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,
#351
Jill P. Mesirov
#29442
Overall Influence
Jill P. Mesirov is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and computational biologist who is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She previously held an adjunct faculty position at Boston University and was the associate director and chief informatics officer at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Go to Profile#352
Rama Akkiraju
#54769
Overall Influence
Rama Akkiraju is an Indian-born American computer scientist. She is vice president of AI for IT at Nvidia and performs research in the field of artificial intelligence. Akkiraju started her career at the T. J. Watson Research Center in New York and later moved to IBM Almaden Research Center. She served as the Distinguished Engineer and Director of Engineering at IBM's Watson Division from 2015 to 2019.
Go to Profile#353
Sophia Ananiadou
#67724
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sophia Ananiadou is a Greek-British computer scientist and computational linguist. She led the development of and directs the National Centre for Text Mining in the United Kingdom. She is also Professor in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.
Go to Profile#354
Dahlia Malkhi
#72392
Overall Influence
Dahlia Malkhi is an Israeli-American computer scientist who works on distributed systems and cryptocurrency. Education and career Malkhi earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, finishing her Ph.D. under the supervision of Danny Dolev. She taught at the Hebrew University until 2004, and then joined Microsoft Research at their Silicon Valley research center. In 2014, when Microsoft closed the center, she moved to VMware, a company working in cloud computing and platform virtualization.
Go to Profile#355
Wendy Seltzer
#27302
Overall Influence
Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and, as of January 2023, a staff member at Tucows where she is the Principal Identity Architect. She is known for her many years of work with the World Wide Web Consortium, where, among many roles, she was the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group.
Go to Profile#356
Yolanda Gil
#74663
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Yolanda Gil is a Spanish computer scientist specializing in knowledge discovery and knowledge-based systems at the University of Southern California . She served as chair of SIGAI the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, and the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#357
Susanne Boll
#57558
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Susanne Boll is a Professor for Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. and is a member of the board at the research institute OFFIS. She is a member of SIGMM and SIGCHI of the ACM as well as the German Informatics Society GI. She founded and directs the HCI Lab at the University of Oldenburg and OFFIS.
Go to Profile#358
Julia Lockheart
#25641
Overall Influence
Julia Lockheart is a British artist, academic and researcher. She is a Professor, Head of Contextual Practices, and Director of the Metadesign Research Centre at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David; metadesign researcher and Associate Lecturer in Design Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London; and also as a design and language consultant to several educational institutions internationally.
Go to Profile#359
Rita Cucchiara
#73134
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Rita Cucchiara is an Italian electrical and computer engineer, and professor in Computer engineering and Science in the Enzo Ferrari Department of Engineering at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. She helds the courses of “Computer Architecture” and “Computer Vision and Cognitive Systems”. Cucchiara's research work focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically deep network technologies and computer vision for human behavior understanding and visual, language and multimodal generative AI. She is the scientific coordinator of the AImage Lab at UNIMORE and is director of the Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation Center as well as the ELLIS Unit at Modena.
Go to Profile#360
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
#57651
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Geraldine Fitzpatrick is an Australian professor and academic researcher who serves as the head of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at TU Wien since 2009. Her research is interdisciplinary at the intersection of social and computer sciences.
Go to Profile#361
Rebecca Mercuri
#48760
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Rebecca Mercuri is a computer scientist specializing in computer security and computer forensics. She is considered a leading expert on electronic voting systems. Education Mercuri earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 after defending her thesis on electronic voting. She was a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. From 2004–2005, she was a computer science fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, focusing on transparency and trust in computational systems.
Go to Profile#362
Kaisa Nyberg
#27975
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kaisa Nyberg is a Finnish cryptographer and computer security researcher. Contributions Nyberg's research includes the theory of perfect nonlinear S-boxes , provably secure block cipher design Education and career Nyberg received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1980 from the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation, On Subspaces of Products of Nuclear Fréchet Spaces, was in topology, and was supervised by Edward Leonard Dubinsky.
Go to Profile#363
Yejin Choi
#48284
Overall Influence
Yejin Choi is the Brett Helsel Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Her research considers natural language processing and computer vision. Early life and education Choi is from South Korea. She attended Seoul National University. After earning a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Choi moved to the United States, where she joined Cornell University as a graduate student. There she worked with Claire Cardie on natural language processing. After earning her doctorate, Choi joined Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. At Stony Brook U...
Go to Profile#364
Cheng Xiang Zhai
#79516
Overall Influence
ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Biography Zhai received the BS , MS , and PhD in Computer Science from Nanjing University. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at Nanjing University's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University with David A. Evans. Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty.
Go to Profile#365
Elizabeth O'Neil
#69066
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Jean O'Neil is an American computer scientist known for her highly cited work in databases, including C-Store, the LRU-K page replacement algorithm, the log-structured merge-tree, and her criticism of the ANSI SQL 92 isolation mechanism. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Go to Profile#366
Henriette Avram
#27359
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Henriette Davidson Avram was a computer programmer and systems analyst who developed the MARC format , the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries. Avram's development of the MARC format in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the Library of Congress had a revolutionizing effect on the practice of librarianship, making possible the automation of many library functions and the sharing of bibliographic information electronically between libraries using pre-existing cataloging standards.
