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,
#1651
Julianne Swartz
#94834
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Julianne Swartz is a New York-based artist. She is known for immersive installations, architectural interventions and sculptures that bring sound, optics and kinetics into play to create alternative, multisensory experiences. She uses utilitarian materials to warp, reshape or deepen perception, generating unexpected, ephemeral and participatory experiences out of common situations. Critics suggest that her work inhabits liminal areas, both literally and conceptually, bridging the perceptible and evanescent, public and private, visual and embodied, affective and technical. Art in America critic Peter R.
Go to Profile#1652
Christen A. Smith
#118139
Overall Influence
Christen A. Smith is an associate professor of anthropology and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the director of the university's Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also the founder of Cite Black Women.
Go to Profile#1653
Catherine Wagner
#103973
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Catherine Wagner is an American photographer, professor and conceptual artist. Wagner has created large-scale, site-specific public artworks for the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Kyoto, Japan. Her work is represented in major national and international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Wagner's process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti called "the syste...
Go to Profile#1654
June Wayne
#77891
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop , a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.
Go to Profile#1655
Angeliki Pantazi
#180371
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Angeliki Pantazi is a Greek researcher in neuromorphic computing and in applications of control theory to computer data storage systems, for IBM Research in Zurich. Education and career Pantazi studied electrical engineering and computer technology at the University of Patras, where she earned a diploma in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 2005. She has been affiliated with IBM Research in Zurich since 2002, and became a permanent member of the research staff in 2006.
Go to Profile#1656
Yufang Jin
#176984
Overall Influence
Yufang Jin is an assistant professor of remote sensing and ecosystem change at UC Davis's Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, and associate environmental scientist at the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Her research uses satellite imaging and other techniques to track and model how landscapes and ecosystems change.
Go to Profile#1657
M. Grace Burke
#182149
Overall Influence
Mary Grace Burke is an American materials scientist who is an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester. She was awarded the 2020 International Metallographic Society Henry Clifton Sorby Award and is the President of the Royal Microscopical Society.
Go to Profile#1658
Asha Bowen
#184809
Overall Influence
Associate Professor Asha Bowen is an Australian Paediatric Infectious Diseases clinician-scientist and a leading voice and advocate for children's health and well-being. She is Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Perth Children's Hospital, Head of the Healthy Skin and ARF Prevention team and Program Head of the End Rheumatic Heart Disease program at the Telethon Kids Institute. Bowen leads a large body of skin health research in partnership with healthcare workers and community in the Kimberley while expanding her team and work to understand skin health in urban Aboriginal children better.
Go to Profile#1659
Claudia Rosiny
#96949
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Claudia Rosiny is a German-Swiss academic in Dance and Media studies, a festival director and cultural manager. She became internationally known as an expert on video dance. Having served as a co-director of the Berne Dance Days for many years, she is in charge of the Performing Arts at the Federal Office of Culture Berne and teaches at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Go to Profile#1660
Emma Byrne
#98447
Overall Influence
Emma Byrne is a contemporary British writer and scientist, working in the fields of swearing, artificial intelligence and robotics. Career Scientist Byrne completed her PhD in Expectation Violation Analysis at the University College London, UCL, Department of Computer Science in 2005. Her work showed how it is possible to automatically identify and rank unexpected, and therefore interesting, news from the large volumes of news are available around the clock and around the world.
Go to Profile#1661
Mary Beth Edelson
#14591
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Mary Beth Edelson was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists". Edelson was a printmaker, book artist, collage artist, painter, photographer, performance artist, and author. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Go to Profile#1662
Adrienne Lavine
#185723
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Adrienne S. Lavine is an American mechanical engineer specializing in heat transfer, thermal energy, and energy storage, and known as a coauthor of several widely used textbooks on heat transfer. She is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, director of the UCLA Modeling of Complex Thermal Systems Laboratory, and a former associate vice provost at UCLA.
Go to Profile#1663
Shirley Thomas
#43985
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Shirley Thomas , also known as Shirley Thomas Perkins, was a radio/television actress/writer/producer, author, and professor in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 2010, The Aerospace Historical Society established the Shirley Thomas Academic Scholarship. It is "presented annually at the International von Kármán Wings Award banquet to a student in aerospace engineering or a related science that shows promise for continued future contributions to the field."
