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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#551
Bernard Galler
#8619
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Bernard A. Galler was an American mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Michigan who was involved in the development of large-scale operating systems and computer languages including the MAD programming language and the Michigan Terminal System operating system.
Go to Profile#552
Ian Goldberg
#7473
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL , and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint , a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.
Go to Profile#553
Susan L. Graham
#8182
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Susan Lois Graham is an American computer scientist. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#554
Seymour Ginsburg
#6896
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Seymour Ginsburg was an American pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory, in particular; and computer science, in general. His work was influential in distinguishing theoretical Computer Science from the disciplines of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
Go to Profile#555
Grzegorz Rozenberg
#9881
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Grzegorz Rozenberg is a Polish and Dutch computer scientist. His primary research areas are natural computing, formal language and automata theory, graph transformations, and concurrent systems. He is referred to as the guru of natural computing, as he was promoting the vision of natural computing as a coherent scientific discipline already in the 1970s, gave this discipline its current name, and defined its scope.
Go to Profile#556
Mehran Sahami
#8644
Overall Influence
Mehran Sahami is an Iranian-born American computer scientist, engineer, and professor. He is the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering, and Professor and Associate Chair for Education in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. He is also the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Go to Profile#557
Jonathan Schaeffer
#9944
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jonathan Herbert Schaeffer is a Canadian researcher and professor at the University of Alberta and the former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence. He led the team that wrote Chinook, the world's strongest American checkers player, after some relatively good results in writing computer chess programs. He is involved in the University of Alberta GAMES group developing computer poker systems. Schaeffer is also a member of the research group that created Polaris, a program designed to play the Texas Hold'em variant of poker. He is a Founder of Onlea, which produces online learning e...
Go to Profile#558
Lenore Blum
#4928
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#559
Cynthia Breazeal
#6753
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the director of the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.
Go to Profile#560
Mihalis Yannakakis
#5240
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mihalis Yannakakis is professor of computer science at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in computational complexity, databases, and other related fields. He won the Donald E. Knuth Prize in 2005.
Go to Profile#561
Mark Jerrum
#10009
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mark Richard Jerrum is a British computer scientist and computational theorist. Jerrum received his Ph.D. in computer science 'On the complexity of evaluating multivariate polynomials' in 1981 from University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Leslie Valiant. He is professor of pure mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#562
Michael Butler
#10273
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Michael J. Butler is an Irish computer scientist. As of 2022, he is professor of computer science and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton, England.
Go to Profile#563
Maurice Herlihy
#10983
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Maurice Peter Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable data structures, applications of combinatorial topology to distributed computing, as well as hardware and software transactional memory. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1994.
Go to Profile#564
Andrej Karpathy
#10641
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. He currently works for OpenAI, where he specializes in deep learning and computer vision.
Go to Profile#565
Dave Thomas
#8814
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Dave Thomas is a computer programmer, author and editor. He has written about Ruby and together with Andy Hunt, he co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer and runs The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company. Thomas moved to the United States from England in 1994 and lives north of Dallas, Texas.
Go to Profile#566
Steven K. Feiner
#10426
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Steven K. Feiner is an American computer scientist, serving as Professor for computer science at Columbia University in the field of computer graphics. He is well-known for his research in augmented reality , and co-author of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice. He directs the Columbia University Computer Graphics and User Interface Lab.
Go to Profile#567
Francis Heylighen
#1789
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel , where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their pro...
Go to Profile#568
Alan Dix
#10744
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Alan John Dix FCBS FLSW is a British author, researcher, and university professor, specialising in human–computer interaction . He is one of the four co-authors of the university level textbook Human–Computer Interaction. Dix is the Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, since May 2018. He was previously a professor at Lancaster University.
