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,
#201
Claire Mathieu
#27155
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Claire Mathieu is a French computer scientist and mathematician, known for her research on approximation algorithms, online algorithms, and auction theory. She works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Go to Profile#202
Anna Lubiw
#26318
Overall Influence
Anna Lubiw is a computer scientist known for her work in computational geometry and graph theory. She is currently a professor at the University of Waterloo. Education Lubiw received her Ph.D from the University of Toronto in 1986 under the joint supervision of Rudolf Mathon and Stephen Cook.
Go to Profile#203
Catherine Havasi
#41676
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Catherine Havasi is an American scientist who specialises in artificial intelligence at MIT Media Lab. She is co-founder and CEO of AI company Luminoso. Havasi was a member of the MIT group engaged in the Open Mind Common Sense AI project and that created the natural language AI program ConceptNet.
Go to Profile#204
Keren Elazari
#39137
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Keren Elazari , also known as k3r3n3, is an Israeli cybersecurity analyst, writer, and speaker. She is a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv University Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center. Early life and education Elazari was born in and grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her father is Ami Elazari, the CEO of an electric company and a former member of the Israel Defense Forces intelligence group, Unit 8200. Her mother works for an airline. Internet became available in Tel Aviv when Elazari was eleven or twelve years old, and she says she learned English and learned about hacking in online chat rooms.
Go to Profile#205
Catherine McGeoch
#42505
Overall Influence
Catherine Cole McGeoch is an American computer scientist specializing in empirical algorithmics and heuristics for NP-hard problems. She is currently Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society at Amherst College. She has been the Editor in Chief of ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics and was a member of the ACM Publications Board.
Go to Profile#206
Carolyn Rosé
#21900
Overall Influence
Carolyn Penstein Rosé is an American computer scientist who is a Professor of Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research looks to understand human conversation, and use this understanding to build computer systems that support effective communication in an effort to improve human learning. She has previously served as President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences and a Leshner Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#207
Katie Bouman
#26435
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#208
Marta Kwiatkowska
#43522
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Her research focuses on developing modelling and automated verification techniques for computing systems in order to guarantee safe, secure, reliable, timely and resource-efficient operation.
Go to Profile#209
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln
#31961
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln is an American methodologist and higher-education scholar. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Lincoln holds the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.
Go to Profile#210
Lorrie Cranor
#25954
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Lorrie Faith Cranor, D.Sc. is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and is the director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. She has served as Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, and she was formerly a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors. Previously she was a researcher at AT&T Labs-Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University. She has authored over 110 research papers on online privacy, phishing and semantic attacks, spam...
Go to Profile#211
Mary Beth Rosson
#41870
Overall Influence
Mary Beth Rosson is the director of graduate programs and professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology. Rosson also co-directs the collaboration and innovation lab. Most of her research concentrates on End User Programming, Computer Supported Cooperative Work , and Human-Computer Interaction . Prior to teaching at Penn State, Rosson taught at the Virginia Tech Computer Science department for 10 years and worked as a research staff manager at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center for 11 years. Rosson also served as the Dean for the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology from 2014 to 2016.
Go to Profile#212
Elham Kashefi
#43933
Overall Influence
Elham Kashefi is a Professor of Computer Science and Personal Chair in quantum computing at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and a Centre national de la recherche scientifique researcher at the Sorbonne University. Her work has included contributions to quantum cryptography, verification of quantum computing, and cloud quantum computing.
Go to Profile#213
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay
#14055
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is an Indian computer scientist specializing in computational biology. A professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, she is a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winner in Engineering Science for 2010, IInfosys Prize 2017 laureate in the Engineering and Computer Science category and TWAS Prize winner for Engineering Sciences in 2018. Her research is mainly in the areas of evolutionary computation, pattern recognition, machine learning and bioinformatics. Since 1 August 2015, she has been the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, and she would oversee t...
Go to Profile#214
Allison Druin
#45411
Overall Influence
Allison Druin is an American computer scientist who studies human–computer interaction, and digital libraries, particularly focusing on children's use of educational technology. She is a professor emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Provost for Research and Strategic Partnerships at the Pratt Institute.
Go to Profile#215
Ursula Martin
#28013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#216
Chieko Asakawa
#28867
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Chieko Asakawa is a blind Japanese computer scientist, known for her work at IBM Research – Tokyo in accessibility. A Netscape browser plug-in she developed, the IBM Home Page Reader, became the most widely used web-to-speech system available. She is the recipient of numerous industry and government awards.