Go to Profile#1664
Gloria L. Main
#174763
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Gloria Lund Main is an American economic historian who is a professor emeritus of history at University of Colorado Boulder. She authored two books about the Thirteen Colonies. Life Gloria Jean Lund was born to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Lund of Mount Hermon, California. She graduated from Analy High School. Lund completed her bachelor's degree at San Jose State College . She was an economics graduate student at University of California, Berkeley where she was the only female graduate student. In 1956, Lund paused her studies to marry her former undergraduate professor, Jackson Turner Main, a grandson of historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
Go to Profile#1665
Ellen E. Strong
#167626
Overall Influence
Ellen E. Strong is a research zoologist, curator of Mollusca, and the chair of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. She studies the diversity and the evolutionary relationships of freshwater and marine snails. Many of these snails have been affected by humans and she is part of conservation efforts by informing best how to help these species.
Go to Profile#1666
Izabela Naydenova
#184526
Overall Influence
Izabela Naydenova is a Bulgarian researcher in holography, holographic materials and nanostructures, and holographic sensors. She is a professor at Technological University Dublin, where she is head of discipline for physics and clinical measurement science in the School of Physics, Clinical and Optometric Sciences, and scientific director of the Centre for Industrial and Engineering Optics.
Go to Profile#1667
Melissa Chase
#129112
Overall Influence
Melissa Erin Chase is an American cryptographer known for her research on attribute-based encryption, digital credentials, and information privacy. She works at Microsoft Research. Education Chase graduated in 2003 from Harvey Mudd College, with a senior thesis in mathematics about the shortest path problem, advised by Ran Libeskind-Hadas. She earned a Ph.D. from Brown University with Anna Lysyanskaya as her doctoral advisor.
Go to Profile#1668
Laura Boykin
#101420
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Laura Boykin is an American computational biologist who uses supercomputing and genomics to help farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has studied the evolution of the agricultural pest whitefly and identified genetic differences between various species. She works with African scientists to develop computing and genomics skills across the continent, and is a Senior TED fellow.
Go to Profile#1669
Bin Xie
#97545
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Bin Xie is a Chinese-born artist living in Sydney, Australia. She was a finalist in the 2006 Archibald Prize. Early life Xie graduated from Chongqing University in 1982 with a bachelor of science degree, and earned a master of science from the same university in 1988. She remained at Chongqing University as a mathematics instructor until 1990, when she moved to Australia. She began painting seriously around 2002, and studied fine arts at the Meadowbank campus of the Northern Sydney Institute of TAFE, from which she received a diploma in 2003. She went on to the Sydney College of the Arts , gr...
Go to Profile#1670
Srabanti Chowdhury
#187389
Overall Influence
Srabanti Chowdhury is an Indian American Electrical Engineer who is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She is a senior fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. At Stanford she works on ultra-wide and wide-bandgap semiconductors and device engineering for energy-efficient electronic devices. She serves as Director for Science Collaborations at the United States Department of Energy Energy Frontier Research Center ULTRA.
Go to Profile#1671
Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler
#106427
Overall Influence
1959 - 2009 (50 years)
Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler was a Brazilian professor of German studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Patrik von zur Mühlen described her as the foremost specialist on German language writers and editors exiled in Brazil during the Nazi-era. From 1998, she was editor-in-chief of forum deutsch, Revista Brasileira de Estudos Germânicos, a publication of the Association of Professors of German of Rio de Janeiro.
Go to Profile#1672
Syd Carpenter
#148825
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Syd Carpenter is an African American artist and a retired professor of studio art, known for her ceramic and sculpture work, which explores African-American farming and gardening. She has received multiple fellowships, including a Pew Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship, and her work is currently in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection.
Go to Profile#1673
Susan Henrichs
#38604
Overall Influence
Susan Henrichs became provost of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in July 2007, after serving as dean of the Graduate School and vice provost of UAF from 2003 to 2007. Career Henrichs was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and chemical oceanography from the University of Washington in 1975, and a Ph.D. in chemical oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint program in 1980. From 1981 to 1982 she worked as a postdoctoral research chemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She joine...
Go to Profile#1674
Idelle Weber
#79660
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements. Early life Weber was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 12, 1932 as Tessie Pasternack. Adopted as an infant by Julius Earl and Minnie Feinberg, she lived in Wilmette, Illinois until the age of eight, with a businessman father and a mother devoted to her cultural development. Early childhood gifts of a Brownie camera and a large magnifying glass were meaningful. She was curious and creative as a child. Her mother took her on weekly visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, her favorite works in the collection being those by Rembrandt, Edward Hopper, and the Thorne miniature rooms.
Go to Profile#1675
Sama Alshaibi
#77031
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Sama Raena Alshaibi also known as Sama Alshaibi is a conceptual artist , who deals with spaces of conflict as her primary subject. War, exile, power and the quest for survival are themes seen in her works. She often uses her own body in her artwork as a representation of the country or an issue she is dealing with.
