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,
#601
Tara Javidi
#72487
Overall Influence
Tara Javidi is an Iranian electrical engineer and computer scientist who studies networked information, stochastic control, machine learning, hypothesis testing, network optimization, and network routing, among other topics. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where she co-directs the Center for Machine-Integrated Computing and Security with Farinaz Koushanfar.
Go to Profile#602
Kristin Lauter
#50887
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Kristin Estella Lauter is an American mathematician and cryptographer whose research interest is broadly in application of number theory and algebraic geometry in cryptography. She is particularly known for her work in the area of elliptic curve cryptography. She was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, from 1999–2021 and the head of the Cryptography Group from 2008–2021; her group developed Microsoft SEAL. In April 2021, Lauter joined Facebook AI Research as the West Coast Head of Research Science. She became the President-Elect of the Association for Women in Mathema...
Go to Profile#603
Paula Bonta
#94801
Overall Influence
Paula Bonta is an Argentinian-Canadian computer scientist and educational software designer. She is known for developing programming environments for children, most notably contributing to the design of the Scratch programming language before it was even called Scratch. She co-founded the Playful Invention Company, a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab noted for developing the Programmable Cricket, with Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman and serves as Lead Designer. She was also the design director for several award-winning software products for children, including MicroWorlds and the "My Make Believe" series of products from Logo Computer Systems, Inc.
Go to Profile#604
Orna Grumberg
#52610
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Orna Grumberg is an Israeli computer scientist and academic, the Leumi Chair of Science at the Technion. Grumberg is noted for developing model checking, a method for formally verifying hardware and software designs. With Edmund M. Clarke and Doron A. Peled, she is the author of the book Model Checking .
Go to Profile#605
Andrea Fraser
#15312
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Andrea Rose Fraser is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of Institutional Critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#606
Natasha Noy
#98688
Overall Influence
Natasha Fridman Noy is a Russian-born American Research scientist who works at Google Research in Mountain View, CA, who focuses on making structured data more accessible and usable. She is the team leader for Dataset Search, a web-based search engine for all datasets. Natasha worked at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research before joining Google, where she made significant contributions to ontology building and alignment, as well as collaborative ontology engineering. Natasha is on the Editorial Boards of many Semantic Web and Information Systems publications and is the Immediate Past President of the Semantic Web Science Association.
Go to Profile#607
Laura Fabbri
#112236
Overall Influence
#608
Tanja Schultz
#93806
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tanja Schultz is a German computer scientist specializing in speech processing. She is professor of computer science at the University of Bremen and the former president of the International Speech Communication Association.
Go to Profile#609
Bettina Speckmann
#65115
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Bettina Speckmann is a German computer scientist who heads the Applied Geometric Algorithms group in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology in Eindhoven, Netherlands, where she is a professor. The main topics of her research are computational geometry and information visualization, especially focusing on the geometry and visualization of objects in motion.
Go to Profile#610
Beena Pillai
#43316
Overall Influence
Beena Ramakrishnan Pillai is an Indian microbiologist, geneticist, and a scientist at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology. She is known for her studies on gene regulation influenced by small RNA and histone variants and is a recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Young Scientist Medal of the INSA. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded her the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for her contributions to biosciences, in 2017–18.
Go to Profile#611
Finale Doshi-Velez
#97138
Overall Influence
Finale Doshi-Velez is a computer scientist and the John L. Loeb Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She works on machine learning, computational statistics and healthcare.
Go to Profile#612
Priya Narasimhan
#86322
Overall Influence
Priya Narasimhan is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is also the CEO and founder of YinzCam, a U.S.-based technology company that provides the mobile fan experience for a number of professional sports teams and leagues in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Go to Profile#613
Diana Marculescu
#93358
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Diana Marculescu is the Department Chair and Motorola Regents Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering #2 at the University of Texas at Austin. She was formerly the David Edward Schramm Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the first female chair in the department's history.
Go to Profile#614
Salima Hashmi
#15680
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Salima Hashmi is a Pakistanii painter, artist, former college professor, anti-nuclear weapons activist and former caretaker minister in Sethi caretaker ministry. She has served for four years as a professor and the dean of National College of Arts. She is the eldest daughter of the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British-born wife Alys Faiz.
Go to Profile#615
Qing Zhao
#79706
Overall Influence
Qing Zhao is the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell, she held positions as a Systems Engineer at Aware, Incorporated and on the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at the University of California at Davis. She is expert on sequential decision-making under uncertainty with a focus on infrastructure networks and communication systems.
