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,
#2101
Conny Restle
#100149
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Conny Restle is a German musicologist, Museum director and lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. Life Born in Munich, Restle took her Abitur at the humanistic Wilhelmsgymnasium in 1980. From 1980 to 1985 she studied Musicology, Latin philology of the Middle Ages and German Philology of the same period at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. After graduating with a Magister Artium, she worked at the Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte from 1986 to 1989. In 1989 Restle received her doctorate in musicology with a thesis on Bartolomeo Cristofori and the beginnings of the ...
Go to Profile#2102
Christine Gardner
#66044
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Christine Joy Gardner is an American communication scholar and journalist. She is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Communication Arts at Gordon College. Early life and education Gardner was born in 1969. She has received degrees from Seattle Pacific University , the University of Washington , and Northwestern University .
Go to Profile#2103
Kathy Goodell
#160838
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kathy Goodell is an American contemporary artist based in New York City. She works in sculptural objects, installation, drawing and photography. She is a professor of painting and drawing at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Go to Profile#2104
Sophia Wisniewska
#179366
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sophia Wisniewska is a university administrator and a former chancellor of University of South Florida St. Petersburg and Pennsylvania State Brandywine. Earlier in her career, she worked for her alma mater, Pennsylvania State University, and later served as the dean of Temple University Ambler.
Go to Profile#2105
Jean Dollimore
#192394
Overall Influence
Jean Dollimore is an English computer scientist that worked at Queen Mary University of London, notable for being co-author of one of the standard distributed computer systems textbooks, Distributed Systems . This textbook alone has been cited over 4,700 times.
Go to Profile#2106
Margaret Boozer
#107380
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Margaret A Boozer is an American ceramist and sculpture artist, best known for her clay and ceramic compositions, or landscapes, that focus on the individuality, history, and geology of the clay used as subject matters.
Go to Profile#2107
Mandy Martin
#87868
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Mandy Martin was a contemporary Australian painter, printmaker and teacher. She was involved in the development of feminist art in Australia from the mid-1970s and as exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. In recent years she used the art she created as part of the ongoing debate on climate change, an area in which she was "prolifically active". Based in Canberra for many years, she was also a lecturer at the Australian National University School of Art from 1978 to 2003. As well as being a visual artist, Martin was an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Soc...
Go to Profile#2108
Cho Yoon-kyoung
#190023
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Cho Yoon-Kyoung is an interdisciplinary researcher involved in basic science to translational research in microfluidics and nanomedicine. She is a group leader in the Center for Soft and Living Matter at the Institute for Basic Science and a full professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology , Ulsan, Korea. Cho is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Go to Profile#2109
Hermine Freed
#168160
Overall Influence
1940 - 1998 (58 years)
Hermine Freed , was an American painter, photographer, and video artist. She is noted for being among the first generation of artists to explore video art in the late 1960s. Life and work Freed studied painting at Cornell University and New York University, where she taught starting from the late 1960s. In 1972 she became a professor for video art at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Go to Profile#2110
Orshi Drozdik
#31724
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Orshi Drozdik is a feminist visual artist based in New York City. Her work consists of drawings, paintings, photographs, etchings, performances, videos, sculptures, installations, academic writings and fiction, that explore connected themes, sometimes over an extended period. Through her work, organized into several topics, she explores themes that undermine the traditional and erotic representation of women: Individual Mythologies, Adventure in Tecnos Dystopium, and Manufacturing the Self. She is influenced by Valéria Dienes, János Zsilka, Susan Sontag, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luce Irigaray, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, among others.
Go to Profile#2111
Elena Kovalskaya
#184272
Overall Influence
Elena Kovalskaya is a Russian theatre critic, curator, and teacher. She teaches the history of foreign theatre at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts , and directs a master's program there in social theatre. Until she resigned in protest at the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, she was artistic director at the Meyerhold Theatre and Cultural Center .
Go to Profile#2112
Helen Mirra
#171050
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Hendl Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice. She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist and pragmatist philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking. She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity." In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language.
Go to Profile#2113
Sonya Sklaroff
#114043
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Biography Sonya Sklaroff, born on November 7, 1970, in Philadelphia, is a contemporary American painter renowned for her cityscapes of New York City. Her educational journey began at Friends' Central School and led her to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design , where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts. At RISD, she won the Providence Art Award and was selected for the European Honors Program, studying under Friedrich St. Florian. Sklaroff later achieved her Master of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she studied under luminaries such as Faith Ringgold and Glenn Goldberg.