Go to Profile#1676
Diana al-Hadid
#99970
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Diana al-Hadid is a Syrian-born American contemporary artist who creates sculptures, installations, and drawings using various media. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Early life and education Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria. When she was five, her family immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, but she grew up mostly in North Canton, Ohio. She grew up in an Islamic household. Al-Hadid decided at the age of 11 that she wanted to be an artist. She was inspired by family vacations to the middle east, visiting the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon and experiencing Islamic architecture.
Go to Profile#1677
Alison Sinclair
#93527
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alison Jane Sinclair is professor of molecular virology at the University of Sussex where she runs the Sinclair Lab. Her research interests include the Epstein Barr virus. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Go to Profile#1678
Suzi Gablik
#76844
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Suzi Gablik was an American visual artist, author, art critic, and professor of art history and art criticism. She lived in Blacksburg, Virginia. Early life and education Gablik was born in New York City on September 26, 1934. Her interest in art was piqued after visiting museums in her hometown with her father during her childhood. In 1951, after a summer studying at Black Mountain College, she entered Hunter College where she studied with Robert Motherwell. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1955.
Go to Profile#1679
Eileen I. Oliver
#96635
Overall Influence
Eileen I. Oliver is a professor in the University of Florida College of Education. She was the associate dean of the University of Florida Division of Continuing Education and in 2008 she accepted the position as interim dean of the division of continuing education. Oliver earned an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in English and education. Prior to moving to the University of Florida, Oliver held a number of professional and academic positions in the California State University System, University of North Carolina System, and Washington State University.
Go to Profile#1680
Malabika Sarker
#89327
Overall Influence
Malabika Sarker is a Bangladeshi physician and public health scientist. She is a Professor of Practice of Behavioral and Social Science at Brown School of Public Health, Brown University, USA. She is the former Associate Dean and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Science of Implementation and Scale-Up at the BRAC James P. Grant School of Public Health of BRAC University in Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#1681
Ana Cara
#61993
Overall Influence
Ana C. Cara is an Argentine creolist, translator, and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College. She graduated from Middlebury College with a Bachelor of Arts in 1972, from University of Pennsylvania with a Master of Arts in Folklore and Folklife in 1974, and with a Doctor of Philosophy in Folklore and Folklife in 1983. She was visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley.
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Deryl Northcott
#177011
Overall Influence
Deryl Northcott is a New Zealand accounting academic. She is currently a full professor at the Auckland University of Technology. Academic career After a 1996 PhD titled 'Uses of accounting information in capital investment decision making' at the University of Waikato, she moved to the University of Manchester in the UK, before returning to New Zealand and Auckland University of Technology in 2002 as full professor.
Go to Profile#1683
Diana Gannett
#93331
Overall Influence
Diana Gannett is an American classical double bassist and educator, Professor Emeritus of Double Bass at the University of Michigan School of Music. Career Previous appointments include the faculties of Yale University School of Music, Theatre & Dance and Hartt School of Music, Theatre & Dance in Connecticut, Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio, University of Iowa School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and the University of South Florida.
Go to Profile#1684
Emily Adams
#187639
Overall Influence
Emily Adams is a Reader in Diagnostics for Infectious Disease at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. She is diagnostic lead for the Centre for Drugs and Diagnostics developing with industry diagnostics for various diseases. She is also the Director for Epidemics and Neglected Tropical Disease at Global Access Diagnostics , a not-for-profit diagnostics company in the UK.
Go to Profile#1685
Katherine Barbeau
#185709
Overall Influence
Katherine Barbeau is a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography known for her work on trace metals and the linkages between trace metals and biology. Education and career Barbeau graduated from Mercy High School in Middleton, Connecticut. She has a B.S. from Southampton College , and then moved to the Université libre de Bruxelles for one year. She earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1998. Following her Ph.D. she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara until 2001 when she joined t...
Go to Profile#1686
Rylie Green
#118096
Overall Influence
Rylie Green is an Australian biomedical engineer who is a Professor at Imperial College London. She works on bioactive conducting polymers for applications in medical electronics. Education Green is Australian. She received her PhD in neural interfaces from the School of Biomedical Engineering, University of New South Wales in 2008. She remained at UNSW for her postdoctoral studies, focussing on bioactive and cellular components for tissue engineering.
Go to Profile#1687
Ruth Weisberg
#147154
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ruth Weisberg is an American artist and Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she is also former dean of the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Weisberg's work is influenced by her Jewish heritage and its traditions, the human body, and feminist themes. She works primarily in painting, and her recent work is produced in scroll formats.