Go to Profile#616
Yoonkyung Lee
#97581
Overall Influence
Yoonkyung Lee is a professor of statistics at Ohio State University, and also holds a courtesy appointment in computer science and engineering at Ohio State. Her research takes a statistical approach to kernel methods, dimensionality reduction, and regularization in machine learning.
Go to Profile#617
Meral Özsoyoglu
#51553
Overall Influence
Zehra Meral Özsoyoglu is a Turkish-American computer scientist specializing in databases, including research on query languages, database model, and indexes, and applications of databases in science, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. She is the Andrew R. Jennings Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University.
Go to Profile#618
Sharon Goldwater
#99168
Overall Influence
Sharon J. Goldwater is an American and British computer scientist, cognitive scientist, developmental linguist, and natural language processing researcher who holds the Personal Chair of Computational Language Learning in the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Her research involves the unsupervised learning of language by computers, and computer modeling of language development in children.
Go to Profile#619
Aidong Zhang
#92736
Overall Influence
Aidong Zhang is a computer scientist whose research topics include machine learning and bioinformatics. She is William Wulf Faculty Fellow and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where she also holds affiliations with the Department of Biomedical Engineering and School of Data Science.
Go to Profile#620
Chia Shen
#47830
Overall Influence
Chia Shen is a Chinese-American computer scientist specialized in human–computer interaction, visual learning, and computer-supported collaborative learning. She is a program director at the National Science Foundation overseeing cyberlearning and STEM education initiatives.
Go to Profile#621
Isabelle Bloch
#113929
Overall Influence
#622
Amy Goodloe
#71729
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Amy Goodloe is the creator of the websites Women Online and Lesbian.org, a non-profit organization focused on documenting activities and work by lesbians on the web. She also initiated and maintained mailing lists that served as online discussion spaces for LGBTQ communities. She was a professor of writing in the Women and Gender Studies department at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Go to Profile#623
Niki de Saint Phalle
#3347
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.
Go to Profile#624
Anne Trefethen
#57192
Overall Influence
Anne Elizabeth Trefethen FREng is Pro Vice-Chancellor , and professor of Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford. She is a fellow of St Cross College. Her work in industry and academia focuses on numerical algorithms and software, computational science and high-performance computing.
Go to Profile#625
Sarah L. Waters
#48216
Overall Influence
Sarah Louise Waters is a British applied mathematician whose research interests include biological fluid mechanics, tissue engineering, and their applications in medicine. She is a professor of applied mathematics in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#626
Jennifer Steinkamp
#55376
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jennifer Steinkamp is an American installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception. Life and career Born in Denver, Colorado in 1958, Steinkamp is the eldest of five children, three girls and two boys. Her family lived in a number of areas before settling in Edina, Minnesota. In 1979, Steinkamp moved to Los Angeles to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, studying with Mike Kelley, Gene Youngblood, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. She then transferred to the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied experimental animation.
Go to Profile#627
Louiqa Raschid
#80701
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Louiqa Raschid is a computer scientist in the USA who specializes in data base management and data science with applications in biology, medicine, financial and socio-economic data and disaster management. She is a professor in the Robert H. Smith School of Business and UMIACS at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Go to Profile#628
Jessica Staddon
#99579
Overall Influence
Jessica Nicola Staddon is an American computer scientist with broad research interests that include cryptography, human–computer interaction, information visualization, coding theory, and information privacy. She is a research scientist at Google, and an adjunct professor of computer science at North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#629
Sue Whitesides
#65561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sue Hays Whitesides is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, a professor emeritus of computer science and the chair of the computer science department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research specializations include computational geometry and graph drawing.
Go to Profile#630
Daphna Hacker
#22137
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Daphna Hacker is a full professor at the Tel Aviv University law faculty and Women and Gender Studies Program. After publishing Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization, Hacker was awarded the 2018 LSA Jacob Book prize.
Go to Profile#631
Sheila McIlraith
#111351
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sheila McIlraith is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in Artificial Intelligence . She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada CIFAR AI Chair , and Associate Director and Research Lead of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Go to Profile#632
Sue Sentance
#100581
Overall Influence
Susan Sentance is a British computer scientist, educator and director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates a wide range of issues computer science education, teacher education and the professional development of those teaching computing. In 2020 Sentance was awarded a Suffrage Science award for her work on computing education.