Go to Profile#569
Steve Mann
#2985
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
William Stephen George Mann is a Canadian engineer, professor, and inventor who works in augmented reality, computational photography, particularly wearable computing, and high-dynamic-range imaging. Mann is sometimes labeled the "Father of Wearable Computing" for early inventions and continuing contributions to the field. He cofounded InteraXon, makers of the Muse brain-sensing headband, and is also a founding member of the IEEE Council on Extended Intelligence . Mann is currently CTO and cofounder at Blueberry X Technologies and Chairman of MannLab. Mann was born in Canada, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and two children.
Go to Profile#570
Pavel Curtis
#9222
Overall Influence
Pavel Curtis is an American software architect at Microsoft who is best known for having founded and managed LambdaMOO, an online community. In the mid- to late 1980s Curtis developed and taught parts of the computer science course at the Center for Talented Youth summer program.
Go to Profile#571
Stuart Feldman
#7796
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stuart Feldman is an American computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program make. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operating system, and participated in development of the ALTRAN and EFL programming languages.
Go to Profile#572
David L. Mills
#6232
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David L. Mills is an American computer engineer and Internet pioneer. Education Mills earned his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. While at Michigan he worked on the ARPA sponsored Conversational Use of Computers project and developed DEC PDP-8 based hardware and software to allow terminals to be connected over phone lines to an IBM 360 mainframe.
Go to Profile#573
Johannes Gehrke
#10970
Overall Influence
Johannes Gehrke is a German computer scientist and the director of Microsoft Research in Redmond and CTO and Head of Machine Learning for the Microsoft Teams Backend. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and the recipient of the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. From 1999 to 2015, he was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where at the time of his leaving he was the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#574
Wojciech Zaremba
#9646
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist, a founding team member of OpenAI , where he leads both the Codex research and language teams. The teams actively work on AI that writes computer code and creating successors to GPT-3 respectively. The mission of OpenAI is to build safe artificial intelligence , and ensure that its benefits are as evenly distributed as possible.
Go to Profile#575
Eiiti Wada
#11570
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Eiiti Wada is a computer scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo and the Research Director of Internet Initiative Japan , a computer network technology company. He is one of the creators of the Happy Hacking Keyboard.
Go to Profile#576
Michael Martin Hammer
#2161
Overall Influence
1948 - 2008 (60 years)
Michael Martin Hammer was born in Annapolis, Maryland. Hammer is Jewish-American engineer, management author, and a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Michael Hammer and James A. Champy are the founders of The management theory of Business process reengineering . In which, they wrote "Re-engineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution" in 1993.
Go to Profile#577
Jitendra Malik
#9432
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision.
Go to Profile#578
Shimon Even
#9243
Overall Influence
1935 - 2004 (69 years)
Shimon Even was an Israeli computer science researcher. His main topics of interest included algorithms, graph theory and cryptography. He was a member of the Computer Science Department at the Technion since 1974. Shimon Even was the PhD advisor of Oded Goldreich, a prominent cryptographer.
Go to Profile#579
James Hendler
#6004
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Go to Profile#580
Hugo de Garis
#8485
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Hugo de Garis is an Australian retired researcher in the sub-field of artificial intelligence known as evolvable hardware. He became known in the 1990s for his research on the use of genetic algorithms to evolve artificial neural networks using three-dimensional cellular automata inside field programmable gate arrays. He claimed that this approach would enable the creation of what he terms "artificial brains" which would quickly surpass human levels of intelligence.
Go to Profile#581
Stephen Grossberg
#6275
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Grossberg is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
Go to Profile#582
Dieter Fox
#7928
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Dieter Fox is a German-American roboticist and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Bonn in 1998. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields including robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing. Together with Wolfram Burgard and Sebastian Thrun he is a co-author of the book Probabilistic Robotics.
Go to Profile#583
David J. Farber
#4728
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
David J. Farber is a professor of computer science, noted for his major contributions to programming languages and computer networking who is currently the distinguished professor and co-director of Cyber Civilization Research Center at Keio University in Japan. He has been called the "grandfather of the Internet".
