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,
#1
Frank Gehry
#46
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Frank Owen Gehry is a Canadian-born American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become world-renowned attractions.
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Philip Johnson
#135
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks. In his obituary in 2005, The New York Times wrote that his works "were widely considered among the architectural masterpieces of the 20th century."
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Oscar Niemeyer
#100
Overall Influence
1907 - 2012 (105 years)
Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho , known as Oscar Niemeyer , was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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Claude Shannon
#14
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
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John Bardeen
#77
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
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Robert Venturi
#368
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Robert Charles Venturi Jr. was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures of the twentieth century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings, and teaching have also contributed to the expansion of discourse about architecture.
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Rem Koolhaas
#331
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#8
Renzo Piano
#248
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris , The Shard in London , the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City , İstanbul Modern in Istanbul and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens . He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.
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Zaha Hadid
#326
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi and British architect, artist and designer, recognized as a major figure in architecture of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Hadid studied mathematics as an undergraduate and then enrolled at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1972. In search of an alternative system to traditional architectural drawing, and influenced by Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde, Hadid adopted painting as a design tool and abstraction as an investigative principle to "reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of ...
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Neil Armstrong
#91
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who in 1969 became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. Armstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He entered Purdue University, studying aeronautical engineering, with the U.S. Navy paying his tuition under the Holloway Plan. He became a midshipman in 1949 and a naval aviator the following year. He saw action in the Korean War, flying the Grumman F9F Panther from the aircraft carrier . After the war, he completed his bachelor's degree at Purdue...
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Peter Eisenman
#467
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Peter David Eisenman is an American architect, writer, and professor. Considered one of the New York Five, Eisenman is known for his high modernist and deconstructive designs, as well as for his authorship of several architectural books. His work has won him several awards, including the Wolf Prize in Arts.
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Deke Slayton
#343
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton was a United States Air Force pilot, aeronautical engineer, and test pilot who was selected as one of the original NASA Mercury Seven astronauts. He went on to become NASA's first Chief of the Astronaut Office and Director of Flight Crew Operations, responsible for NASA crew assignments.
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W. Edwards Deming
#187
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
William Edwards Deming was an American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, and writer. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the United States Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is also known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan. He is best known for his theories of management.
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J. Presper Eckert
#329
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer , presented the first course in computing topics , founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay-line memory.
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Heinz von Foerster
#309
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.
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Lotfi A. Zadeh
#301
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of several fuzzy-related concepts: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy semantics, fuzzy languages, fuzzy control, fuzzy systems, fuzzy probabilities, fuzzy events, and fuzzy information. Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.
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I. M. Pei
#231
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Raised in Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but he quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, and spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
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Jim Lovell
#291
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
James Arthur Lovell Jr. is an American retired astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
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Santiago Calatrava
#445
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Santiago Calatrava Valls is a Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter, particularly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms. His best-known works include the Olympic Sports Complex of Athens, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City, the Auditorio de Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, and his largest project, the City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House in his birthplace, Valencia.
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Richard Rogers
#633
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Richard George Rogers, Baron Rogers of Riverside, was a British-Italian architect noted for his modernist and constructivist designs in high-tech architecture. He was a senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, previously known as the Richard Rogers Partnership, until June 2020.
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Daniel Libeskind
#436
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Libeskind is a Polish-American architect, artist, professor and set designer. Libeskind founded Studio Daniel Libeskind in 1989 with his wife, Nina, and is its principal design architect. He is known for the design and completion of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, that opened in 2001. On February 27, 2003, Libeskind received further international attention after he won the competition to be the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.
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Jørn Utzon
#891
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jørn Oberg Utzon was a Danish architect. In 1957, he won an international design competition for his design of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Utzon's revised design, which he completed in 1961, was the basis for the landmark, although it was not completed until 1973.
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Christopher Alexander
#380
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.
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Hans Moravec
#164
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Peter Moravec is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in computer vision for determining the region of interest in a scene.
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Jack Kilby
#303
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Jack St. Clair Kilby was an American electrical engineer who took part in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10, 2000.
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Tadao Ando
#752
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Tadao Ando is a Japanese autodidact architect whose approach to architecture and landscape was categorized by architectural historian Francesco Dal Co as "critical regionalism". He is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize.
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Stafford Beer
#438
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
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Michael Graves
#903
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Michael Graves was an American architect, designer, and educator, and principal of Michael Graves and Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. He was a member of The New York Five and the Memphis Group and a professor of architecture at Princeton University for nearly forty years. Following his own partial paralysis in 2003, Graves became an internationally recognized advocate of health care design.