Go to Profile#367
Juliana Freire
#53119
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva is a Brazilian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University. She is known for her research in information visualization, data provenance, and computerized assistance for scientific reproducibility.
Go to Profile#368
Marieke Huisman
#58865
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Marieke Huisman is a Dutch Computer Scientist and a professor of Software Reliability at the University of Twente, where she leads the Formal Methods and Tools Group. Career Huisman graduated from Utrecht University in 1996. She obtained her PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen in 2001; her dissertation, entitled Reasoning about Java programs in higher order logic using PVS and Isabelle, was supervised by Henk Barendregt.
Go to Profile#369
Margaret Hedstrom
#38931
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Margaret L. Hedstrom is an American archivist who is the Robert M. Warner Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. She has contributed to the field of digital preservation, archives, and electronic records management and holds a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin.
Go to Profile#370
Dirkje Postma
#80638
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dirkje Postma is professor at the University of Groningen and the University Medical Center Groningen. She focused her research career on asthma and COPD. Postma is a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands.
Go to Profile#371
Kimberly Keeton
#50519
Overall Influence
Kimberly Kristine Keeton is an American computer scientist specializing in databases and computer data storage. She worked at HP Labs as a Distinguished Technologist and is currently employed by Google as Principal Engineer, and was one of the designers of the Express Query metadata database used by Hewlett-Packard as part of their StoreAll large-scale data storage systems.
Go to Profile#372
Fanya Montalvo
#59902
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Fanya S. Montalvo Received the Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976. Her dissentary was entitled Aftereffects, Adaptation, and Plasticity: A Neural Model for Tunable Feature Space. She was advised by Michael Anthony Arbib. Montalvo has been a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, HP, MIT, and Digital Equipment Corporation.
Go to Profile#373
Faith Ellen
#83056
Overall Influence
Faith Ellen is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto who studies distributed data structures and the theory of distributed computing. She earned her bachelor's degree and master's from the University of Waterloo in 1977 and 1978, respectively, and doctorate in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Richard Karp; her dissertation concerned lower bounds for cycle detection and parallel prefix sums. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1983, and moved to Toronto in 1986. From 1997 to 2001, she was the vice chair of SIGACT, the leading international society for theory of computation.
Go to Profile#374
Asunción Gómez Pérez
#65533
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Asunción Gómez Pérez is a Spanish computer scientist, the Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Doctoral Studies and a Full Professor at the Technical University of Madrid. In 2015, she received National Prize of Informatics from Scientific Society of Informatics of Spain. She is also the recipient of the Ada Byron Prize. She is working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in semantic web and ontology engineering.
Go to Profile#375
Muffy Calder
#47464
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dame Muffy Calder is a Canadian-born British computer scientist, Vice-Principal and Head of College of Science and Engineering, and Professor of Formal Methods at the University of Glasgow. From 2012 to 2015 she was Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government.
Go to Profile#376
Batya Friedman
#54048
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Batya Friedman is an American professor in the University of Washington Information School. She is also an adjunct professor in the Paul G. Allen School Computer Science and Engineering and adjunct professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, where she directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. She received her PhD in learning sciences from the University of California, Berkeley School of Education in 1988, and has an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in computer science and mathematics.
Go to Profile#377
Deborah McGuinness
#29901
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, exp...
Go to Profile#378
Mariarosaria Taddeo
#54542
Overall Influence
Mariarosaria Taddeo is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, and deputy director of the Digital Ethics Lab. Taddeo is also an associate scholar at Said Business School, University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#379
Pamela Zave
#71944
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Pamela Zave is an American computer scientist now working at Princeton University. She is known for her work on requirements engineering, telecommunication services, and protocol modeling and verification, and is now working on network architecture. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2002, and was the 2017 recipient of the Harlan D. Mills Award from the IEEE Computer Society.
Go to Profile#380
Marian Petre
#61414
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marian Petre is a British computer scientist and Professor of Computing at the Open University and Director of its Centre for Research in Computing , known for her work on Visual Programming Environments, and co-developed the concept of cognitive dimensions of notations.
Go to Profile#381
Jordan Harrod
#61453
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (28 years)
Jordan Harrod is an American research scientist and YouTuber who works on neuroengineering, brain-machine interfaces, and machine learning for medicine. A current graduate student at Harvard and MIT, Harrod also runs a YouTube channel to educate the public about artificial intelligence. As of January 2023, her YouTube channel has over 84 thousand subscribers and her videos have over 2 million total views.
Go to Profile#382
Mihaela van der Schaar
#41061
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mihaela van der Schaar is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, AI, and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, where she is director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine , and a Chancellor's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#383
Věra Kůrková
#60573
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Věra Kůrková is a Czech mathematician and computer scientist, affiliated with the Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include neural networks, computational learning theory, and nonlinear approximation theory. She formulated the abstract concept of a variational norm in 1997 which puts ideas of Maurey, Jones, and Barron into the context of functional analysis. See V. Kůrková, Dimension-independent rates of approximation by neural networks. In: Warwick, K., Karny, M. Computer-Intensive Methods in Control and Signal Processing. The Curse of Dimensionality, Birkhauser, Boston, MA, pp. 261–270 .
