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,
#301
Antonia J. Jones
#50278
Overall Influence
1943 - 2010 (67 years)
Antonia Jane Jones was a British mathematician and computer scientist. Her research considered number theory and computer science. Early life and education Jones was born in 1943 in Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital. She was the first member of her family to attend university. Jones contracted polio as a child and lost both of her legs at the age of ten. Jones attended the University of Reading, where she studied mathematics and physics and graduated both with first class honours. She was a doctoral student in number theory at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 1969.
Go to Profile#302
Gail C. Murphy
#61709
Overall Influence
Gail C. Murphy is a Canadian computer scientist who specializes in software engineering and knowledge worker productivity. Murphy is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In 2016, she was named Associate Vice President Research pro tem and assumed the role of Vice-President, Research & Innovation on August 14, 2017. Murphy is co-founder and was Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated.
Go to Profile#303
Meredith Whittaker
#43906
Overall Influence
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on their board of directors. She was formerly the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University , and the co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute. She also served as a senior advisor on AI to Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission. Whittaker was employed at Google for 13 years, where she founded Google's Open Research group and co-founded the M-Lab. In 2018, she was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts and resigned from the company in July 2019.
Go to Profile#304
Lily Jan
#20975
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lily Yeh Jan is a Taiwanese-American neuroscientist. She is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she collaborates with her husband Yuh Nung Jan as co-PIs of the Jan Lab.
Go to Profile#305
Kathleen Nichols
#41342
Overall Influence
Kathleen Nichols is an American computer scientist and computer networking expert. Nichols is the founder and CEO of Pollere, Inc, a network architecture and performance company based in California, US. Before founding Pollere, Nichols was VP of Network Science at Packet Design, where she was part of the founding team. Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at Cisco Systems.
Go to Profile#306
Krysta Svore
#69798
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Krysta Marie Svore is an American computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. She leads the Azure Quantum software team for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where she is Distinguished Scientist and Vice President of Quantum Software. Beyond quantum computing, she has also worked on research in machine learning.
Go to Profile#307
Tal Rabin
#54045
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tal Rabin is a computer scientist and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously the head of research at the Algorand Foundation and the head of the cryptography research group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Go to Profile#308
Kristen Grauman
#70056
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Kristen Lorraine Grauman is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin on leave as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research . She works on computer vision and machine learning.
Go to Profile#309
Wendy Lehnert
#49903
Overall Influence
Wendy Grace Lehnert is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and known for her pioneering use of machine learning in natural language processing. She is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#310
Francine Berman
#62495
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Francine Berman is an American computer scientist, and a leader in digital data preservation and cyber-infrastructure. In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE/ACM-CS Ken Kennedy Award "for her influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her exemplary service to the high performance community". In 2004, Business Week called her the "reigning teraflop queen".
Go to Profile#311
Nada Golmie
#36829
Overall Influence
Nada Taleb Golmie is an American computer scientist and engineer. She is chief of the wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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Lucy Sanders
#50914
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lucinda "Lucy" Sanders is the current CEO and a co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She is the recipient of many distinguished honors in the STEM fields, including induction into the US News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame in 2013.
Go to Profile#313
Yoko Ono
#2051
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lenn...
Go to Profile#314
Kathleen Fisher
#64390
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Kathleen Shanahan Fisher is an American computer scientist who specializes in programming languages and their implementation. Professor Fisher is Chair of Computer Science at Tufts University and one of the authors of the PADS data description language and the Moby experimental concurrent programming language. She is a past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages and has chaired three of their major conferences, ICFP in 2004, OOPSLA in 2011, and PLDI in 2019. She co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop Series in an effort to increase the number o...
Go to Profile#315
Amy S. Bruckman
#40750
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Amy Susan Bruckman is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Reviews TR100 awardees, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
Go to Profile#316
Mary Flanagan
#46464
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Mary Flanagan is an American artist, author, educator, and designer. She pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play and has written several books. She is the founding director of the research laboratory and design studio Tiltfactor Lab and the CEO of the board game company Resonym. Flanagan's work as an artist has been shown around the world and won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in 2018.
