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).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#51
Peter Chen
#662
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Pin-Shan Chen is a Taiwanese American computer scientist. He is a distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus at LSU. He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.
Go to Profile#52
Friedrich L. Bauer
#682
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. He coined the term Software engineering Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. From 1946 to 1950, he studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Bauer received his Doctor of Philosophy under the supervision of Fritz Bopp for his thesis Gruppentheoretische Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Spinwellengleichungen in 1952. He completed his habilitation thesis Über q...
Go to Profile#53
Ray Solomonoff
#695
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Ray Solomonoff was the inventor of algorithmic probability, his General Theory of Inductive Inference , and was a founder of algorithmic information theory. He was an originator of the branch of artificial intelligence based on machine learning, prediction and probability. He circulated the first report on non-semantic machine learning in 1956.
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Barry Boehm
#562
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Barry William Boehm was an American software engineer, distinguished professor of computer science, industrial and systems engineering; the TRW Professor of Software Engineering; and founding director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. He was known for his many contributions to the area of software engineering.
Go to Profile#55
Judea Pearl
#315
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks . He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models . In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of sev...
Go to Profile#56
Ole-Johan Dahl
#1007
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard.
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Vladimir Vapnik
#966
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is a computer scientist, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method and support-vector clustering algorithms.
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Douglas Hofstadter
#102
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
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Sebastian Thrun
#598
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
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Dana Scott
#362
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dana Stewart Scott is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, California. His work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages. He has also worked on modal logic, topology, and category theory.
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Louis Pouzin
#509
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist. He designed a pioneering packet communications network, CYCLADES that was the first to implement the end-to-end principle, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.
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Kent Beck
#936
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming,<noinclude></noinclude> a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto,<noinclude></noinclude> the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development , of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
Go to Profile#63
Leslie Lamport
#638
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
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Robert Tarjan
#914
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.
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John Hopcroft
#969
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Edward Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies at Peking University, and the Director of the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Go to Profile#66
Edward Feigenbaum
#608
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Edward Albert Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems." Education and early life Feigenbaum was born in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1936 to a culturally Jewish family, and moved to nearby North Bergen, where he lived until the age of 16, when he left to start college. His hometown did not have a secondary school of its own, and so he chose Weehawken High School for its college preparatory program. He was inducted into his high school's hall of fame in 1996.
Go to Profile#67
Adi Shamir
#474
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#68
Gerald Jay Sussman
#1008
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#69
Leslie Valiant
#768
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leslie Gabriel Valiant is a British American computer scientist and computational theorist. He was born to a chemical engineer father and a translator mother. He is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Valiant was awarded the Turing Award in 2010, having been described by the A.C.M. as a heroic figure in theoretical computer science and a role model for his courage and creativity in addressing some of the deepest unsolved problems in science; in particular for his "striking combination of depth and breadth".
Go to Profile#70
Sepp Hochreiter
#1148
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Josef "Sepp" Hochreiter is a German computer scientist. Since 2018 he has led the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz after having led the Institute of Bioinformatics from 2006 to 2018. In 2017 he became the head of the Linz Institute of Technology AI Lab. Hochreiter is also a founding director of the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence . Previously, he was at the Technical University of Berlin, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the Technical University of Munich. He is a chair of the Critical Assessment of Massive Dat...
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Kenneth E. Iverson
#943
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice".
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Richard Hamming
#382
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code , the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing , Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance.
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Rob Pike
#1181
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Pike is a Canadian programmer and author. Life and works He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and, earlier, at Bell Labswhere he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language.
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Kunihiko Fukushima
#1355
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kunihiko Fukushima is a Japanese computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is currently working part-time as a senior research scientist at the Fuzzy Logic Systems Institute in Fukuoka, Japan.