Go to Profile#384
Jean Bacon
#44570
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean Bacon is a British emeritus professor of distributed systems at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where she co-headed the Opera Research Group from its founding in the 1990s. Previously, she taught at Hatfield Technical College where, in the 1970s, she was involved in the design of one of the earliest computer science degree programs offered in the United Kingdom. Bacon retired from her faculty position at Cambridge in 2010 but has continued to work on Opera projects related to distributed systems and security in cloud computing.
Go to Profile#385
Rebecca Grinter
#68137
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Rebecca Elizabeth "Beki" Grinter is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology . She is affiliated with the RIM@GT, the GVU Center and the Scheller College of Business. Grinter's research lies generally in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work . She has chaired and published papers in top-tier academic conferences in these fields. Her research and expert opinion on technology have also been reported in major news media sources.
Go to Profile#386
Danica Kragic
#53601
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Danica Kragic is a professor of computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology , Stockholm, Sweden. She was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to vision-based systems and robotic object manipulation.
Go to Profile#387
Regan Mandryk
#50371
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Regan Lee Mandryk is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. She specializes in Human-computer interaction. Early life and education Mandryk was born on December 9, 1975, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Mandryk earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Winnipeg in 1997. She completed her Master's degree and PhD at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Mandryk's PhD dissertation applied physiological measures to model user emotion in interactive play environments. She was awarded the 2005 Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal in Applied Sciences and was nominated for the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Go to Profile#388
Ileana Streinu
#43006
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ileana Streinu is a Romanian-American computer scientist and mathematician, the Charles N. Clark Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is known for her research in computational geometry, and in particular for her work on kinematics and structural rigidity.
Go to Profile#389
Bhavani Thuraisingham
#43096
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor of computer science and the executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is a visiting senior research fellow in the Department of Informatics at Kings College University of London and a 2017–2018 Cyber Security Policy Fellow at New America.
Go to Profile#390
Roberta Smith
#7665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position. Early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968, while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
Go to Profile#391
Deborah Raji
#53701
Overall Influence
Inioluwa Deborah Raji is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist and activist who works on algorithmic bias, AI accountability, and algorithmic auditing. Raji has previously worked with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice League on researching gender and racial bias in facial recognition technology. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on how to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning engineering practice. A current Mozilla fellow, she has...
Go to Profile#392
Francesca Bria
#40874
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Francesca Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. She is an Italian innovation economist and information technologist who lectures at various universities and is a consultant to the United Nations and the European Commission.
Go to Profile#393
Jeni Tennison
#56352
Overall Influence
Jenifer Fays Alys Tennison is a British software engineer and consultant who co-chairs the data governance working group within the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence . She also serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the information law and policy centre of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. She was previously Chief Executive Officer of the Open Data Institute .
Go to Profile#394
Claire Cardie
#74054
Overall Influence
Claire Cardie is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. Since 2006, she has been a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and from 2010 to 2011 she was the first Charles and Barbara Weiss Chair of Information Science at Cornell. Her research interests include coreference resolution and sentiment analysis.
Go to Profile#395
Pierangela Samarati
#85618
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pierangela Samarati from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to information security, data protection, and privacy. She was named a 2021 ACM Fellow "for contributions to data security and privacy".
Go to Profile#396
Dmitry Khovratovich
#62513
Overall Influence
Dmitry Khovratovich is a cryptographer, currently a Lead Cryptographer for the Dusk Network, researcher for the Ethereum Foundation, and member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He developed, together with Alex Biryukov, the Equihash proof-of-work algorithm which is currently being used as consensus mechanism for the Zcash cryptocurrency, and the Argon2 key derivation function, which won the Password Hashing Competition in July 2015.
Go to Profile#397
Ulrike Sattler
#58144
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ulrike M. Sattler is a professor of computer science in the information management group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and a visiting professor at the University of Oslo.
Go to Profile#398
Philippa Gardner
#67401
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Philippa Anne Gardner is a British computer scientist and academic. She has been Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London since 2009. She was director of the Research Institute in Automated Program Analysis and Verification between 2013 and 2016. In 2020 Gardner was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#399
Virginia Dignum
#62556
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Maria Virgínia Ferreira de Almeida Júdice Gamito Dignum is a Professor of Computer Science at Umeå University, and an Associated Professor at Delft University of Technology. She leads the Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence research group. Her research and writing considers responsible AI and the development evaluation of human-agent team work, thereby aligning with Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence themes.
Go to Profile#400
Olia Lialina
#31632
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Olia Lialina is an Internet artist and theorist, an experimental film and video critic and curator. Life Lialina graduated in 1993 after studying film criticism and journalism at Moscow State University, followed by art residencies at C3 and Villa Waldberta .
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