Go to Profile#317
Toniann Pitassi
#52601
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Toniann Pitassi is a Canadian-American mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational complexity theory. She is currently Jeffrey L. and Brenda Bleustein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and was Bell Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#318
Jean Cadet
#76747
Overall Influence
#319
Kanchana Kanchanasut
#53224
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kanchana Kanchanasut is a Thai computer science professor at the Asian Institute of Technology who became the first Thai person to use email. She hosted the first server in Thailand connected to the Internet and registered Thailand's country code top-level domain .th in 1988. Kanchanasut was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.
Go to Profile#320
Valerie Barr
#49473
Overall Influence
Valerie Barr is an American computer scientist, and is the Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Bard College. She formerly held the Jean Sammet endowed chair in the department of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is known for her work with women in computing.
Go to Profile#321
Lisa Strausfeld
#44915
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lisa Strausfeld is an American design professional and information architect. Education Strausfeld studied art history and computer science and earned a Bachelor of Arts at Brown University. She went on to study at Harvard University, where she earned a Master of Architecture. She later studied media arts and sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , earning a Master of Science degree.
Go to Profile#322
Marion Créhange
#43872
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Marion Créhange was a French computer scientist. She was one of the first persons in France to get a PhD in Computer Science in 1961. A pioneer of computer science at the University of Nancy, she was one of the first to write a PhD in computer science in France in 1961, under the direction of Jean Legras. The title of her thesis is Structure du code de programmation, which deals with the definition and realization of a macro-assembler and a programming tool.
Go to Profile#323
Linda Petzold
#43403
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Linda Ruth Petzold is a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also listed as affiliated faculty in the department of mathematics. Her research concerns differential algebraic equations and the computer simulation of large real-world social and biological networks.
Go to Profile#324
Sylvia Ratnasamy
#63513
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Sylvia Ratnasamy is a Belgian–Indian computer scientist. She is best known as one of the inventors of the distributed hash table . Her doctoral dissertation proposed the content-addressable networks, one of the original DHTs, and she received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014 for this work. She is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#325
Maja Pantić
#67587
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maja Pantić is a Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London and an AI Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London. She was previously Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing University of Twente and Research Director of the Samsung AI lab in Cambridge, UK. She is an expert in machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection and tracking of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals and affective states.
Go to Profile#326
Peri Tarr
#59009
Overall Influence
Peri Tarr received her BS in Zoology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986, and her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Between her BS and MS/PhD, she worked full-time at the University of Massachusetts Physical Plant, attempting to introduce an automated system to help with the Plant's operations. After receiving her PhD, she joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in 1996, where she worked on and led various projects relating to issues of software composition, morphogenic software, and aspect-oriented...
Go to Profile#327
Valerie Aurora
#54372
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative c...
Go to Profile#328
Kavita Bala
#71357
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kavita Bala is an Indian computer scientist, academic and entrepreneur. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. After serving as department chair from 2018–2020, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science, now known as the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
Go to Profile#329
Annie Antón
#45147
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Annie Antón is an academic and researcher in the fields of computer science, mathematical logic, and bioinformatics. She is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, within its College of Computing. She is the founder and director of ThePrivacyPlace.org, a research center devoted to issues of privacy protection in information systems. She has also held advisory positions in industry and government.
Go to Profile#330
Tova Milo
#63018
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Tova Milo is a full Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and the Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2011 to 2014. Milo is the head of the data management group in Tel Aviv University, and her research focuses on Web data management. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 1992 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and INRIA, France, prior to joining Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#331
Sandra Wachter
#49836
Overall Influence
Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute.
Go to Profile#332
Patricia Flatley Brennan
#14646
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received a Master of Science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as chair of University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering's Department of Industrial Engineering from 2007 to 2010.
Go to Profile#333
Judy Chicago
#2097
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers.
Go to Profile#334
Muriel Médard
#44171
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Muriel Médard is an information theorist and electrical engineer. She is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her research in network coding.
