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,
#901
Zeynep Akata
#143161
Overall Influence
Zeynep Akata is a professor of computer science at the University of Tübingen where she leads the Explainable Machine Learning group. Akata is also a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen.
Go to Profile#902
Nichole Pinkard
#111792
Overall Influence
Nichole Pinkard is an American computer scientist and associate professor of learning sciences and faculty director of the Office of Community Education Partnerships in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. She is helping lead a collaboration with Apple and the Chicago Public School system to teach computer programming to teachers.
Go to Profile#903
Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini
#101126
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini is an Italian logician and theoretical computer scientist whose research topics include type theory and intersection type disciplines, lambda calculus, and programming language semantics. She is a professor emerita at the University of Turin.
Go to Profile#904
Nancy R. Mead
#99519
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Nancy Rose Mead is an American computer scientist. She is known for her contributions to security, software engineering education and requirements. Background and education Mead spent her childhood in New Jersey, growing up in a 2nd generation Armenian immigrant family. She had an early interest in mathematics. This led to a mathematics major at New York University. from which she received a BA in mathematics and French in 1963, and an MS in mathematics in 1967. Mead received her PhD in mathematics in 1983 from the Polytechnic Institute of New York . Her thesis, "Complexity Measures for Sys...
Go to Profile#905
Sylvie Lorente
#54490
Overall Influence
Sylvie Lorente is a French mechanical engineer known for her research on the thermodynamics and fluid mechanics of porous media, and in particular for her work on the constructal theory of flows and their dynamic evolution. She is College of Engineering Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University, Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University, professor at the Institut national des sciences appliquées de Toulouse, and extraordinary professor at the University of Pretoria.
Go to Profile#906
Janet Louise Taylor
#146437
Overall Influence
#907
Jana Sawynok
#146672
Overall Influence
#908
Pinar Heggernes
#47626
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Pinar Heggernes is a Turkish-born Norwegian computer scientist known for her research on graph algorithms, sparse matrix computations, and parameterized complexity. She is the deputy rector of the University of Bergen, elected together with rector Margareth Hagen for the period 2021 - 2025. Until August 2021, she was the head of the Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen. She is also a member of the board of directors of the Research Council of Norway, appointed for the period 2019–2022.
Go to Profile#909
Pearl Pu
#136573
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Pearl Pu is a Chinese-born Swiss computer scientist. After completing her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, she obtained the Research Initiation Award from NSF before moving to Switzerland. She has been a faculty member and senior scientist at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she founded the Human-Computer Interaction Group in 2000. In 1997, she co-founded the company, Iconomic Systems SA, known for the development of an agent-based paradigm for travel e-commerce and was chairperson until its sale to i:FAO in 2001. She spent 6 months each as visiting scholar at Stanf...
Go to Profile#910
Lori L. Pollock
#131717
Overall Influence
Lori L. Pollock is an American Computer Scientist noted for her research on software analysis and testing, green software engineering and compiler optimization. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She has been a board member of CRA-W since 2001 and was the Co-Chair of CRA-W from 2005 to 2009. She was on the board when CRA-W was awarded the U.S. Public Service Award by the National Science Board in 2005, and when the CRA-W was awarded the U.S. Presidential Award for Mentoring in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics in 2004.
Go to Profile#911
Fawzia Fahim
#38123
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Fawzia Abbas Fahim is an Egyptian biochemist and environmental biologist known for her work on the anti-tumoral effects of snake venom and iodoacetate. She is currently Professor of Biochemistry at Ain Shams University, Egypt. Fahim has also made important contributions to infant and occupational health, and pollution issues in Egypt.
Go to Profile#912
Bina Shaheen Siddiqui
#20035
Overall Influence
Bina Shaheen Siddiqui is a Pakistani chemist and the Director of the H.E.J. Research Institute of Chemistry at the University of Karachi. Siddiqui graduated from the University of Karachi with an MPhil in 1978. In 1980, she graduated from the same university with a PhD in organic chemistry.
