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,
#451
Amy Ashurst Gooch
#74607
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Amy Ashurst Gooch is a computer scientist known for her contributions in non-photorealistic rendering. She is currently the Chief Operations Officer at ViSOAR LLC, a data visualization research spin-off software company from the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. She is also an adjunct professor of computer science at Texas A&M University. Her current research is part of an interdisciplinary effort involving computer graphics, perceptual psychology, and computational vision. She is interested in better understanding the spatial information potentially available in CG imagery, determin...
Go to Profile#452
Andrea Grimes Parker
#26732
Overall Influence
Andrea Grimes Parker is an American computer scientist, researcher, and Associate Professor, known for her interdisciplinary study of human computer interaction and personal health informatics. Parker is currently an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing. She also currently serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
Go to Profile#453
Michal Aharon
#70217
Overall Influence
Michal Aharon is an Israeli computer scientist known for her research on sparse dictionary learning, image denoising, and the K-SVD algorithm in machine learning. She is a researcher on advertisement ranking for Yahoo! in Haifa.
Go to Profile#454
Paola Velardi
#82465
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paola Velardi is a full professor of computer science at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Her research encompasses natural language processing, machine learning, business intelligence and semantic web, web information extraction in particular. Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it" . This online, open database champions the recognition of top-rated female scientists in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics areas.
Go to Profile#455
Wenjing Lou
#91121
Overall Influence
Wenjing Lou, a professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Falls Church, Virginia campus since 2011, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to information and network security.
Go to Profile#456
Tandy Warnow
#44604
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.
Go to Profile#457
Cathy Price
#86914
Overall Influence
Catherine J. "Cathy" Price is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
Go to Profile#458
Shuchi Chawla
#78351
Overall Influence
Shuchi Chawla is an Indian computer scientist who works in the design and analysis of algorithms, and is known for her research on correlation clustering, information privacy, mechanism design, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, and algorithmic bias. She works as a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#459
Martha Palmer
#64962
Overall Influence
Martha Palmer is an American computer scientist. She is best known for her work on verb semantics, and for the creation of ontological resources such as PropBank and VerbNet. Education Palmer received a Master of Arts in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin in 1976, advised by Robert Simmons.
Go to Profile#460
Joyce C. H. Liu
#24530
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Joyce Chi-Hui Liu is Professor of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Liu is the Chair of the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies that she founded in 2002. She is also the director of the International Center for Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan.
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Nina Amenta
#80992
Overall Influence
Annamaria Beatrice "Nina" Amenta is an American computer scientist who works as the Tim Bucher Family Professor of Computer Science and the chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in computational geometry and computer graphics, and is particularly known for her research in reconstructing surfaces from scattered data points.
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Kristina Lerman
#87413
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kristina Lerman is an American network scientist whose research concerns the spread of information on social networks, and fairness in machine learning. She is a research professor at the University of Southern California, in the Computer Science Department of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and a principal scientist in the Information Sciences Institute.
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Judith Donath
#19779
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Judith Stefania Donath is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.
Go to Profile#464
Yuying Li
#86621
Overall Influence
Yuying Li is a Chinese-Canadian professor of computer science in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her research interests include mathematical optimization, scientific computing, data mining, and tail risk in computational finance.
Go to Profile#465
Monique Teillaud
#72579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Monique Teillaud is a French researcher in computational geometry at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Nancy, France. She moved to Nancy in 2014 from a different INRIA center in Sophia Antipolis, where she was one of the developers of CGAL, a software library of computational geometry algorithms.
Go to Profile#466
Ruth Aylett
#59819
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ruth S. Aylett is a British author, computer scientist, professor, poet, and political activist. She is a professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she specialises in affective computing, social computing, software agents, and human–robot interaction.
Go to Profile#467
Greet Van den Berghe
#91760
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Greet Van den Berghe is an intensive care specialist and since 2002 head of the Department of Intensive Care of the University Hospital of Leuven and head of the Laboratory of Intensive Care Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven.
Go to Profile#468
Ursula von Rydingsvard
#28066
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Go to Profile#469
Cecilia Mascolo
#83398
Overall Influence
Cecilia Mascolo is a Professor of Mobile Systems at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Education Mascolo received her Bachelors, Masters and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna, Italy. Her PhD, completed in 2001, was supervised by .
Go to Profile#470
Carme Torras
#74618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Carme Torras Genís is a Spanish computer scientist who has contributed to research on robotics and artificial intelligence. A member of Academia Europaea since 2010, she writes technical works in English and fiction in Catalan.