Go to Profile#335
Galina Kofman
#36585
Overall Influence
Galina Kofman is a computer scientist and business executive. She was the author of the Kerberos protocol for various IBM systems. Kofman also authored FTP for IBM VM/CMS and OS/2. She received two IBM CEO Outstanding Technical Achievements awards and holds a patent on grid applications. Kofman is an executive at Recyclebank, a green company that rewards people for recycling.
Go to Profile#336
Dianne P. O'Leary
#46394
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dianne Prost O'Leary is an American mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns scientific computing, computational linear algebra, and the history of scientific computing. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of the book Scientific Computing with Case Studies .
Go to Profile#337
Rita Orji
#16644
Overall Influence
Rita Orji is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist who is a Canada Research Chair in Persuasive Technology and the Director of the Persuasive Computing Lab at Dalhousie University. Her work is in the area of human–computer interaction with a major focus on designing interactive systems to achieve health and well being objectives. She has won over 70 awards and recognitions from both national and international organizations. She has addressed a United Nations panel about the status of women and at the Parliament of Canada.
Go to Profile#338
Ruby B. Lee
#49261
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media. At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security. Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".
Go to Profile#339
Mary Lou Soffa
#64602
Overall Influence
Mary Lou Ehnot Soffa is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, program optimization, system software and system engineering. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She is on the CRA-W Board and was co-chair from 2000 to 2003. With Jan Cuny, she founded the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Program and the CRA-W Associate Professor Program.
Go to Profile#340
Nancy M. Amato
#45922
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP , of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.
Go to Profile#341
Sunita Sarawagi
#72834
Overall Influence
Sunita Sarawagi is an Indian computer scientist known for her research in databases, data mining, and machine learning, including the use of natural language processing to extract structured data from text. She is Institute Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay.
Go to Profile#342
Nancy D. Erbe
#16412
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nancy Diane Erbe is an American negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills . Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with a wide spectrum of individuals and groups representing more than 80 countries, from colleagues and associates to clients and students, on these issues. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair . She has received four Fulbright Honors to date including two in the same year which is extremely rare. She is the recipient of the Presidential Outstanding Professor Award-2015.
Go to Profile#343
Catherine G. Wolf
#54462
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Catherine Gody Wolf was an American psychologist and expert in human-computer interaction. She was the author of more than 100 research articles and held six patents in the areas of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and collaboration. Wolf was known for her work at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where she was a 19-year staff researcher.
Go to Profile#344
Naomi Sager
#16469
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Naomi Sager is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.
Go to Profile#345
Wang Xiaoyun
#41053
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Wang Xiaoyun is a Chinese cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and System Science of Shandong University and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#346
Chrisanthi Avgerou
#53861
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Chrisanthi Avgerou FBCS FAIS is a Greek-born British scholar in the field of the Social Study of Information Systems, focusing on Information Technology in developing countries. She is currently Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Go to Profile#347
Lale Akarun
#23886
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lale Akarun is a Turkish electrical engineer and computer scientist researching sign language and gesture recognition, human–computer interaction, and biometrics. She is a professor in the computer engineering department and ex-vice rector at Boğaziçi University.
Go to Profile#348
Anastasia Ailamaki
#72534
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Anastasia Ailamaki is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the Director of the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems lab. She is also the co-founder of RAW Labs SA, a Swiss company developing real-time analytics infrastructures for heterogeneous big data. Formerly, she was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#349
Wendi Heinzelman
#68769
Overall Influence
Wendi Beth Rabiner Heinzelman is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist specializing in wireless networks, cloud computing, and multimedia. She is dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester, and the former dean of graduate studies for arts, sciences, and engineering at Rochester.
Go to Profile#350
Yoelle Maarek
#25881
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Yoelle Maarek is a Tunisian-born Israeli computer scientist. She is the Vice President of Worldwide Research at Amazon, responsible for Amazon's Alexa Shopping Research. Maarek is a researcher in the field of search engines and data mining, and a former vice president at Yahoo! and Director of Yahoo! in Israel and in India. Maarek was the first engineer of Google Israel and established the first development center in Haifa in 2006.
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