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,
#251
Pascale Fung
#44989
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Pascale Fung is a professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She is the director of the newly established, multidisciplinary Centre for AI Research at HKUST. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine intera...
Go to Profile#252
Dorothea Blostein
#42072
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dorothea Blostein is a Canadian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science at Queen's University. She has published well-cited publications on computer vision, image analysis, and graph rewriting, and is known as one of the authors of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences. Her research interests also include biomechanics and tensegrity.
Go to Profile#253
Patricia Selinger
#38852
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Patricia G. Selinger is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for her work on relational database management systems. Education She received A.B. , S.M. , and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#254
Dorien Herremans
#54298
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Dorien Herremans is a Belgian computer music researcher. Herremans is currently an assistant professor in the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and research scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR. She also works as a certified instructor for the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and is director of SUTD Game Lab. Before going to SUTD, she was a recipient of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, where she worked on the project MorpheuS: Hybrid Machine Learning – Optimization techniques To Generate Structured Music Through Morphing And Fusion.
Go to Profile#255
Cynthia Beath
#46015
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Cynthia Mathis Beath is an American economist and Professor Emerita at the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management at the McCombs School of Business, Biography Beath obtained her BA in Psychology from Duke University in 1966, and later studied at University of California, Los Angeles, where she obtained her MBA in Computer and Information Systems in 1975, and her PhD in Computer and Information Systems in 1986
Go to Profile#256
Hagit Attiya
#58293
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hagit Attiya is an Israeli computer scientist who holds the Harry W. Labov and Charlotte Ullman Labov Academic Chair of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Her research is in the area of distributed computing.
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Dorothea Wagner
#56027
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dorothea Wagner is a German computer scientist, known for her research in graph drawing, route planning, and social network analysis. She heads the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#258
Tamara Munzner
#45911
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Tamara Macushla Munzner is an American-Canadian scientist. She is an expert in information visualization who works as a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia . Early life Tamara Macushla Munzner was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the daughter of abstract painter Aribert Munzner. She graduated from South High School in 1986. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. She returned to Stanford for her graduate studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. Her thesis, In...
Go to Profile#259
Urmila Mahadev
#23930
Overall Influence
Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Education and career Mahadev is originally from Los Angeles, where her parents are physicians. She became interested in quantum computing through a course with Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, where she graduated in 2010.
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Michèle Sebag
#38210
Overall Influence
Martine-Michèle Sebag is a French computer scientist, primarily focused on machine learning. She has over 6,000 citations. Biography Sebag studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and later worked in the computer science industry, starting at Thomson Corporation, where she was introduced to artificial intelligence. She then moved into the research field, at the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Solides at Ecole Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#261
Ronitt Rubinfeld
#36989
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ronitt Rubinfeld is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University. Education Rubinfeld was born in 1964 in Ohio and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child, she attended Huron High School and went on to graduate from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering . Following that, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley , under the supervision of Manuel Blum. In the years 1990–1992 she did a post-doctorate at Princet...
Go to Profile#262
Joëlle Coutaz
#38806
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Joëlle Coutaz is a French computer scientist, specializing in human-computer interaction . Her career includes research in the fields of operating systems and HCI, as well as being a professor at the University of Grenoble. Coutaz is considered a pioneer in HCI in France, and in 2007, she was awarded membership to SIGCHI. She was also involved in organizing CHI conferences and was a member on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
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Maja Matarić
#43195
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Maja Matarić is an American computer scientist, roboticist and AI researcher, and the Chan Soon-Shiong Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California. She is known for her work in human-robot interaction for socially assistive robotics, a new field she pioneered, which focuses on creating robots capable of providing personalized therapy and care that helps people help themselves, through social rather than physical interaction. Her work has focused on aiding special needs populations including the elderly, stroke patients, an...
Go to Profile#264
Sally Jackson
#15500
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sally Ann Jackson is an American scholar of argumentation, communication, and rhetoric. She is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Biography Jackson earned all three of her degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has held faculty positions at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln , Michigan State University , University of Oklahoma , and the University of Arizona . At Arizona she also served in a series of administrative positions, including Vice Provost/Vice President for Learning and Information Technologies and Chief Information Officer.
Go to Profile#265
Johanna Moore
#46353
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Johanna Doris Moore FRSE is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.
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Carla Brodley
#49985
Overall Influence
Carla E. Brodley is a computer scientist specializing in machine learning. Brodley is a Fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence , and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . She is the Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, where she serves as the Executive Director for the Center for Inclusive Computing and holds a tenured appointment in Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Brodley served as dean of Khoury College from 2014-2021. She is a proponent for greater enrollment of women and under-represented minorities in c...
Go to Profile#267
Svetha Venkatesh
#20850
Overall Influence
Svetha Venkatesh is one of the top 15 women in the world in Artificial Intelligence. She is Indian/Australian and is an Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environments, in the Department of Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin University, as well as a professor of computer science and director of the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin. She was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2004 for her contributions to the "formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data". She was...
