiss civil engineer and Professor at the ETH Zurich, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, known for his work on hydraulics. Biography Born in 1951, Hager obtained his engineering degree from the ETH Zurich in 1976, were in 1981 he also obtained his PhD at its VAW Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology.
Go to Profile#452
Carme Pinós
#19901
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Carme Pinós is a Spanish architect. Biography Pinós graduated Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in Barcelona in 1979 and returned to the school in 1981 to study Urbanism. From 1982 on she formed a partnership with her husband, Enric Miralles, which ended in 1991. During this period the projects developed include the Igualada Cemetery Park, the Archery Range Buildings for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games and the La Llauna School in Badalona. The work of Pinós-Miralles received awards on several occasions, including the FAD prize for the La Llauna School and the Igualada Cemet...
Go to Profile#453
Frank Ching
#23826
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Francis D. K. "Frank" Ching is an architecture and design graphics writer. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. Ching was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He received his B.Arch. from the University of Notre Dame in 1966. After several years of practice, in 1972 he joined the faculty at Ohio University to teach drawing. To support his lectures in architectural graphics, Ching hand-drew and hand-lettered his lecture notes. Department chairman Forrest Wilson presented these notes to the publisher, Van Nostrand Reinhold, and they were published in 1975, in an edited version, as Architectural Graphics, a book now in its sixth edition.
Go to Profile#454
Krishna Saraswat
#23825
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Krishna Saraswat is a professor in Stanford Department of Electrical Engineering in the United States. He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in engineering, placing him in the top 250 worldwide in engineering research, and a recipient of IEEE's Andrew S. Grove Award for "seminal contributions to silicon process technology".
Go to Profile#455
Masanobu Shinozuka
#30389
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Masanobu Shinozuka was a Japanese applied mechanics expert in earthquake and structural engineering. Shinozuka's research focuses on field theory and risk assessment methodology in civil engineering. His works have been applied numerously in earthquake engineering in buildings, bridges, lifeline and environmental systems.
Go to Profile#456
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#9367
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory. Early life and education Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Afterwards, Sugimoto settled in New York City.
Go to Profile#457
Peter Latz
#13797
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Peter Latz is a German landscape architect and a professor for landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich. He is best known for his emphasis on reclamation and conversion of former industrialized landscapes. Retired today, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and was also a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Go to Profile#458
Adrian Bowyer
#11927
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Adrian Bowyer is an English engineer and mathematician, formerly an academic at the University of Bath. Born in 1952 in London, Bowyer is the older child of the late Rosemary and John Bowyer; the latter was a writer, painter and one of the founders of Zisman, Bowyer and Partners, consulting engineers. Bowyer was educated at Woodroffe School, Lyme Regis and Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#459
Jawad Salehi
#13187
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jawad A. Salehi, IEEE Fellow & Optica Fellow, born in Kazemain , Iraq, on December 22, 1956, is an Iranian electrical and computer engineer, pioneer of optical code division multiple access and a highly cited researcher. He is also a board member of Academy of Sciences of Iran and a fellow of Islamic World Academy of Sciences. He was also elected as a member of Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame in Electrical Engineering, October 2010.
Go to Profile#460
Jaap Haartsen
#11784
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jacobus "Jaap" Cornelis Haartsen is a Dutch electrical engineer, researcher, inventor and entrepreneur best known for being credited as the inventor of Bluetooth. He obtained his Master of Science degree in 1986 in electrical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. After a brief period at Siemens in The Hague and Philips in Eindhoven, he continued his studies and in 1990 obtained a PhD degree from the Delft University of Technology defending the thesis titled Programmable surface acoustic wave detection in silicon: design of programmable filters. Since 1991 he worked for Ericsson, first in United States between 1991 and 1993 and later, between 1993 and 1997, in Sweden.
Go to Profile#461
Saul Amarel
#11181
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Saul Amarel was a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and best known for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence . He also had a career as a scientist, engineer, and teacher. He was a contributor to advanced computing and AI methodologies, both applied to scientific inquiry as well as engineering practice.