Go to Profile#633
Alison Darcy
#45423
Overall Influence
Alison Darcy is a research psychologist and technologist. She is the Founder and President of Woebot Health, a company which provides digital therapeutics and behavioural health products. Early life and education Darcy was an undergraduate student in Ireland at the University College Dublin, where she specialised in psychology. After completing her studies, Darcy became interested in computer science, so moved to London to work in an investment bank as a software developer. The investment bank was acquired by a larger bank during the dot com crash, leaving Darcy looking for new options. In par...
Go to Profile#634
Deborah Frincke
#79600
Overall Influence
Deborah A. Frincke is an American academic and computer scientist specializing in computer security who is the associate laboratories director of national security programs at Sandia National Laboratories.
Go to Profile#635
Jane Liu
#87134
Overall Influence
Jane Win-Shih Liu is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her work on real-time computing. She is a professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Shun Hing Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University, a distinguished visiting fellow of the Academia Sinica, and the former editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers.
Go to Profile#636
Diane Souvaine
#71909
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Diane L. Souvaine is a professor of computer science and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Tufts University. Contributions Souvaine's research is in computational geometry and its applications, including robust non-parametric statistics and molecular modeling. She has also encouraged women and minorities to study and pursue careers in mathematics and the sciences and advocated gender neutrality in science teaching.
Go to Profile#637
Lucila Ohno-Machado
#106470
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Lucila Ohno-Machado is a biomedical engineer and Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#638
Diane Pozefsky
#84922
Overall Influence
Diane P. Pozefsky is a research professor at the University of North Carolina in the department of Computer Science. Pozefsky was awarded the Women in Technology International 2011 Hall of Fame Award for contributions to the fields of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#639
Birte Svensson
#115901
Overall Influence
#640
Sofya Raskhodnikova
#110102
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Sofya Raskhodnikova is a Belarusian and American theoretical computer scientist. She is known for her research in sublinear-time algorithms, information privacy, property testing, and approximation algorithms, and was one of the first to study differentially private analysis of graphs. She is a professor of computer science at Boston University.
Go to Profile#641
Julia Chuzhoy
#70533
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Julia Chuzhoy is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, known for her research on approximation algorithms and graph theory. Education and career Chuzhoy earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, 2000, and 2004 respectively. Her dissertation, on approximation algorithms, was supervised by Seffi Naor. She has been at the Toyota Technological Institute since 2007, and also holds a position in the Computer Science Department of the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#642
Bonnie Ann Wallace
#107464
Overall Influence
Bonnie Ann Wallace, FRSC is a British and American biophysicist and biochemist. She is a professor of molecular biophysics in the department of biological sciences, formerly the department of crystallography, at Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
Go to Profile#643
Annie K. Powell
#116221
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
#644
Miriah Meyer
#56660
Overall Influence
Miriah Meyer is an American computer scientist and USTAR professor at the University of Utah. She is noted for her pioneering work in data visualization for research applications. She received an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship in 2006 and served as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune. She was named in MIT Technology Reviews TR35 list in 2011 and Fast Company's list of the 100 most creative people in 2012. She was named a 2013 TED Fellow for her work in interactive visualization.
Go to Profile#645
Julie A. Kientz
#81049
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Julie Anne Kientz is an American computer scientist. Kientz is a full professor in the University of Washington's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Early life and education Kientz was born to Tom and Carol in Marion, Ohio, US on May 9, 1980. While attending River Valley High School in the 1990s, she won the Johnny Clearwater Award at the State Science Day. She originally intended to pursue a career in veterinary medicine but changed her path after fainting while watching a dog undergoing surgery. In her senior year, Kientz began taking courses at Ohio State University at Mari...
Go to Profile#646
Stormy Peters
#80408
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stormy Peters is an information technology industry analyst and prominent free and open source software advocate, promoting business use of FOSS. She advocates as a consultant and conference speaker. She co-founded, and was later appointed as executive director of the GNOME Foundation. She previously worked for Mozilla Corporation, Cloud Foundry, and Red Hat. In August 2019 she joined Microsoft.
Go to Profile#647
Klara Kedem
#92174
Overall Influence
Klara Kedem is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel and an adjunct faculty member in computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Go to Profile#648
Lori A. Clarke
#108975
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Lori A. Clarke is an American computer scientist noted for her research on software engineering. Biography Clarke received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1969. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1976.
Go to Profile#649
Camille Utterback
#65716
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Camille Utterback is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art. One of her most well-known installations is the work Text Rain .
Go to Profile#650
Lutgarde Thijs
#117182
Overall Influence