Go to Profile#268
Elizabeth Rather
#38164
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Elizabeth "Bess" D. Rather is the co-founder of FORTH, Inc. and is a leading expert in the Forth programming language. She became involved with Forth while she was at the University of Arizona, but working part-time for National Radio Astronomy Observatory . While she initially aimed to rewrite their systems in FORTRAN, her discovery of the power of Forth convinced her to leave the University to work for NRAO and Kitt Peak National Observatory, where she wrote the first Forth manual and started popularizing the language in the scientific community. She co-founded FORTH, Inc. with Charles Moore in 1973.
Go to Profile#269
Elisabeth André
#35634
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Elisabeth André is a German Computer Scientist from Saarlouis, Saarland who specializes in Intelligent User Interfaces, Virtual Agents, and Social Computing. Education 1988—Computer Science diploma at the University of Saarland1995—Computer Science PhD at the University of SaarlandAndré's research interests include Affective Computing, Embodied Conversational Agents, Multimodal Human-Machine Interaction, and Social Signal Processing.
Go to Profile#270
Jennifer Mankoff
#48191
Overall Influence
Jennifer Mankoff is the Richard E. Ladner Endowed Professor and Associate Director for Diversity and Inclusion in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she joined the faculty in 2017.
Go to Profile#271
Laura M. Haas
#47587
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Laura M. Haas is an American computer scientist noted for her research in database systems and information integration. She is best known for creating systems and tools for the integration of heterogeneous data from diverse sources, including federated technology that virtualizes access to data, and mapping technology that enables non-programmers to specify how data should be integrated.
Go to Profile#272
Elaine Rich
#55708
Overall Influence
Elaine Alice Rich is an American computer scientist, known for her textbooks on artificial intelligence and automata theory and for her research on user modeling. She is retired as a distinguished senior lecturer from the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#273
Cordelia Schmid
#57458
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Cordelia Schmid is computer vision researcher, currently Head of the THOTH project team at INRIA , Montbonnot, France. Schmid obtained a degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, and her doctorate from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, with a prizewinning thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval".
Go to Profile#274
Robin Murphy
#42584
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robin Roberson Murphy is an American computer scientist and roboticist. She is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. She is known as a founder of the fields of rescue robotics and human-robot interaction and for inserting robots into disasters. Her case studies of how unmanned systems under perform in the field led cognitive systems engineering researcher David Woods to pose the Murphy's Law of Autonomy: a deployment of robotic systems will fall short of the target level of autonomy, creating or exacerbating a shortfall in mechanisms for coordination with human problem holders.
Go to Profile#275
Reihaneh Safavi-Naini
#21271
Overall Influence
Reihaneh "Rei" Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industrial Research Chair and the Alberta Innovates Strategic Chair in Information Security at the University of Calgary, Canada. Education Reihaneh received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada, under supervision of Prof. Ian F. Blake. She obtained her BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.
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Ann Copestake
#49843
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
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Nadia Heninger
#35869
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Nadia Heninger is an American cryptographer, computer security expert, and computational number theorist at the University of California, San Diego. Contributions Heninger is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routerss and other embedded devices, for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the National ...
Go to Profile#278
Maria-Florina Balcan
#59150
Overall Influence
Maria-Florina Balcan is a Romanian-American computer scientist whose research investigates machine learning, algorithmic game theory, theoretical computer science, including active learning, kernel methods, random-sampling mechanisms and envy-free pricing. She is an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Mihaela Cardei
#16230
Overall Influence
Mihaela Cardei is a Romanian-American computer scientist known for her research on wireless ad hoc networks. She is a professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, where she is also associate dean for graduate studies.
Go to Profile#280
Nuria Oliver
#57959
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist. She is the director of the ELLIS Alicante Foundation, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Vodafone Institute, and Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance. Previously, she was an independent director on the board of directors of Bankia, Commissioner of the Presidency of Valencia for AI and COVID-19, Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone, Scientific Director at Telefónica and researcher at Microsoft Research. She holds a PhD from the Media Lab at MIT, and is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, a member of the board of ELLIS, and elected permanent member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.
Go to Profile#281
Amparo Alonso Betanzos
#46305
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Amparo Alonso-Betanzos is a Spanish computer scientist and president of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence. Career She is a professor at University of A Coruña, where she leads the Laboratory for the Investigation and Development of Artificial Intelligence . Originally a chemical engineer, her research now focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically its medical applications.
Go to Profile#282
Aude Oliva
#21785
Overall Influence
Aude Oliva is a French professor of computer vision, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . Education Oliva has a dual French baccalaureate in mathematics and physics. She then earned a Masters of Science in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble and then a doctorate from the same university in 1995. She joined the MIT faculty in 2004 and CSAIL in 2012.
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Hanna Wallach
#60384
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Hanna Wallach is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at Microsoft Research. Her work makes use of machine learning models to study the dynamics of social processes. Her current research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning.
