6 famous engineers of today · Elon Musk · Satya Nadella · Shuji Nakamura · Sundar Pichai · Robert S. Langer · Dr. Andrew Viterbi
6 most famous engineers in the world who are still alive
27 Feb 2025
When we think of famous engineers, the first names that most think of are the boomers and those much, much older.
Thomas Edison, for his invention of the light bulb, amongst other things. Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company for creating the assembly line. Alexander Graham Bell, credited with patenting the first practical telephone.
Sure enough, it’s not hard to see the possibilities engineers can achieve, to the point that the 2012 sci-fi film “Prometheus” calls the “Engineer” in the movie the most perfect organism, creating human life from a bio-engineered substance called black goo.
Although calling real-world engineers “perfect organisms” is a stretch, they do play an important role in the planet we live on, creating things – machines, structures, software and hardware, and many more — that power a huge part of our lives.
The most famous engineers of the 21st century have simply taken things a step further.
Shuji Nakamura
Those blue LED lights you see streamers use in their videos? It is all because of this man.
After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electronic engineering at Tokushima University, Nakamura immediately went to work in the electronics industry.
His contribution? Blue LEDs. These are tiny semiconductor devices that emit blue light when electricity passes through them. Crucially, they enabled the creation of white LED light, a discovery achieved by combining blue light with other colours or using phosphors.
This was a major breakthrough in lighting technology due to their reduction of energy consumption since these new white light sources require ten times less energy than ordinary light bulbs, thus earning him the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Today, he teaches materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.