Go to Profile#471
Carol Frieze
#70131
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Carol Frieze works in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University as director of the Women@SCS and SCS4ALL professional organizations. She is co-author of a book on the successful efforts to attract and retain women in computing at Carnegie Mellon, where women represented 50% of the incoming class to the computer science major in fall 2018. She has been recognized by the A. Nico Habermann Award of the Computing Research Association and the AccessComputing Capacity Building Award.
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Brenda Baker
#71058
Overall Influence
Brenda Sue Baker is an American computer scientist. She is known for Baker's technique for approximation algorithms on planar graphs, for her early work on duplicate code detection, and for her research on two-dimensional bin packing problems.
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Magdalena Bałazińska
#83897
Overall Influence
Magdalena Bałazińska is a computer scientist whose research concerns databases and data streams. Born in Poland and educated in Algeria, Canada, and the US, she works at the University of Washington, where she directs the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
Go to Profile#474
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
#78720
Overall Influence
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan is an American computer scientist and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research focusing mainly on building responsible artificial intelligence systems as part of Microsoft's Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI initiative. Jennifer is also a co-chair of Microsoft's Aether group on transparency that works on operationalizing responsible AI across Microsoft through making recommendations on responsible AI issues, technologies, processes, and best practices. Jennifer is also active in the research community, she served as the workshops chai...
Go to Profile#475
Diyi Yang
#76508
Overall Influence
Diyi Yang is a Chinese computer scientist and assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. Her research combines linguistics and social sciences with machine learning to address social problems like online harassment, as well as user-centered text generation and learning with limited data.
Go to Profile#476
Angela Orebaugh
#84722
Overall Influence
Angela Orebaugh is a cyber technology and security author and researcher. In 2011, she was selected as Booz Allen Hamilton's first Cybersecurity Fellow. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia Department of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#477
Katherine Isbister
#73266
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Katherine Isbister is a game and human computer interaction researcher and designer, currently a professor in computational media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Until June 2015, she was an associate professor at New York University, with a joint appointment in computer science and in the Game Center at the Tisch School of the Arts. At NYU, she was founding research director of the Game Innovation Lab. Isbister's research and design contributions center on how to create more compelling emotional and social qualities in games and other digital experiences. She has innovated in the areas of character/avatar/agent design and in researching and evaluating the user experience.
Go to Profile#478
Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau
#71042
Overall Influence
Andrea Carol Arpaci-Dusseau is an American computer scientist interested in operating systems, file systems, data storage, distributed computing, and computer science education. She is a professor of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#479
Monique Laurent
#40954
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Monique Laurent is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is an expert in mathematical optimization. She is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam where she is also a member of the Management Team. Laurent also holds a part-time position as a professor of econometrics and operations research at Tilburg University.
Go to Profile#480
Vida Dujmović
#25312
Overall Influence
Vida Dujmović is a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in graph theory and graph algorithms, and particularly for graph drawing, for the structural theory of graph width parameters including treewidth and queue number, and for the use of these parameters in the parameterized complexity of graph drawing. She is a professor of electrical engineering & computer science at the University of Ottawa, where she holds the University Research Chair in Structural and Algorithmic Graph Theory.
Go to Profile#481
Phyllis Fox
#18066
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Phyllis Ann Fox was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Early life and education Fox was born on March 13, 1923, and raised in Colorado. She did her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, earning a B.A. in mathematics in 1944.
Go to Profile#482
Aleksandra Przegalińska
#56316
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Aleksandra Katarzyna Przegalińska-Skierkowska is a Polish futurist. She is an associate professor of management and artificial intelligence as well as a vice-rector at Kozminski University. Life Przegalińska is a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and the Center for Collective Intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also a visiting scholar at the Labor & Worklife Center at Harvard University.
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Jie Lu
#93411
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jie Lu is a scientist in the area of computational intelligence and Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2000, Lu earned her PhD from Curtin University in Perth. She made fundamental contributions in the areas of fuzzy transfer learning, concept drift, data-driven decision support systems, and recommender systems.
Go to Profile#484
Laura Chappell
#75482
Overall Influence
Laura Chappell is an American researcher and educator. She is best known as the founder of Chappell University, Wireshark University and the WCNA Certification program . She has authored several publications on Wireshark including:Wireshark Network Analysis: the Official Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Study GuideWireshark 101: Essential Skills for Network AnalysisChappell's career began in 1989 at Novell, Inc., where she developed an interest in newly emergent Internet and networking technology. She subsequently worked as a road show presenter and course developer.