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Sophia Drossopoulou
#44077
Overall Influence
Sophia Drossopoulou is a computer scientist, currently working at Imperial College London, where she is Professor in Programming Languages. She earned her Ph.D. from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#285
Dorothy Monekosso
#51217
Overall Influence
Dorothy N. Monekosso is a British academic. She is a professor of computer science in the Department of Computer Science at University of Durham. She researches ambient assisted living , intelligent environments, smart homes, and assistive robotics.
Go to Profile#286
Holly Rushmeier
#55891
Overall Influence
Holly Rushmeier is an American computer scientist and is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. She is known for her contributions to the field of computer graphics. Biography Rushmeier has received three degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell University: the B.S. in 1977, the M.S. in 1986, and the Ph.D. in 1988. Before returning to graduate school in 1983, she worked in Seattle as an engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Washington Natural Gas.
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Asuman Özdağlar
#25117
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Asuman "Asu" Özdağlar is a Turkish academic. Early life She was born to İsmail Özdağlar and Zahide Özdağlar on December 16, 1974. Her father İsmail Özdağlar was a former Minister of State, between December 13, 1983 and January 15, 1985 in the 45th government of Turkey, who was convicted and jailed of misuse of ministerial powers.
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Brigitte Plateau
#50267
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Brigitte Plateau is a French computer scientist. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-aux-Roses majoring in Mathematics , she is a Doctor of Information Studies. A University Professor at Grenoble Institute of Technology since 1988, since February 2012 she has been the General Administrator of the Grenoble INP cluster.
Go to Profile#289
Anne Condon
#39106
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anne Elizabeth Condon, is an Irish-Canadian computer scientist, professor, and former head of the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on computational complexity theory, DNA computing, and bioinformatics. She has also held the NSERC/General Motors Canada Chair for Women in Science and Engineering from 2004 to 2009, and has worked to improve the success of women in the sciences and engineering.
Go to Profile#290
Laurie Hendren
#62395
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Laurie Hendren was a Canadian computer scientist noted for her research in programming languages and compilers. Biography Hendren received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Queen's University, Kingston in 1982 and 1984 respectively. She received a Ph.D in computer science from Cornell University in 1990.
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Maria Petrou
#30706
Overall Influence
1953 - 2012 (59 years)
Maria Petrou FREng was a Greek-born British scientist who specialised in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine vision. She developed a number of novel image recognition techniques, taught at Surrey University and Imperial College London, and was a prolific author of scientific articles.
Go to Profile#292
Michal Parnas
#63950
Overall Influence
Michal Parnas is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist known for her work on property testing and sublinear-time algorithms. She is a professor of computer science at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo in Israel, where she was a founding faculty member and was also the dean of the school of computer science from 2011 to 2016. Since October 2022 she is the vice president of academic affairs of the college.
Go to Profile#293
Jane Hillston
#36822
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jane Elizabeth Hillston is a British computer scientist who is professor of quantitative modelling and head of school in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Early life and education Hillston received a BA in Mathematics from the University of York in 1985, an MSc in Mathematics from Lehigh University in the United States in 1987 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994, where she has spent her subsequent academic career. Her PhD thesis was awarded the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Awards in 1995 and has been published by Cambridg...
Go to Profile#294
Diane J. Cook
#63359
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Diane Joyce Cook is an American computer scientist whose research interests include artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, home automation, and smart environments. She is Regents Professor and Huie-Rogers Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.
Go to Profile#295
Veronica Dahl
#43504
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Verónica Dahl is an Argentine/Canadian computer scientist, who is recognized as one of the 15 founders of the field of logic programming. Early life Dahl attended college at Buenos Aires University, and graduated from there with a degree in computer science in 1974. As the political conflict in Argentina increased, Dahl attended graduate school in France. In 1977, she was the first graduate at the Université d'Aix-Marseille to receive a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#296
Anna Goldenberg
#62183
Overall Influence
Anna Goldenberg is a Russian-born computer scientist and a full professor at University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute and the Associate Research Director for health at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She is the first chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Go to Profile#297
Gloria Mark
#64754
Overall Influence
Gloria Janet Mark is an American psychologist. She is Chancellor's professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Attention Span, has published over 200 scientific research articles and is noted for her research on Social computing and the social impacts of Digital media. In 2017, she was inducted into the CHI Academy for her contributions to the field of Human-computer interaction.
Go to Profile#298
Alexandra Silva
#56651
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Alexandra Silva is a Portuguese computer scientist and Professor at Cornell University. She was previously Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Awards and honours Silva won a Philip Leverhulme Prize in engineering in 2016. She won the Presburger Award, awarded each year to "a young scientist for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers", in 2017, and the Roger Needham Award in 2018.
Go to Profile#299
Judit Bar-Ilan
#62606
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Judit Bar-Ilan was an Israeli computer scientist known for her research in informetrics and scientometrics. She was a professor of information science and head of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University.
Go to Profile#300
Brenda Romero
#48702
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Brenda Louise Romero , previously known as Brenda Brathwaite, is an American game designer and developer in the video game industry. She was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University. Romero is best known for her work on the Wizardry series of role-playing video games and, more recently, the non-digital series The Mechanic is the Message. She has worked in game development since 1981 and has credits on 49 game titles.
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