Go to Profile#462
Kazuo Shinohara
#17725
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Kazuo Shinohara was a Japanese architect, forming what is now widely known as the "Shinohara School", which has been linked to the works of Toyo Ito, Kazunari Sakamoto and Itsuko Hasegawa. As architectural critic Thomas Daniell put it, "A key figure who explicitly rejected Western influences yet appears on almost every branch of the family tree of contemporary Japanese architecture... is Kazuo Shinohara... His effects on the discipline as a theorist, designer and teacher have been immense." He studied at Tokyo Institute of Technology, finishing in 1953, and going on to become professor in 1970.
Go to Profile#463
A. Michael Noll
#3681
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
A. Michael Noll is an American engineer, and professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He served as dean of the Annenberg School from 1992 to 1994. He was a very early pioneer in digital computer art and 3D animation and tactile communication.
Go to Profile#464
Paola Antonelli
#16123
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Paola Antonelli is an Italian architect, curator, author, editor, and educator. Antonelli is the Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art , New York, where she also serves as the founding Director of Research and Development. She has been described as "one of the 25 most incisive design visionaries in the world" by TIME magazine.
Go to Profile#465
John L. Moll
#16446
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
John Louis Moll was an American electrical engineer, notable for his contributions to solid-state physics. Biography Moll was born in Wauseon, Ohio, and obtained a B.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University in 1943 and 1952 respectively. The Ebers-Moll transistor model, and the theory of the p-n-p-n switch, came from this effort.
Go to Profile#466
Robert Haralick
#21311
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert M. Haralick is Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Graduate Center of the City University of New York . Haralick is one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition, and image analysis. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow and past president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Professor Haralick is the King-Sun Fu Prize winner of 2016, "for contributions in image analysis, including remote sensing, texture analysis, mathematical morphology, consistent labeling, and system performance ev...
Go to Profile#467
Hugh Casson
#8499
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson was a British architect. He was also active as an interior designer, as an artist, and as a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 1976 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Academy.
Go to Profile#468
Paul Chemetov
#9437
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Paul Chemetov is a French architect and urbanist. He is best known for his collaborations with Borja Huidobro. Biography Chemetov was born in Paris on 6 September 1928. As a student, he belonged to the Union of Communist Students. He graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in 1959. Chemetov taught at the École des Ponts ParisTech until 1989, at which time he switched to the . In 1961, he joined the AAU. He has designed several buildings with Borja Huidobro since 1983. Chemetov has received several awards and honors including the Grand prix national de l'architecture , Officer of the Legion of Honour, Officer of the , and Officer of the .
Go to Profile#469
K. Michael Hays
#21538
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kenneth Michael Hays is an American architectural historian and professor. He currently serves as Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is also co-director of the school's doctoral programs, namely Ph.D and DDes or Doctor of Design.
Go to Profile#470
Paul M. Naghdi
#26151
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Paul Mansour Naghdi was a professor of mechanical engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Paul Naghdi was born in Tehran on March 29, 1924. In 1943, in order to pursue his education, he undertook a perilous voyage to the United States, during which he helped navigate the ship. He studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University and graduated in January 1946. After a short period in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, he enrolled in the graduate program in the engineering mechanics department of the University of Michigan in the summer of 1946. He was granted U.S.
Go to Profile#471
Chen Guanrong
#25374
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Guanrong Chen or Ron Chen is a Chinese mathematician who made contributions to Chaos theory. He has been the chair professor and the founding director of the Centre for Chaos and Complex Networks at the City University of Hong Kong since 2000. Prior to that, he was a tenured full professor at the University of Houston, Texas. Chen was elected Member of the Academy of Europe in 2014, elected Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences in 2015, and elected IEEE Fellow in 1997. He is currently the editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.
Go to Profile#472
Brian Launder
#23259
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Brian Edward Launder, FRS, FREng is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He is known for his work in the field of turbulent flows in general and turbulence modelling in particular. In 1994, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#473
Sujoy K. Guha
#12779
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sujoy Kumar Guha is an Indian biomedical engineer. He was born in Patna, India, 20 June 1940. He did his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, followed by a master's degree in electrical engineering at IIT, and another master's degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Guha later received his Ph.D. in medical physiology from St. Louis University.
Go to Profile#474
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli
#15872
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alberto Luigi Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is an Italian-American computer scientist. He currently sits on the board of directors of Cadence Design Systems, an EDA company he co-founded in 1988. Biography Born in Milan, Italy, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli received his master of science degree in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1971. In 1976, he moved to University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and holds the position of Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair and serves as a full professor.