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Denise Scott Brown
#1364
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Scott Brown and her husband and partner, Robert Venturi , are regarded as among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and theoretical writing and teaching.
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Aldo Rossi
#1502
Overall Influence
1931 - 1997 (66 years)
Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international recognition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design and also product design. He was one of the leading proponents of the postmodern movement.
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Kenneth Frampton
#1782
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Kenneth Brian Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He is regarded as one of the world's leading historians of modernist and contemporary architecture. He is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York, where he taught for over 50 years. He is a citizen of Britain and the United States.
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Jean Nouvel
#479
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jean Nouvel is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture, France’s first labor union for architects. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture , the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work.
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Rudolf E. Kálmán
#1145
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Rudolf Emil Kálmán was a Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical algorithm that is widely used in signal processing, control systems, and guidance, navigation and control. For this work, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Kálmán the National Medal of Science on October 7, 2009.
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Frei Otto
#1740
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Frei Paul Otto was a German architect and structural engineer noted for his use of lightweight structures, in particular tensile and membrane structures, including the roof of the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics.
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Douglas Engelbart
#136
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
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Marcian Hoff
#784
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. is one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Education and work history Hoff received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1958. He applied for his first two patents based on work done for the General Railway Signal Corp. of Rochester, New York during the summers of his undergraduate study. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to enroll in Stanford University, where he received his master's degree in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Hoff co-invented the least m...
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Bob Ludwig
#237
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert C. Ludwig is an American mastering engineer. He mastered recordings on all the major recording formats for all the major record labels, and on projects by more than 1,300 artists including Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney, Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen and Daft Punk resulting in over 3,000 credits. He is the recipient of numerous Grammy and other awards. In 2023, Ludwig announced his retirement.
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Robert Samuel Langer, Jr.
#2232
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng is an American biotechnologist, businessman, chemical engineer, chemist, and inventor. He is one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Amnon Yariv
#4415
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Amnon Yariv is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics. Yariv obtained his B.S., M.S. and PhD. in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1954, 1956 and 1958, respectively.
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Ivan Sutherland
#162
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
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Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank
#637
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, is a British architect and designer. Closely associated with the development of high-tech architecture, Foster is recognised as a key figure in British modernist architecture. His architectural practice Foster + Partners, first founded in 1967 as Foster Associates, is the largest in the United Kingdom, and maintains offices internationally. He is the president of the Norman Foster Foundation, created to 'promote interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists to anticipate the future'. The foundation, which opened in June 2017, is based in Madrid and operates globally.
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Moshe Safdie
#870
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Moshe Safdie is an Israeli architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. He is known for incorporating principles of socially responsible design throughout the course of his six-decade career. His projects include cultural, educational, and civic institutions; neighborhoods and public parks; housing; mixed-use urban centers; airports; and master plans for existing communities and entirely new cities in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. Safdie is most identified with designing Marina Bay Sands and Jewel Changi Airport, as well as his debut project Habitat 67, which was originally conceived as his thesis at McGill University.
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Bob Kahn
#271
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol , the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
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Arata Isozaki
#1533
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Arata Isozaki was a Japanese architect, urban designer, and theorist from Ōita. He was awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1986 and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2019. He taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and Yale University.
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Frank Whittle
#828
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, was an English engineer, inventor and Royal Air Force air officer. He is credited with having invented the turbojet engine. A patent was submitted by Maxime Guillaume in 1921 for a similar invention which was technically unfeasible at the time. Whittle's jet engines were developed some years earlier than those of Germany's Hans von Ohain, who designed the first-to-fly turbojet engine.
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Steven Holl
#1621
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Steven Holl is a New York–based American architect and watercolorist. His work includes the 2022 Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study; the 2020 Campus expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston including the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building and Glassell School of Art; the 2019 REACH expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the 2019 Hunters Point Library in Queens, New York; the 2007 Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and the 2009 Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.
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Mike Massimino
#4488
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael James Massimino is an American professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University and a former NASA astronaut. He is the senior advisor of space programs at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
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Bernard Tschumi
#1877
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bernard Tschumi is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French-Swiss national who works and lives in New York City and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969.
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Kevin Warwick
#485
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
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Abdul Qadeer Khan
#351
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Abdul Qadeer Khan, , known as A. Q. Khan, was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and metallurgical engineer who is colloquially known as the "father of Pakistan's atomic weapons program". An émigré from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1952, Khan was educated in the metallurgical engineering departments of Western European technical universities where he pioneered studies in phase transitions of metallic alloys, uranium metallurgy, and isotope separation based on gas centrifuges. After learning of India's "Smiling Buddha" nuclear test in 1974, Khan joined his nation's clandestine efforts to deve...
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