Go to Profile#1688
Melissa Williams
#80710
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Melissa S. Williams is an American academic who specialises in democratic theory and comparative political theory. She was the founding director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics. As of 2018, she is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#1689
Noor Shaker
#184945
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Noor Shaker is a Syrian British entrepreneur and computer scientist who co-founded the AI for drug discovery start-up Glamorous AI. Glamorous AI was acquired by the US-based company X-Chem in Nov 2021. Before Glamorous AI, Noor founded the drug discovery start-up GTN Ltd and served as CEO for more than two years. She stepped down as CEO in August 2019. The company entered liquidation in March 2020. In 2018, she received a CogX UK Rising Star Award from Prime Minister Theresa May for "AI technology that will transform drug discovery to treat chronic diseases".
Go to Profile#1690
Noa Eshkol
#66553
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Noa Eshkol was an Israeli dance composer and textile artist. Eshkol is best known for her co-invention, alongside architect Avraham Wachman, of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation System. She and Wachman worked together for over two decades to refine the system and develop its various applications.
Go to Profile#1691
Shani Peters
#156127
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Shani Peters is an artist from Lansing, Michigan based in New York. She received her BA from Michigan State University and her MFA from the City College of New York, where she taught as of 2020. Her work often addresses issues related to social justice in a range of media and processes including printmaking, interpretations of record-keeping, collaborative projects, video, and collage. In 2019, she was a Joan Mitchell Foundation artist-in-residence in New Orleans. In 2017, she exhibited at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery.
Go to Profile#1692
Margaret Keyes
#75600
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Margaret Naumann Keyes was an American academic and heritage preserver. She was a professor of Home Economics at the University of Iowa and is a nationally recognized leader in the field of heritage conservation, best known for her work to preserve the Iowa Old Capitol Building.
Go to Profile#1693
Laura Kina
#125293
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Laura Kina is an artist. Kina was born in Riverside, California. and raised in Poulsbo, Washington. She moved to Chicago, Illinois, to Pilsen neighborhood in 1990 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Michiko Itatani, the revered fashion designer and Ray Yoshida, earning her B.F.A. in 1994. Furthermore, and henceforth, in 2001, Kina received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she studied under Kerry James Marshall and Phyllis Bramson. She is a fan of Anna Sui and Anna Delvey.
Go to Profile#1694
Małgorzata Kalinowska-Iszkowska
#164996
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Małgorzata Kalinowska-Iszkowska is a Polish computer scientist, educator, and activist. She was awarded the Polish Gold Cross of Merit for her work in information technology . She was a member of the Polish Congress of Women.
Go to Profile#1695
Ardele Lister
#36515
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ardele Lister is an artist working in time-based media. From 1991 to the present, Lister has taught media production and critical studies at Rutgers University, where she is currently Graduate Director of Visual Arts. She has also taught at Montclair State University in New Jersey, School of the Visual Arts, and Center for Media Arts, both in New York City.
Go to Profile#1696
Wenjie Zhang
#186684
Overall Influence
Wenjie Zhang is a Professor and Head of the Data and Knowledge Research Group within the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales . Her most notable breakthrough is in the area of optimization strategies to process computationally complex large graphs. Her work is among the first to identify that graph complexity relies only on the small size of the query input and output rather than the size of the whole data graph, which could be a web scale, such as in social media networks. Her recent research focuses on algorithms, indexes, and systems in large scale g...
Go to Profile#1697
Lydia W. S. Finley
#175456
Overall Influence
Lydia W. S. Finley is an American scientist and an assistant member at the Cell Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Finley is known for her contributions to understanding the metabolic underpinnings of stem cell fate.
Go to Profile#1698
Catherine Falade
#173808
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Catherine Olufunke Falade is a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics and also the director of the Institute for Advanced Medical Research & Training at the College of Medicine at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She is also a healthcare practitioner specializing as a pharmacologist at the University College Hospital, Ibadan. Her research interest focuses on malaria in children. She collaborates with the Malaria Control Units of both the State and Federal Ministries of Health.
Go to Profile#1699
Hallam Hurt
#111670
Overall Influence
Hallam Hurt is an American neonatologist. She is "the medical director of Special Babies Clinic and an attending neonatologist at CHOP Newborn Care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania." As of 2013, she was also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1700
Lalya Gaye
#182028
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Lalya Gaye is a digital media artist and interaction designer whose early work was influential in the field of locative media. Currently based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, she is the founder and director of the international and interdisciplinary digital art practice Attaya Projects.
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