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 female people in Computer Science,
#51
Joy Buolamwini
#8249
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Ghanaian-American-Canadian computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab. Buolamwini introduces herself as a poet of code, daughter of art and science. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League , an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence .
Go to Profile#52
Melanie Mitchell
#6901
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
Go to Profile#53
Nancy Leveson
#9094
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy G. Leveson is an American specialist in system and software safety and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, United States. Leveson gained her degrees from UCLA, including her PhD in 1980. Previously she worked at University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington as a faculty member. She has studied safety-critical systems such as the Traffic Collision Avoidance System for the avoidance of midair collisions between aircraft and problems with the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine.
Go to Profile#54
Éva Tardos
#6844
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Éva Tardos is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks. She has done some work on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory and simple auctions.
Go to Profile#55
Cynthia Solomon
#7874
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Cynthia Solomon is an American computer scientist known for her work in popularizing computer science for students. She is a pioneer in the fields of computer science, and educational computing. While working as a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Solomon took it upon herself to understand and program in the programming language Lisp. As she began learning this language, she realized the need for a programming language that was more accessible and understandable for children. Throughout her research studies in education, Solomon worked full-time as a computer teacher in elementary and secondary schools.
Go to Profile#56
Sally Floyd
#11954
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Sally Jean Floyd was an American computer scientist known for her work on computer networking. Formerly associated with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she retired in 2009 and died in August 2019. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control, and was in 2007 one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.
Go to Profile#57
Charlotte Froese Fischer
#8503
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.
Go to Profile#58
Dorothy E. Denning
#10417
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Dorothy Elizabeth Denning is a US-American information security researcher known for lattice-based access control , intrusion detection systems , and other cyber security innovations. She published four books and over 200 articles. Inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2012, she is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School.
Go to Profile#59
Virginia Vassilevska Williams
#8749
Overall Influence
Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.
Go to Profile#60
Daniela L. Rus
#11571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#61
Isabelle Guyon
#13448
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Isabelle Guyon is a French-born researcher in machine learning known for her work on support-vector machines, artificial neural networks and bioinformatics. She is a Chair Professor at the University of Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#62
Margo Seltzer
#11723
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.
Go to Profile#63
Jenny Preece
#13553
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jenny Preece is an American academic who is the Dean Emerita of the College of Information Studies, a Professor at the University of Maryland, and a member of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She researches online communities and is known for her work on what makes such a community successful, and how usability factors interact with sociability in online communities.
Go to Profile#64
Carol E. Reiley
#7268
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine,...
Go to Profile#65
Marti Hearst
#14023
Overall Influence
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word sense disambiguation. She invented an algorithm that became known as "Hearst patterns" which applies lexico-syntactic patterns to recognize hyponymy relations with high accuracy in large text collections, including an early application of it to WordNet; this algorithm is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning. Hearst al...
Go to Profile#66
Maria Klawe
#6982
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Maria Margaret Klawe is a computer scientist and the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College . Born in Toronto in 1951, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. She was previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is known for her advocacy for women in STEM fields.
Go to Profile#67
Dawn Song
#10608
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Dawn Song is a Chinese American academic and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2010.
Go to Profile#68
Frances Spence
#5009
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Frances V. Spence was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC . She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.
Go to Profile#69
Irene Greif
#10049
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Irene Greif is an American computer scientist and a founder of the field of computer-supported cooperative work . She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#70
Stephanie Forrest
#12736
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephanie Forrest is an American computer scientist and director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. She was previously Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is best known for her work in adaptive systems, including genetic algorithms, computational immunology, biological modeling, automated software repair, and computer security.
Go to Profile#71
Joyce K. Reynolds
#10138
Overall Influence
1952 - 2015 (63 years)
Joyce Kathleen Reynolds was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.
Go to Profile#72
Stephanie Seneff
#7231
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Working primarily in the Spoken Language Systems group, her research at CSAIL relates to human-computer interaction, and algorithms for language understanding and speech recognition. In 2011, she began publishing controversial papers in low-impact, open access journals on biology and medical topics; the articles have received "heated objections from experts in almost every field she's delved into," according to the food columnist Ari Le...
Go to Profile#73
Rosemary Candlin
#15234
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Rosemary Candlin is a crystallographer and computer scientist who joined the University of Edinburgh Computer Science Department shortly after it was first established, and for some time was the only woman lecturer on the staff. She worked there from 1968 to 1995, helped design the curriculum in its early years, and developed a specialist interest in parallel programming. She then went on to work for CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Go to Profile#74
Julia Hirschberg
#14911
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
Go to Profile#75
Deborah Estrin
#11426
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013. Estrin is known for her work on sensor networks, participatory sensing, mobile health, and small data. She is one of the most-referenced computer scientists of all time, with her work cited over 128,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#76
Regina Barzilay
#11797
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Go to Profile#77
Christiane Floyd
#15653
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christiane Floyd is an Austrian computer scientist. In 1978, she became the first female professor of computer science in Germany, and was a pioneer of evolutionary participatory software design—a precursor to open-source software development.