Go to Profile#2114
Susie Ganch
#190752
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Susie Ganch is a first generation American artist of Hungarian heritage. She is a sculptor, jeweler, educator, and founder and director of Radical Jewelry Makeover. Ganch received her Bachelors in Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Geology in 1994 and her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997.
Go to Profile#2115
Afaf Zurayk
#111055
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Afaf Zurayk is a Lebanese multimedia artist and poet living and working in Beirut, Lebanon. Education and teaching Born in Beirut, Afaf Zurayk graduated from the American University of Beirut in 1970 with a BA in fine arts with distinction, and obtained an MA in Islamic art from Harvard University in 1972. She taught in Lebanon at the Beirut University College and the American University of Beirut, as well as in the continuing education programs of the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
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Wanda Ewing
#173298
Overall Influence
1970 - 2013 (43 years)
Wanda Ewing was an artist born in Omaha, Nebraska. She considered her art to be "provocative with a political edge." A common message of her art was “I’m a proud black woman, and I’m going to be hard to ignore.” Ewing studied printmaking at San Francisco Art Institute where she received her BFA in 1997. She received her MA and MFA in printmaking at the University of Iowa in 2001 and 2002, respectively. She was a tenured professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she taught visual arts classes from 2004 to 2013. Ewing exhibited nationally and won several awards for her work.
Go to Profile#2117
Gail Wight
#117139
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gail Wight is an American new media artist and professor, whose work fuses art with biology, neurology, and technology. Popular media Wight uses to create art include, drawing and painting, electronic sculpture, interactive sculpture, video and living mediums. Since 2003, Wight has taught at Stanford University in the Department of Art.
Go to Profile#2118
Emily R Mikeska
#192431
Overall Influence
#2119
Allison Smith
#168579
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Allison Smith is an American artist who is based in Oakland, California. Smith's work draws from American history to create artworks which combine social practice, performance, and craft-based sculpture.
Go to Profile#2120
Julie Freeman
#142537
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Julie Freeman is an artist whose work spans visual, audio and digital art forms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it. Biography Freeman's work has focused on using electronic technologies to ‘translate nature’ – whether it is through the sound of torrential rain dripping on a giant rhubarb leaf, a pair of mobile concrete speakers who lurk in galleries haranguing passersby with fractured sonic samples, or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs' ears.
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Maggie Michael
#181893
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Maggie Michael is an American painter. Born in Milwaukee, Michael has spent much of her career in Washington, D.C. A 1996 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which she received a BFA, with honors, she received her MA from San Francisco State University in 2000 and her MFA from American University in 2002. She has received numerous awards during her career, including a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2004, the same year in which she was given a Young Artist Grant by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; she has also worked with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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Cherine Fahd
#187806
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Cherine Fahd is an Australian artist who works in photography and video performance. She is also Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and has published in academic journals, photographic and art publications, and in news and media. Her work has been shown in Australia, Israel, Greece and Japan. She has received numerous grants, and has been awarded residencies in India and in Sydney at the Carriageworks.
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Gesche Würfel
#188438
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Gesche Würfel is a visual artist born in Bremerhaven, Germany, and based in the United States since 2009. Her practice mostly focuses on photography, but also includes video, sound, installation, and urban interventions.
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Hannah Rickards
#115176
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Hannah Rickards is a British artist. She has won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Visual and Performing Arts. Life and work Rickards was born in London. She studied at Central Saint Martins and now teaches there.
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Sheida Soleimani
#122060
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American multimedia artist, activist, and professor. Her works have generated conversations in the field of 'constructed' tableau photography, as well as the intersections of art and protest, with a focus on Iranian human-rights violations.
Go to Profile#2126
Adelaide Alsop Robineau
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Adelaide Alsop Robineau was an American china painter and potter, and is considered one of the top ceramists of American art pottery in her era. Early life and education Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut. She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman, she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student. During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing.
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Rosalba Carriera
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Rosalba Carriera was a Venetian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era.
Go to Profile#2128
Eleanor Layfield Davis
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Eleanor Layfield Davis , also called ELDA, was an American painter. She served on the Board of Trustees for Meredith College and both Meredith and Wake Forest University award art scholarships in her memory.
Go to Profile#2129
Elaine de Kooning
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
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Harriet George Barclay
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Harriet George Barclay was an American botanist, plant ecologist, nature conservationist, and artist. Biography Barclay was a professor at the University of Tulsa. She later became Chair of the Botany Department in 1953.
