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 people in Computer Science,
#501
Andrew Yao
#3312
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a Chinese computer scientist and computational theorist. He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's Principle.
Go to Profile#502
George Novacky
#9402
Overall Influence
George A. Novacky was an Assistant Department Chair and Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, and an Assistant Dean of CAS for Undergraduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Education and career Novacky first received a mathematics degree from Wheeling Jesuit College in 1968. In 1971, he received his MA in mathematics followed by a PhD in mathematics in 1981. Both his MA and PhD were from University of Pittsburgh. Novacky's dissertation was Chromaticity of Extremal Graphs.
Go to Profile#503
E. Allen Emerson
#4491
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ernest Allen Emerson II , better known as E. Allen Emerson, is an American computer scientist and winner of the 2007 Turing Award. He is Professor and Regents Chair Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, United States.
Go to Profile#504
Adam Cheyer
#6671
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Adam Cheyer is a co-founder of Siri Inc. and formerly a director of engineering in the iPhone group at Apple. Early life and education Cheyer attended Sharon High School, in Sharon, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1984, Cheyer earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Brandeis University in 1988, and a master's degree in computer science and artificial intelligence from UCLA in 1993.
Go to Profile#505
Jelani Nelson
#7577
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Jelani Osei Nelson is an Ethiopian-American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nelson is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.
Go to Profile#506
Kathleen Antonelli
#3536
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Kathleen Rita Antonelli , known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Frances Spence, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.
Go to Profile#507
Jack Edmonds
#3259
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.
Go to Profile#508
Lisa Anthony
#9312
Overall Influence
Lisa Anthony is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. She is also the director of the Intelligent Natural Interaction Technology Laboratory . Her research interests revolve around developing natural user interfaces to allow for greater human-computer interaction, specifically for children as they develop their cognitive and physical abilities.
Go to Profile#509
Keshav K Pingali
#9622
Overall Influence
Keshav K Pingali is an American computer scientist, currently the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, and also a published author. He previously also held the India Chair of Computer Science at Cornell University and also the N. Rama Rao Professorship at Indian Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2020, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Academia Europeana.
Go to Profile#510
Eric Xing
#8218
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Eric Poe Xing is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, computational biology, and statistical methodology. Xing is founding President of the world’s first artificial intelligence university, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#511
Gerrit Blaauw
#8343
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Gerrit Anne "Gerry" Blaauw was a Dutch computer scientist, known as one of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, together with Fred Brooks, Gene Amdahl, and others. Biography Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Blaauw received his BA from the Delft University of Technology in 1946. In 1947, Blaauw won an exclusive scholarship funded by IBM Chief Executive Officer Thomas J. Watson. After an initial year at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Blaauw studied at Harvard University. He received his MA in 1949 and his PhD in 1952 under supervision of Howard Aiken, inventor of the early Mark I computer.
Go to Profile#512
Eugene Myers
#4101
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Colorado.
Go to Profile#513
Xiaoming Fu
#9641
Overall Influence
Xiaoming Fu is a Chinese German computer scientist. He is a Full Professor of Computer Science with focus on Internet technologies at Universität Göttingen. His research interests include architecture, protocols and applications of networked systems including mobile and cloud computing, network security, social computing and big data.
Go to Profile#514
Edward H. Shortliffe
#8247
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Edward Hance Shortliffe is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice , its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty.
Go to Profile#515
Eldon C. Hall
#8199
Overall Influence
Eldon Hall was the leader of hardware design efforts for the Apollo Guidance Computer at MIT, and advocated the use of integrated circuits for this task. He wrote extensively of the development of the AGC, culminating in his 1996 book, Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer
Go to Profile#516
Frances Allen
#6595
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita.
Go to Profile#517
Wolfram Burgard
#6042
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Wolfram Burgard is a German roboticist. He is a full professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg where he heads the Laboratory for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He is known for his substantial contributions to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem as well as diverse other contributions to robotics.
Go to Profile#518
Dana Angluin
#7464
Overall Influence
Dana Angluin is a professor emeritus of computer science at Yale University. She is known for foundational work in computational learning theory and distributed computing. Education Angluin received her B.A. and Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. Her thesis, entitled "An application of the theory of computational complexity to the study of inductive inference" was one of the first works to apply complexity theory to the field of inductive inference. Angluin joined the faculty at Yale in 1979.