Go to Profile#78
Sheila Greibach
#13505
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sheila Adele Greibach is an American researcher in formal languages in computing, automata, compiler theory and computer science. She is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and notable work include working with Seymour Ginsburg and Michael A. Harrison in context-sensitive parsing using the stack automaton model.
Go to Profile#79
Colette Rolland
#14057
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Colette Rolland is a French computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science in the department of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and a leading researcher in the area of information and knowledge systems, known for her work on meta-modeling, particularly goal modelling and situational method engineering.
Go to Profile#80
Katia Sycara
#5329
Overall Influence
Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
Go to Profile#81
Rosalind Picard
#7374
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Rosalind Wright Picard is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica.
Go to Profile#82
Barbara J. Grosz
#15053
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
Go to Profile#83
Lois Haibt
#10162
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Lois B. Mitchell Haibt is an American computer scientist best known for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. She is known as an early pioneer in computer science.
Go to Profile#84
Cecilia Berdichevsky
#12569
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Cecilia Berdichevsky or Berdichevski was a pioneering Argentinian computer scientist and began her work in 1961 using the first Ferranti Mercury computer in that country. Biography She was born Mirjam Tuwjasz on 30 March 1925 in Vidzy, at that time part of Poland, now Belarus.
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Jen Golbeck
#14221
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Jennifer Golbeck is a computer scientist. She currently is a professor at the College of Information Studies, an affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department, and an affiliate professor in the Journalism Department, all at the University of Maryland, College Park. Golbeck was director of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab from 2011 to 2014.
Go to Profile#86
Hava Siegelmann
#19029
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hava Siegelmann is an American computer scientist and Provost Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography Siegelmann earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University under Eduardo Sontag. Her dissertation was on the topic of Hypercomputation. She earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science at Hebrew University and a B.A. in Computer Science at the Technion .
Go to Profile#87
Bonnie Berger
#8181
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Go to Profile#88
Carolyn Talcott
#13058
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carolyn Talcott is an American computer scientist known for work in formal reasoning, especially as it relates to computers, cryptanalysis and systems biology. She is currently the program director of the Symbolic Systems Biology group at SRI International.
Go to Profile#89
Julie Beth Lovins
#14791
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Julie Beth Lovins was a computational linguist who published The Lovins Stemming Algorithm - a type of stemming algorithm for word matching - in 1968. The Lovins Stemmer is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release, having been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al
Go to Profile#90
Winifred Asprey
#14838
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Winifred "Tim" Alice Asprey was an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was one of only around 200 women to earn PhDs in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s, a period of women's underrepresentation in mathematics at this level. She was involved in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar.
Go to Profile#91
Dana Ron
#19914
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Dana Ron Goldreich is a computer scientist, a professor of electrical engineering at the Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Ron is one of the pioneers of research in property testing, and a leading researcher in that area.
Go to Profile#92
Anja Feldmann
#13950
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Anja Feldmann is a German computer scientist. Education and career Feldmann studied computer science at Universität Paderborn and received her degree in 1990. She continued her studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her M.Sc. in 1991 and her Ph.D. in 1995. Following four years of postdoctoral work at AT&T Labs Research, she held research positions at Saarland University and Technical University Munich.
Go to Profile#93
Cecilia R. Aragon
#18898
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, author, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers .
Go to Profile#94
Mary Allen Wilkes
#15090
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Mary Allen Wilkes is a lawyer, former computer programmer and logic designer, known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first "personal computer". Career Wilkes was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 where she majored in philosophy and theology. Wilkes planned to become a lawyer, but was discouraged by friends and mentors from pursuing law because of the challenges women faced in the field. A geography teacher in the eighth grade had told Wilkes, "Mary Allen, when you grow up, you ought to be a computer programmer." Sh...
Go to Profile#95
Annie Easley
#11313
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energ...
Go to Profile#96
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#97
Mary Lee Woods
#8389
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
Go to Profile#98
Mary Shaw
#14119
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mary Shaw is an American software engineer, and the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work in the field of software architecture.
Go to Profile#99
Rachel Harrison
#26799
Overall Influence
Rachel Harrison is a British computer scientist and software engineer whose research interests include mobile apps and object-oriented design. She is a professor of computer science at Oxford Brookes University.
Go to Profile#100
Yael Tauman Kalai
#20074
Overall Influence
Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and as an adjunct professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
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