Go to Profile#475
Oussama Khatib
#19985
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Oussama Khatib is a roboticist and a professor of computer science at Stanford University, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He is credited with seminal work in areas ranging from robot motion planning and control, human-friendly robot design, to haptic interaction and human motion synthesis. His work's emphasis has been to develop theories, algorithms, and technologies, that control robot systems by using models of their physical dynamics. These dynamic models are used to derive optimal controllers for complex robots that interact with the environment in real-time.
Go to Profile#476
Eric Fossum
#11651
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#477
Joseph Wang
#12542
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Joseph Wang is an American biomedical engineer and inventor. He is a Distinguished Professor, SAIC Endowed Chair, and former Chair of the Department of Nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego, who specialised in nanomachines, biosensors, nano-bioelectronics, wearable devices, and electrochemistry. He is also the Director of the UCSD Center of Wearable Sensors and co-director of the UCSD Center of Mobile Health Systems and Applications .
Go to Profile#478
Amos Horev
#10323
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Amos Horev is an Israeli military official and expert. He served as a commander in the Palmach the elite force of the Haganah before the founding of the state, and was later an Israeli Defense Forces Major-General, Chief of Ordnance and subsequently Quartermaster General and Chief Scientist of the IDF, nuclear scientist, President of Technion University, and Chairman of Rafael. In June 2010, he was appointed to the Israeli special independent Turkel Commission of Inquiry into the Gaza flotilla raid.
Go to Profile#479
Eric Owen Moss
#12809
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eric Owen Moss practices architecture with his eponymously named LA-based firm founded in 1973. Education Moss was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965, his Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in 1968 and a second Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972.
Go to Profile#480
Yoky Matsuoka
#9393
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Yoky Matsuoka is the CEO and Founder of Yohana . She was the CTO of Google Nest, a co-founder of Google X and previously held roles as VP of Technology and Analytics at Twitter, technology executive at Apple, and as VP of Technology at Nest.
Go to Profile#481
Nick McKeown
#12225
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Nicholas William McKeown FREng, is a Senior Fellow at Intel, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon Valley.
Go to Profile#482
Siavash Teimouri
#13943
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Siavash Teimouri is an Iranian architect, artist and scholar. Born in Tehran, Iran, he graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran with the highest mark under the supervision of Hooshang Seyhoun. He was then granted a scholarship to pursue his education in France in 1962, where he studied at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and graduated with a Diploma of Architecture in 1969 under the supervision of Le Corbusier. He worked with world-class architects of his time and received the French Association Architects' Prize in 1967. He is a member of the French Society of...
Go to Profile#483
Michael M. Watkins
#20982
Overall Influence
Michael M. Watkins is an American engineer, scientist, and a Professor of Aerospace and Geophysics at the California Institute of Technology . He previously served as the 9th director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and as a vice president of Caltech, which staffs and manages JPL for NASA. His directorial position was effective from July 1, 2016 to August 20, 2021.
Go to Profile#484
Markus Breitschmid
#14330
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Markus Breitschmid is an American architectural theoretician, architect, and the author of several books on contemporary architecture and philosophical aesthetics. His most highly regarded books are Der bauende Geist. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Architektur , The Significance of the Idea , and Non-Referential Architecture . His writings have been translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. Breitschmid has been invited to contribute to the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Architecture Biennale of Chicago, the Salone Internationale del Mobile di Milano in Milan, and the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon.
Go to Profile#485
Donald Pederson
#18770
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Donald Oscar Pederson was an American professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the designers of SPICE, a simulator for integrated circuits that has been universally used as a teaching tool and in the everyday work of circuits engineers. The IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits is named in his honor.
Go to Profile#486
Bashirul Haq
#24960
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Bashirul Haq was a Bangladeshi architect, town planner and visiting professor of MIT. He was regarded as one of the most influential architects in South Asia in terms of environmentally and socially responsive design.
Go to Profile#487
Masayoshi Esashi
#20962
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Masayoshi Esashi is an engineer. He is a global authority of Microelectromechanical systems and serves as the professor of the Tohoku University graduate school engineering graduate course. Born in Sendai, Japan, in 1949, Masayoshi Esashi received his B.E. degree in electronic engineering in 1971 and a Doctor of Engineering degree in 1976 at Tohoku University.