Go to Profile#519
Takeo Kanade
#7662
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Takeo Kanade is a Japanese computer scientist and one of the world's foremost researchers in computer vision. He is U.A. and Helen Whitaker Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. He has approximately 300 peer-reviewed academic publications and holds around 20 patents.
Go to Profile#520
Rohini Kesavan Srihari
#9599
Overall Influence
Rohini Kesavan Srihari is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. She is the founder and CEO of Content Savvy Inc., a high-technology company in Western New York. Prior to this she founded Cymfony Inc., which specializes in brand analytics. She also founded Cymfony Net Private Limited in Bangalore, India. She also holds a position as Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.
Go to Profile#521
Angie Jones
#8798
Overall Influence
Angie Jones is a software engineer and automation architect who specializes in software testing and development. Jones has contributed to several open-source testing tools and libraries, including Selenium and Appium.
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Bertram Raphael
#6635
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Bertram Raphael is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. Early life and education Raphael was born in 1936 in New York. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1957, and an MS degree in Applied Math from Brown University in 1959. He was a student of Marvin Minsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his PhD in mathematics in 1964.
Go to Profile#523
Roger Needham
#7288
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Roger Michael Needham was a British computer scientist. Early life and education Needham was born in Birmingham, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, née Baker and Leonard William Needham , a university chemistry lecturer. He attended Doncaster Grammar School for Boys in Doncaster going on to St John's College, Cambridge in 1953, and graduating with a BA in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy. His PhD thesis was on applications of digital computers to the automatic classification and retrieval of documents. He worked on a variety of key computing projects in security, operating systems,...
Go to Profile#524
Jacques Cohen
#9701
Overall Influence
Jacques Cohen is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. There he served as the TJX/Feldberg Chair in Computer Science. He has performed research in algorithms, parsing and compiling, memory management, logic and constraint logic programming, and parallelism. Cohen has published extensively, frequently with undergraduate and graduate students.
Go to Profile#525
Barbara Engelhardt
#9433
Overall Influence
Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.
Go to Profile#526
Matei Zaharia
#5542
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark. As of April 2022, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the 3rd-richest people in Romania with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
Go to Profile#527
Zohar Manna
#8058
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Zohar Manna was an Israeli-American computer scientist who was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Biography He was born in Haifa, Israel. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#528
Ken Perlin
#9743
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kenneth H. Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, founding director of the Media Research Lab at NYU, director of the Future Reality Lab at NYU, and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. He holds a BA. degree in Theoretical Mathematics from Harvard University , a MS degree in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University , and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the same institution . His research interests include graphics, animation, multimedia, and science education. He developed or was in...
Go to Profile#529
Sarita Schoenebeck
#9783
Overall Influence
Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck is an American computer scientist at the University of Michigan, where she serves as Director of the Living Online Lab. Her research considers human–computer interactions, social media and social computing. She was awarded the University of Michigan School of Information Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award in 2017 for her work on LGBTQ+ families and online communities.
Go to Profile#530
Aaron Sloman
#6207
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham. He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; he also collaborated widely, e.g. with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolut...
Go to Profile#531
Farnam Jahanian
#5223
Overall Influence
Farnam Jahanian is an Iranian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and higher education leader. He serves as the 10th president of Carnegie Mellon University. Early life and education Farnam Jahanian was born in Teheran, Iran in 1961. He emigrated to the United States in 1977 at the age of 16 and completed high school in San Antonio, Texas.
Go to Profile#532
Dines Bjørner
#9436
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Professor Dines Bjørner is a Danish computer scientist. He specializes in research into domain engineering, requirements engineering and formal methods. He worked with Cliff Jones and others on the Vienna Development Method at IBM Laboratory Vienna . Later he was involved with producing the RAISE formal method with tool support.
Go to Profile#533
Elaine Weyuker
#7257
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elaine Jessica Weyuker is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow , and an AT&T Fellow at Bell Labs for research in software metrics and testing as well as elected to the National Academy of Engineering. She is the author of over 130 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings.
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Gloria Townsend
#9842
Overall Influence
Gloria Townsend is an American computer scientist and professor in the department of Computer Science at DePauw University in Indiana. She is known for her work in evolutionary computation and her involvement with women in computing. She has served on the executive committee of the Association for Computing Machinery Council on Women in Computing. She is the author of One Hundred One Ideas for Small Regional Celebrations of Women in Computing. In 2013, she received the Mr. and Mrs. Fred C. Tucker Jr. Distinguished Career Award for notable contributions to DePauw through her commitments to s...