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Emma Montgomery McRae
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Emma Montgomery McRae was a Professor of English literature. Born Mary Emma Montgomery in Loveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of William Montgomery and Anna née Newton. Her family moved to Indiana when she was five. Emma completed her undergraduate work at Brookfield Academy, Indiana, then she taught at a school in Vevay, Indiana.
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Helen Binyon
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Helen Francesca Mary Binyon was a British artist and writer. She was also a watercolour painter, an illustrator and a puppeteer. Biography Binyon was born in Chelsea in London, her father being the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon, and was educated at St Paul's Girls' School. Helen Binyon studied at the Royal College of Art, RCA, between 1922 and 1926 where she was taught by Paul Nash and her fellow pupils included Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. After spending some time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Binyon studied engraving at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1928 to 1930.
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Catharine Carter Critcher
1868 - 1964 (96 years)
Catharine Carter Critcher was an American painter. A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body. She was a long time member of the Arts Club of Washington.
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Varvara Stepanova
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was a Russian artist. With her husband Alexander Rodchenko, she was associated with the Constructivist branch of the Russian avant-garde, which rejected aesthetic values in favour of revolutionary ones. Her activities extended into propaganda, poetry, stage scenery and textile designs.
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Muriel Sibell Wolle
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Muriel Sibell Wolle, née Muriel Vincent Sibell was an American artist best known for her drawings and paintings of mining communities in the western states. Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1920 with diplomas in advertising and costume design. After graduation, she accepted a teaching position at the Texas State College for Women in Denton, Texas, then served as an instructor in Art at the Parsons School of Design from 1923 to 1926. After a trip to Colorado in 1926, Sibell began looking for a teaching position in the West.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Elisabeth Blochmann
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Elisabeth Blochmann was a scholar of education, as well as of philosophy, and a pioneer in and researcher of women's education in Germany. Life Born in 1892 as the first child of the public prosecutor Dr. Heinrich Blochmann and his wife Anna née Sachs into an assimilated German-Jewish upper-middle-class family, Elisabeth grew up in the then Grand Ducal capital of Weimar, where she attended the upper girls' school, was certified as an assistant nurse, and qualified as a teacher. Serving as a nurse at a lazarett in Weimar during the first year of World War I, and then for two years as a teacher...
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Alexandra Illmer Forsythe
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Alexandra Winifred Illmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist best known for co-authoring a series of computer science textbooks during the 1960s and 1970s, including the first ever computer science textbook, Computer Science: A First Course, in 1969.
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
Go to Profile#2140
Sonia Saxena
Sonia Saxena FRCGP is a British physician who is a Professor of Primary care and Director of the Child Health Unit at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a practises as a GP in Putney, London. She is known for her work in improving healthcare, and a focus on improving child health in the early years of life and reducing social inequalities.
Go to Profile#2141
Shina Inoue Kan
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Shina Inoue Kan , also seen as "Shina Inouye", "Shina Kan", and "Shinako Kan", was a Japanese college professor. Early life Shina Inoue was born on 25 July 1899 in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. In 1921, her mother Hideko Inoue attended the Conference on Limitation of Armament in Washington D.C., representing the women's peace movement in Japan, with Yajima Kajiko and plant scientist Marian Irwin Osterhout. In 1931, Hide Inoue became the first woman president of Japan Women's University.
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Katherine R. Whitmore
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Katherine R. Whitmore was a Spanish literature professor at Smith College. She majored in Spanish language and literature at the University of Kansas, and received her doctorate from Berkeley. She taught at a college in Richmond and, from 1930 on, at Smith College. She married Brewer Whitmore, another professor at Smith, in 1939.
Go to Profile#2143
Elena Freda
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Elena Freda was an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist known for her collaboration with Vito Volterra on mathematical analysis and its applications to electromagnetism and biomathematics.
Go to Profile#2144
Ada Lovelace
1815 - 1852 (37 years)
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
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Mary Kenneth Keller
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M. was an American Catholic religious sister, educator and pioneer in computer science. She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in the United States. Keller and Irving C. Tang were the first two recipients of computer science doctorates .
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Ruth Teitelbaum
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Ruth Teitelbaum was one of the first computer programmers in the world. Teitelbaum was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
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Georgia O'Keeffe
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Go to Profile#2148
Frida Kahlo
1907 - 1954 (47 years)
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.
Go to Profile#2149
Bev Littlewood
#2150
Vanessa Bell
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf . Early life and education Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth. The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian , half-sister Laura whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896.
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