Go to Profile#913
Richa Singh
#137448
Overall Influence
Richa Singh is an Indian computer scientist whose research concerns biometrics, including face recognition and iris recognition. She is a professor and head of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Jodhpur.
Go to Profile#914
Anne Canteaut
#122744
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anne Canteaut is a French researcher in cryptography, working at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Paris. She studies the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric-key algorithms and S-boxes.
Go to Profile#915
Diane Victor
#38827
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Diane Victor, is a South African artist and print maker, known for her satirical and social commentary of contemporary South African politics. Biography Victor was born in Witbank, South Africa. She received her BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1986.
Go to Profile#916
Anna Huttenlocher
#147122
Overall Influence
#917
Diana Giannarelli
#147171
Overall Influence
#918
Coco Fusco
#24231
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing.
Go to Profile#919
Maren Hassinger
#48169
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our...
Go to Profile#920
Virginia L. Miller
#147394
Overall Influence
#921
ChoKyun Rha
#86145
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
ChoKyun Rha was a Korean-born American food technologist, inventor, and professor of biomaterials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She was the first Asian woman awarded tenure at MIT.
Go to Profile#922
Hamida Hammad
#147493
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
#923
Tanzima Hashem
#75799
Overall Influence
Tanzima Hashem, a Bangladeshi professor at BUET, is one of the five women scientists from the developing world who won Elsevier Foundation Awards in 2017. Her research focuses on maintaining user privacy while location-based services are being accessed. She is also noted for organizing the first workshop in Bangladesh on women in computing in 2014.
Go to Profile#924
Jean Shin
#59749
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials. Personal life Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to the United States when she was 6 years old, growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. Both of her parents who had been professors in Seoul took various jobs after moving to the Washington, D.C. area, eventually owning a supermarket and liquor store.
Go to Profile#925
Cha Meeyoung
#118841
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Cha Meeyoung, sometimes known as Mia, is an associate professor at KAIST in the School of Computing and a chief investigator in the Pioneer Research Center for Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the Institute for Basic Science. Her research focuses on network and data science with an emphasis on modeling, analyzing complex information propagation processes, machine learning-based computational social science, and deep learning. She has served on the editorial boards of the journals PeerJ and ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
Go to Profile#926
Capucine Picard
#148023
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#927
Alessandra Carattoli
#148042
Overall Influence
#928
Lale Say
#148089
Overall Influence
#929
Huma Mulji
#52528
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Huma Mulji is a Pakistani contemporary artist. Her works are in the collections of the Saatchi Gallery, London and the Asia Society Museum. She received the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2013. Life Huma Mulji was born in 1970 in Karachi, Pakistan. In 1995, she completed a BFA at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Pakistan, and in 2010, received an MFA from Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany.
Go to Profile#930
Kristina Schoonjans
#148183
Overall Influence
#931
Xiuling Li
#111533
Overall Influence
Xiuling Li is an distinguished electrical and computer engineering professor in the field of nanostructured semiconductor devices. She is currently the Temple Foundation Endowed Professorship No. 3 in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Fellow of the Dow Professor in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, she was a Donald Biggar Willet Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interim Director of the Nick Holonyak Jr. Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#932
Verena Rieser
#130779
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Verena Rieser is a German computer scientist specialising in natural-language generation, including conversational modelling as well as studies of how gender cues in synthetic language can trigger biases in the people who interact with them. She is a professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she directs the Natural Language Processing Laboratory.
Go to Profile#933
Andrea Frome
#117562
Overall Influence
Andrea Frome is an American computer scientist who works in computer vision and machine learning. Education Frome attended the University of Mary Washington for her undergraduate work, receiving a BS in environmental science in 1996. After a few years working in environmental consulting, she changed fields to computer science. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Vision and Machine Learning in 2007 under the supervision of Jitendra Malik.