Go to Profile#535
Erik Demaine
#5876
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
#536
Judy Goldsmith
#9824
Overall Influence
Judith Anne Goldsmith is a computer scientist whose publications span a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence, computational complexity theory, decision theory, and computer science education. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky.
Go to Profile#537
Dan Geer
#6666
Overall Influence
Dan Geer is a computer security analyst and risk management specialist. He is recognized for raising awareness of critical computer and network security issues before the risks were widely understood, and for ground-breaking work on the economics of security.
Go to Profile#538
Mary Jane Irwin
#9386
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mary Jane Irwin is an Emerita Evan Pugh Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. She has been on the faculty at Penn State since 1977. She is an international expert in computer architecture. Her research and teaching interests include computer architecture, embedded and mobile computing systems design, power and reliability aware design, and emerging technologies in computing systems.
Go to Profile#539
Sanjeev Arora
#8431
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sanjeev Arora is an Indian American theoretical computer scientist. Life He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002–03. In 2008 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2011 he was awarded the ACM Infosys Foundation Award , given to mid-career researchers in Computer Science. He is a two time recipient of the Gödel Prize . Arora has been awarded the Fulkerson Prize for 2012 for his work on improving the approximation ratio for graph separators . In 2012 he became a Simons Investigator. Arora was elected in 2015 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2018 to the National Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#540
Frans Kaashoek
#8777
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marinus Frans Kaashoek is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer systems, distributed systems, and content-distribution networks.
Go to Profile#541
David Korn
#8050
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David G. Korn is an American UNIX programmer and the author of the Korn shell , a command line interface/programming language. Education and work David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic airfoils and developing the Korn airfoil, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to probl...
Go to Profile#542
Ken Sakamura
#5491
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ken Sakamura, as of April 2017, is a Japanese professor and dean of the Faculty of Information Networking for Innovation and Design at Toyo University, Japan. He is a former professor in information science at the University of Tokyo . He is the creator of the real-time operating system architecture TRON.
Go to Profile#543
Bernard Chazelle
#8443
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Bernard Chazelle is a French-born computer scientist. He is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Much of his work is in computational geometry, where he is known for his study of algorithms, such as linear-time triangulation of a simple polygon, as well as major complexity results, such as lower bound techniques based on discrepancy theory. He is also known for his invention of the soft heap data structure and the most asymptotically efficient known deterministic algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees.
Go to Profile#544
Amit Singhal
#6542
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Amitabh Kumar "Amit" Singhal is a former senior vice president at Google Inc., having been a Google Fellow and the head of Google's Search team for 15 years. Biography Born in Jhansi, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989. He continued his computer science education in the United States, and received an M.S. degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991. He wrote about his time at the University of Minnesota Duluth:
Go to Profile#545
John Lions
#9736
Overall Influence
1937 - 1998 (61 years)
John Lions was an Australian computer scientist. He is best known as the author of Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, commonly known as the Lions Book. Early life Lions gained a degree with first-class honours from the University of Sydney in 1959. He applied, and received a scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge where he earned his doctorate on Control engineering in 1963. After his graduation, he worked at the consulting firm KCS Ltd in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 1967, he briefly took a position at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada before moving on...
Go to Profile#546
William Wulf
#7423
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
William Allan Wulf was an American computer scientist notable for his work in programming languages and compilers. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Wulf attended the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, receiving a Bachelor of Science in engineering physics in 1961 and an Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1963. He then achieved the first Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Virginia in 1968.
Go to Profile#547
Bill Gosper
#4384
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ralph William Gosper Jr. , known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer. Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and he holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. The Gosper curve and the Gosper's algorithm are named after him.
Go to Profile#548
John Maeda
#2642
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
John Maeda is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist."
Go to Profile#549
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
#6865
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist. Life Andrzej Ehrenfeucht formulated the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game, using the back-and-forth method given in Roland Fraïssé's PhD thesis. Also named for Ehrenfeucht is the Ehrenfeucht–Mycielski sequence.
Go to Profile#550
Mitchel Resnick
#6203
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mitchel Resnick is LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, Director of the Okawa Center, and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. , Resnick serves as head of the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, which grants master's degrees and Ph.D.s at the MIT Media Lab.
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