Go to Profile#488
Stephen H. Crandall
#33881
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Stephen Harry Crandall was a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He earned his master's degree in engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and his Ph.D. from MIT. He joined the MIT faculty in 1946 and taught dynamics and strength of materials until his retirement in 1991. He was a prolific author of texts in solid mechanics, numerical methods, and random vibration. His mentor at MIT was J. P. Den Hartog. He was awarded the Timoshenko Medal in 1990 "in recognition of distinguished contributions to the field of applied mechanics." He was elected to the...
Go to Profile#489
Gunnar Birkerts
#11212
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Gunnar Birkerts was a Latvian American architect who, for most of his career, was based in the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan. Some of his notable designs include the Corning Museum of Glass and the Corning Fire Station in Corning, New York; Marquette Plaza in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela.
Go to Profile#490
Dan M. Frangopol
#20224
Overall Influence
Dan Mircea Frangopol is an American civil engineer and the inaugural holder of the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#491
Amos Rapoport
#10696
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Amos Rapoport is an architect and one of the founders of Environment-Behavior Studies . He is the author of over 200 academic publications in this field, including books that have been translated into foreign languages, including French, Spanish, German, Persian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. He has held honorable and visiting positions in many universities around the globe, is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Go to Profile#492
John Andrews
#12439
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
John Hamilton Andrews was an Australian architect, known for designing a number of acclaimed structures in Australia, Canada and the United States. He was Australia's first internationally recognised architect, and the 1980 RAIA Gold Medalist. He died peacefully in his hometown of Orange on 24 March 2022.
Go to Profile#493
Jacob Rubinovitz
#16630
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Jacob Rubinovitz is an Israeli scientist. He was the head of the Laboratory for robotics and Computer Integrated Manufacturing at the Technion. Biography Rubinovitz was born in Łódź, Poland, 6 September 1947. In 1957 he moved to Israel, in Aliath Gomulka, in the movement of Jews from Poland to Israel which started in 1956, after the Polish October. He graduated from the Faculty of Industrial engineering and Management at the Technion. From 1969 to 1973 he was a senior systems analyst at Mamram and senior systems analyst at Control Data . He managed the industrial software team and initially...
Go to Profile#494
Laurie Olin
#15291
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Laurie Olin is an American landscape architect. He has worked on landscape design projects at diverse scales, from private residential gardens to public parks and corporate/museum campus plans. Early life Olin grew up in Alaska, and earned his degree in Architecture from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was mentored under Richard Haag.
Go to Profile#495
Yoshihisa Okumura
#20774
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Yoshihisa Okumura was a Japanese engineer, known for development of cellular telephone networks. His radio survey of signal strength as a function of distance as measured in drive tests in automobiles was critical to the system planning of mobile radio telephone systems.
Go to Profile#496
Charles M. Vest
#19059
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Charles "Chuck" Marstiller Vest was an American mechanical engineer and academic administrator. He served as President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from October 1990 until December 2004. He succeeded Paul Gray and was succeeded by Susan Hockfield. He served as president of the National Academy of Engineering from 2007 to 2013.
Go to Profile#497
Giovanni De Micheli
#21015
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Giovanni De Micheli is Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems Centre at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Switzerland. He is program leader of the Nano-Tera.ch program. Previously, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a Nuclear Engineer degree , a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science under Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.
Go to Profile#498
Shankar Sastry
#27016
Overall Influence
S. Shankar Sastry is the Founding Chancellor of the Plaksha University, Mohali and a former Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. From 1996-1999, he was the director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley. From 1999-early 2001, he was on leave from Berkeley as director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . He has served as chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciencess, University of California, Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004. From 2004 to 2007 he was the director of CITRIS ...
Go to Profile#499
Hamid Nawab
#6341
Overall Influence
S. Hamid Nawab is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University who is a researcher, educator, and engineer in the signal processing and machine perception subfields of Electrical Engineering and their application to the machine/computer analysis of complex biosignals from auditory, speech, and neuromuscular systems.
Go to Profile#500
Mary Cunningham Boyce
#26359
Overall Influence
Mary Cunningham Boyce is a professor of engineering at Columbia University. She was provost of Columbia University from July 2021 to June 2023. Previously, she was dean of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2013 to 2021.
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