Go to Profile#485
Tülay Adalı
#74823
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tülay Adalı is a Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose research interests include signal processing, machine learning, and data fusion.
Go to Profile#486
Dana Pe'er
#44301
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Dana Pe'er , Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute is a researcher in computational systems biology. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2021, she was previously a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function and evolution of molecular networks, particularly how genetic variations alter the regulatory network and how these genetic variations can cause cancer.
Go to Profile#487
Amina Doumane
#82684
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Amina Doumane is a Moroccan computer scientist who on during 2017 won the French Giles-Kahn prize for the best doctoral thesis in France. Her thesis was on the subject On the infinitary proof theory of logics with fixed points. On January 31 2018, Doumane was presented with the award by the French computer science society .
Go to Profile#488
Sabine Van Huffel
#60807
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sabine J. A. Van Huffel is a Belgian computer scientist, applied mathematician, and electrical engineer, whose research concerns computational methods for medical diagnostics, and in particular methods based on total least squares.
Go to Profile#489
Carla Savage
#53780
Overall Influence
Carla Diane Savage is an American computer scientist and mathematician, a professor of computer science at North Carolina State University and a former secretary of the American Mathematical Society .
Go to Profile#490
Diane Gromala
#69962
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Diane Gromala is a Canada Research Chair and a Professor in the Simon Fraser University School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Her research works at the confluence of computer science, media art and design, and has focused on the cultural, visceral, and embodied implications of digital technologies, particularly in the realm of chronic pain.
Go to Profile#491
Jennifer Bartlett
#19446
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Jennifer Bartlett was an American artist and novelist. She was best known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism. Many of her pieces were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.
Go to Profile#492
Sally E. Green
#99002
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#493
Susan B. Davidson
#67380
Overall Influence
Susan B. Davidson CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist known for work in databases and bioinformatics. She is Weiss Professor of Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation work on distributed databases included results on statistical and mathematical techniques for data resolution as well as mechanisms to avoid database conflicts.
Go to Profile#494
Kaisa Sere
#82891
Overall Influence
1954 - 2012 (58 years)
Kaisa Sere was a Finnish computer scientist, specialising in research into formal methods. Kaisa Sere was born 3 June 1954 in Gamlakarleby. She received an MSc in mathematics in 1979 and a PhD in computer science in 1990, both from Åbo Akademi University in Turku, southern Finland. She undertook formal methods research in action systems, distributed systems, hardware design, neural networks, and program refinement. She undertook joint research with Ralph-Johan Back and was involved in many collaborative European research projects. She also supervised 19 PhD students.
Go to Profile#495
Susan Hockey
#60208
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Susan Hockey is an Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College London. She has written about the history of digital humanities, the development of text analysis applications, electronic textual mark-up, teaching computing in the humanities, and the role of libraries in managing digital resources. In 2014, University College London created a Digital Humanities lecture series in her honour.
Go to Profile#496
Christel Baier
#80208
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Christel Baier is a German theoretical computer scientist known for her work in model checking, temporal logic, and automata theory. She is a professor at TU Dresden, where she holds the chair for Algebraic and Logic Foundations of Computer Science in the Faculty of Computer Science. Baier is the editor-in-chief of Acta Informatica.
Go to Profile#497
Mandy Chessell
#38866
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Amanda Elizabeth Chessell is a computer scientist and a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. She has been awarded the title of IBM Master Inventor. She is also a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Outside IBM, Chessell is the first woman to be awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2002 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#498
Helen Frankenthaler
#3385
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades , she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field.
Go to Profile#499
Wilhelmina Holladay
#44946
Overall Influence
1922 - 2021 (99 years)
Wilhelmina Cole Holladay was an American art collector and patron. She was the co-founder of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2006. Early life Holladay, known as "Billie", was born in Elmira, New York, on October 10, 1922. Her father, Chauncey Cole, worked as a businessman; her mother, Claire Elisabeth née Strong, was a housewife. She was close to her maternal grandmother, whom she credits with inculcating a perception of beauty. Holladay graduated with a degree in art history from Elmira College in 1944. She went on to study art history...
Go to Profile#500
Olga Troyanskaya
#58423
Overall Influence
Olga G. Troyanskaya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and the Deputy Director for Genomics at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Biology in NYC. She studies protein function and interactions in biological pathways by analyzing genomic data using computational tools.
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