Go to Profile#217
Monika Henzinger
#33270
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Monika Henzinger is a German computer scientist, and is a former director of research at Google. She is currently a professor at the University of Vienna. Her expertise is mainly on algorithms with a focus on data structures, algorithmic game theory, information retrieval, search algorithms and Web data mining. She is married to Thomas Henzinger and has three children.
Go to Profile#218
Marie-Paule Cani
#50174
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Marie-Paule Cani is a French computer scientist conducting advanced research in the fields of shape modeling and computer animation. She has contributed to over 300 research publications having around 12000 citations.
Go to Profile#219
Bridget Riley
#3796
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Bridget Louise Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France. Early life and education Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Riley, originally from Yorkshire, had been an Army officer. He was a printer by trade and owned his own business. In 1938, he relocated the printing business, together with his family, to Lincolnshire.
Go to Profile#220
Bonnie Webber
#43109
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. Education and career Webber completed her PhD at Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods, while at the same time working with Woods at Bolt Beranek and Newman.
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Anna Karlin
#35027
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anna R. Karlin is an American computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Biography Karlin was born into an academic family. Her father, Samuel Karlin, was a mathematician at Stanford University, and her brother, Kenneth Karlin, is a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#222
Vijaya Ramachandran
#51205
Overall Influence
Vijaya Ramachandran is an Indian-American theoretical computer scientist known for her research on graph algorithms and parallel algorithms. She is the William Blakemore II Regents Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Victoria Coleman
#29202
Overall Influence
Victoria Stavridou-Coleman is currently serving as the 37th chief scientist of the United States Air Force. She took her oath of office on April 6, 2021, administered by the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.
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Wendy Myrvold
#33177
Overall Influence
Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.
Go to Profile#225
Susan H. Rodger
#36468
Overall Influence
Susan H. Rodger is an American computer scientist known for work in computer science education including developing the software JFLAP for over twenty years. JFLAP is educational software for visualizing and interacting with formal languages and automata. Rodger is also known for peer-led team learning in computer science and integrating computing into middle schools and high schools with Alice. She is also currently serving on the board of CRA-W and was chair of ACM SIGCSE from 2013 to 2016.
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Danielle Belgrave
#41309
Overall Influence
Danielle Charlotte Belgrave is a Trinidadian-British computer scientist based at DeepMind, who uses statistics and machine learning to understand the progression of diseases. Early life and education Belgrave grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, where her high school mathematics teacher inspired her to work as a data scientist. She studied statistics and business at the London School of Economics . She was a graduate student at University College London , where she earned a master's degree in statistics. In 2010 Belgrave moved to the University of Manchester, where she earned a PhD for research supervised by Iain Buchan, Christopher Bishop and supported by a Microsoft Research scholarship.
Go to Profile#227
Klara Nahrstedt
#39179
Overall Influence
Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and directs the Coordinated Science Laboratory there. Her research concerns multimedia, quality of service, and middleware.
Go to Profile#228
Laurence Devillers
#37920
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Laurence Devillers , is a professor of artificial intelligence & ethics at Paris-Sorbonne University since 2011 and at Computer science laboratory for mechanics and engineering sciences at the Scientific Research National Center, a head of the team "Affective and social dimension in spoken interaction". Laurence Devillers has taken part in several national and European projects on human-robots social and affective interactions. Laurence Devillers is leading a cluster of robots-human co-evolution at the Institute of Digital Society and "Robotic interactive" at Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#229
Katherine Yelick
#36923
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick, an American computer scientist, is the vice chancellor for research and the Robert S. Pepper Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010-2019.
Go to Profile#230
Sara Cox
#6322
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sara Joanne Cyzer is an English broadcaster. She presented Radio 1 Breakfast on BBC Radio 1 from 3 April 2000 until 19 December 2003. Since January 2019, she hosts the BBC Radio 2 drivetime show, Monday–Friday 4pm–7pm .
Go to Profile#231
Joanna Rutkowska
#35083
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Joanna Rutkowska is a Polish computer security researcher, primarily known for her research on low-level security and stealth malware, and as founder of the Qubes OS security-focused desktop operating system.
Go to Profile#232
Ellen Voorhees
#39074
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ellen Marie Voorhees is an American computer scientist known for her work in document retrieval, information retrieval, and natural language processing. She works in the retrieval group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology .
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Yvonne Rogers
#44119
Overall Influence
Yvonne Rogers is a British psychologist and computer scientist. She serves as director of the Interaction Centre at University College London. She has authored or contributed to more than 250 publications. Her book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction written with Jenny Preece and Helen Sharp has sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into six other languages. Her work is described in Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal.
Go to Profile#234
Rachel Thomas
#50888
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Rachel Thomas is an American computer scientist and founding Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco. Together with Jeremy Howard, she is co-founder of fast.ai. Thomas was selected by Forbes magazine as one of the 20 most incredible women in artificial intelligence.
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Leslie Ann Goldberg
#48039
Overall Influence
Leslie Ann Goldberg is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms for random sampling and approximate combinatorial enumeration.
Go to Profile#236
Catherine Plaisant
#49735
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Catherine Plaisant is a French/American Research Scientist Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and assistant director of research of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab.
Go to Profile#237
Linda Shapiro
#46495
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Linda G. Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a professor of electrical engineering, and adjunct professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#238
Karen Holtzblatt
#50603
Overall Influence
Karen Holtzblatt is an American computer scientist known for her contributions in human–computer interaction, and particularly in contextual design. She founded InContext Design in 1992, and is its CEO. Holtzblatt was elected to the CHI Academy in 2007 and won the inaugural ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Award for Practice in 2010. Holzblatt is also affiliated with the University of Maryland, as a research scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and iSchool.
Go to Profile#239
Cristina Lopes
#60533
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Cristina Videira Lopes is a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. Prior to being a professor, she was a Research Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . While at PARC, she was most known as a founder of the group that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming and started aspectj.org. More recently, she has been working in ubiquitous computing, with a focus in communication mechanisms that are pervasive, secure and intuitive for humans to perceive and interact with.
Go to Profile#240
Meredith Ringel Morris
#43040
Overall Influence
Meredith Ringel Morris is an American computer scientist who works in human-computer interaction and collaborative web search. She is a principal scientist at Google Brain and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School.
Go to Profile#241
Stephanie Dinkins
#47224
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for creating art about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, and history. Her aim is to "create a unique culturally attuned AI entity in collaboration with coders, engineers and in close consultation with local communities of color that reflects and is empowered to work toward the goals of its community."
Go to Profile#242
Kathleen McKeown
#47575
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kathleen R. McKeown is an American computer scientist, specializing in natural language processing. She is currently the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science and is the Founding Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#243
Carole Goble
#28356
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carole Anne Goble, is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group with Norman Paton.
Go to Profile#244
Veronika Megler
#35647
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Veronika Margaret Megler is an Australian computer scientist. Megler is currently principal data scientist at Amazon Web Services, and is well known as the co-developer of The Hobbit, a 1982 text adventure game adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Go to Profile#245
Susan J. Eggers
#47308
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Susan J. Eggers is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computer architecture and compilers. "Eggers is best known for her foundational work in developing and helping to commercialize simultaneous multithreaded processors, one of the most important advancements in computer architecture in the past 30 years. In the mid-1990s, Moore's Law was in full swing and, while computer engineers were finding ways to fit up to 1 billion transistors on a computer chip, the increase in logic and memory alone did not result in significant performance gains. Eggers was among those who arg...
Go to Profile#246
Danqi Chen
#47749
Overall Influence
Danqi Chen is a Chinese computer scientist and assistant professor at Princeton University specializing in the AI field of natural language processing . In 2019, she joined the Princeton NLP group, alongside Sanjeev Arora, Christiane Fellbaum, and Karthik Narasimhan. She was previously a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research . She earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University and her BS from Tsinghua University.
Go to Profile#247
Eve Ensler
#1614
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
V, formerly Eve Ensler , is an American playwright, author, performer, feminist, and activist. V is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. In 2006 Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."
Go to Profile#248
Lillian Lee
#34382
Overall Influence
Lillian Lee is a computer scientist whose research involves natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computational social science. She is a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Go to Profile#249
Rebecca N. Wright
#43989
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Rebecca N. Wright is an American computer scientist known for her research in computer security. She is the Druckenmiller Professor of Computer Science at Barnard College. Education and career Wright was an undergraduate at Columbia University, graduating in 1988. She went to Yale University for her graduate studies, and completed her Ph.D. there in 1994. Her dissertation, Achieving Perfect Secrecy Using Correlated Random Variables, was supervised by Michael J. Fischer.
Go to Profile#250
Clarisse de Souza
#53295
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza is a full professor at the Informatics Department of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro , where she does research in the area of human–computer interaction and has developed the theory of Semiotic Engineering.
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