Go to Profile#934
Siladitya Bhattacharya
#148333
Overall Influence
#935
Camelia Suleiman
#47841
Overall Influence
Camelia Suleiman is an American academic who currently serves as associate professor at Michigan State University. She has also served as the Academic Director of the school's Arabic Flagship Program and led the Arabic Program from 2012 to 2020. She has published Language and Identity in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: The Politics of Self-Perception and The Politics of Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Analysis . Her third book is Arabic between State and Nation: Israel, the Levant and Diaspora .
Go to Profile#936
Julie McCann
#119335
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Julie Ann McCann is a Northern Irish computer scientist who is a professor at Imperial College London. She is the leader of the Adaptive Emergent Systems Engineering. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and was awarded the Suffrage Science award in 2018.
Go to Profile#937
Chinwe Nwogo Ezeani
#66071
Overall Influence
Chinwe Nwogo Ezeani, is a Nigerian Chartered Librarian and the immediate past University Librarian of Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, University of Nigeria, Nsukka . She is a Professor of Library and Information Science. Her tenure as a University Librarian at Nnamdi Azikiwe Library was between March 2014-March 2019. She is the first female University Librarian since the inception of Nnamdi Azikiwe Library, University of Nigeria Nsukka. In April, 2021, Dr. Ilo Promise Ifeoma took over as the current University Librarian of Nnamdi Azikiwe Library,
Go to Profile#938
Daniela Galimberti
#148820
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#939
Faith Ringgold
#9649
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, painting on different materials including fabric, a published author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Go to Profile#940
Joyce Friedman
#67825
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Joyce Barbara Friedman was an American mathematician, operations researcher, computer scientist, and computational linguist who worked as a professor at the University of Michigan and Boston University and served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Go to Profile#941
Virginia Torczon
#73823
Overall Influence
Virginia Joanne Torczon is an American applied mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on nonlinear optimization methods including pattern search. She is dean of graduate studies and research, and chancellor professor of computer science, at the College of William & Mary.
Go to Profile#942
Alison Tomlin
#68561
Overall Influence
Alison Sarah Tomlin is a British physical chemist and applied mathematician whose research involves building detailed mathematical models of combustion, including uncertainty quantification for those models. She is a professor in the School of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Leeds, where she heads the Clean Combustion Research Group.
Go to Profile#943
Paola Gramatica
#149400
Overall Influence
#944
Natalia Sobczak
#66137
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Natalia Sobczak is a professor of materials engineering at the Institute of Metallurgy and Materials Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in the 2023–2026 term. She specializes in the physicochemistry of metals and alloys, physical metallurgy and heat treatment, foundry engineering, and the practice and theory of metal composites.
Go to Profile#945
Claudine Berr
#149602
Overall Influence
#946
Emily S. C. Ching
#97247
Overall Influence
Emily Shuk Chi Ching is a Hong Kong theoretical physicist based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She researches fluid turbulence and has been elected as a fellow of the Institute of Physics and American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#947
Silvia Miksch
#141000
Overall Influence
Silvia Miksch is an Austrian computer scientist working in information visualization, particularly for time-oriented and medical data. She is head of the Centre for Visual Analytics Science and Technology at TU Wien.
Go to Profile#948
Jane Veeder
#116571
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jane Veeder is an American digital artist, filmmaker and educator. She is a professor at San Francisco State University in the Department of Design and Industry, at which she held the position of chair between 2012 and 2015. Veeder is best known for her pioneering work in early computer graphics, however she has also worked extensively with traditional art forms such as painting, ceramics, theatre, and photography.
Go to Profile#949
Jocelyne Troccaz
#97221
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jocelyne Troccaz is a French roboticist and researcher in medical imaging and image-guided robotics. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions team of the Laboratory for Translational Research and Innovation in Medicine and Complexity at Grenoble Alpes University. After originally specializing in industrial applications of robotics, her interests shifted to medical robotics.
Go to Profile#950
Maria Gabriella Matera
#150122
Overall Influence