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Fei-Fei Li
#1176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, who was born in China and is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a Co-Director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
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Ben Shneiderman
#1088
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Go to Profile#77
Ron Rivest
#671
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#78
Gary Marcus
#774
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gary Fred Marcus is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence . Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 Marcus founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.
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Hideto Tomabechi
#610
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hideto Tomabechi is a Japanese cognitive scientist computer scientist . He developed models for cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, cognitive psychology, mindcontroll , cognitive warfare and mathematical models for human brain information processing.
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Stephen Cook
#821
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
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Martin Fowler
#1234
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martin Fowler is a British software developer, author and international public speaker on software development, specialising in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.
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Robert W. Floyd
#1594
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Robert W Floyd was a computer scientist. His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm , which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph and his work on parsing; Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm for detecting cycles in a sequence was attributed to him as well. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd–Steinberg dithering . He pioneered in the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was a contribution to what later became Hoare logic.
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Andries van Dam
#850
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also co-founded the precursor of today's ACM SIGGRAPH conference.
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Corrado Böhm
#1778
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Corrado Böhm was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a computer scientist known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages.
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Tom M. Mitchell
#1575
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Tom Michael Mitchell is an American computer scientist and the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University . He is a founder and former Chair of the Machine Learning Department at CMU. Mitchell is known for his contributions to the advancement of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience and is the author of the textbook Machine Learning. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering since 2010. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow and past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
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Lotfi A. Zadeh
#301
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of several fuzzy-related concepts: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy semantics, fuzzy languages, fuzzy control, fuzzy systems, fuzzy probabilities, fuzzy events, and fuzzy information. Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.
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Robert Kowalski
#1196
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Anthony Kowalski is an American-British logician and computer scientist, whose research is concerned with developing both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking. He has spent most of his career in the United Kingdom.
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Larry Wall
#1129
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Larry Arnold Wall is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at Seattle Pacific University in 1976, majoring in chemistry and music and later pre-medicine with a hiatus of several years working in the university's computing center before graduating with a bachelor's degree in Natural and Artificial Languages.
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Ted Nelson
#530
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."
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Ivar Jacobson
#1155
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson is a Swedish computer scientist and software engineer, known as major contributor to UML, Objectory, Rational Unified Process , aspect-oriented software development and Essence.
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Shafi Goldwasser
#895
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#92
David Parnas
#1656
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#93
Bruce Schneier
#529
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#94
Butler Lampson
#718
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received an A.B. in physics from Harvard University in 1964 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.
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James Rumbaugh
#1641
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James E. Rumbaugh is an American computer scientist and object-oriented methodologist who is best known for his work in creating the Object Modeling Technique and the Unified Modeling Language . Biography Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Rumbaugh received a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , an M.S. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology , and received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT under Professor Jack Dennis.
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John C. Reynolds
#1750
Overall Influence
1935 - 2013 (78 years)
John Charles Reynolds was an American computer scientist. Education and affiliations John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1961. He was a professor of information science at Syracuse University from 1970 to 1986. From then until his death, he was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also held visiting positions at Aarhus University , The University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Microsoft Research and Queen Mary University of London.
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Leonid Levin
#993
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Leonid Anatolievich Levin is a Soviet-American mathematician and computer scientist. He is known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic complexity and intractability, average-case complexity, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic probability, theory of computation, and information theory. He obtained his master's degree at Moscow University in 1970 where he studied under Andrey Kolmogorov and completed the Candidate Degree academic requirements in 1972.
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Peter J. Denning
#1577
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Peter James Denning is an American computer scientist and writer. He is best known for pioneering work in virtual memory, especially for inventing the working-set model for program behavior, which addressed thrashing in operating systems and became the reference standard for all memory management policies. He is also known for his works on principles of operating systems, operational analysis of queueing network systems, design and implementation of CSNET, the ACM digital library, and codifying the great principles of computing. He has written numerous influential articles and books, includi...
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Edwin Catmull
#1227
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
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Martin Hellman
#715
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Martin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate, and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.
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