Go to Profile#584
Mark S. Miller
#8658
Overall Influence
Mark S. Miller is an American computer scientist. He is known for his work as one of the participants in the 1979 hypertext project known as Project Xanadu; for inventing Miller columns; and the open-source coordinator of the E programming language. He also designed the Caja compiler. Miller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Foresight Institute.
Go to Profile#585
Jay Earley
#10342
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jay Earley is an American computer scientist and psychologist. He invented the Earley parser in his early career in computer science. Later he became a clinical psychologist specializing in group therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy , including working with the inner critic. He has created the Pattern System, a personality system, and Self-Therapy Journey, a web application for psychological healing and behavior change.
Go to Profile#586
Joseph Goguen
#4583
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Joseph Amadee Goguen was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and University of Oxford, and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.
Go to Profile#587
Eric Horvitz
#9137
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.
Go to Profile#588
Joy Buolamwini
#8249
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Ghanaian-American-Canadian computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab. Buolamwini introduces herself as a poet of code, daughter of art and science. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League , an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence .
Go to Profile#589
Thierry Coquand
#6404
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Thierry Coquand is a French computer scientist and mathematician who is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, having previously worked at INRIA. He is known for his work in constructive mathematics, especially the calculus of constructions.
Go to Profile#590
Nico Habermann
#8784
Overall Influence
1932 - 1993 (61 years)
Arie Nicolaas Habermann , often known as Nico Habermann, was a noted Dutch computer scientist. Habermann was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics and M.S. in mathematics from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1953 and 1958. After working as a mathematics teacher, in 1967 he received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Eindhoven University of Technology under advisor Edsger Dijkstra.
Go to Profile#591
David A. Moon
#12512
Overall Influence
David A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language, as co-author of the Emacs text editor, as the inventor of ephemeral garbage collection, and as one of the designers of the Dylan programming language. Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel name him as a leader of the Common Lisp movement and describe him as "a seductively powerful thinker, quiet and often insulting, whose arguments are almost impossible to refute".
Go to Profile#592
Melanie Mitchell
#6901
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
Go to Profile#593
Robert L. Glass
#9237
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert L. Glass is an American software engineer and writer, known for his works on software engineering, especially on the measuring of the quality of software design and his studies of the state of the art of software engineering research.
Go to Profile#594
Jean-Raymond Abrial
#7434
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jean-Raymond Abrial is a French computer scientist and inventor of the Z and B formal methods. Abrial was a student at the École Polytechnique . Abrial's 1974 paper Data Semantics laid the foundation for a formal approach to Data Models; although not adopted directly by practitioners, it directly influenced all subsequent models from the Entity-Relationship Model through to RDF.
Go to Profile#595
Eugene Charniak
#9682
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Eugene Charniak was a professor of computer Science and cognitive Science at Brown University. He held an A.B. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. His research was in the area of language understanding or technologies which relate to it, such as knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, and learning. Since the early 1990s he was interested in statistical techniques for language understanding. His research in this area included work in the subareas of part-of-speech tagging, probabilistic context-free grammar induction, and, more...
Go to Profile#596
Jon Kleinberg
#6718
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Jon Michael Kleinberg is an American computer scientist and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University known for his work in algorithms and networks. He is a recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize by the International Mathematical Union.
Go to Profile#597
Johan Håstad
#8288
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Johan Torkel Håstad is a Swedish theoretical computer scientist most known for his work on computational complexity theory. He was the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1994 and 2011 and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1986, among other prizes. He has been a professor in theoretical computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden since 1988, becoming a full professor in 1992. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2001.
Go to Profile#598
Radford M. Neal
#11491
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Radford M. Neal is a professor emeritus at the Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he holds a research chair in statistics and machine learning.
Go to Profile#599
Calvin Mooers
#8553
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Calvin Northrup Mooers , was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC. Early life Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota, and received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941. He worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory from 1941 to 1946, and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics. At M.I.T. he developed a mechanical system using superimposed codes of descriptorss for information retrieval called Zatocoding.
Go to Profile#600
Mario Szegedy
#7152
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mario Szegedy is a Hungarian-American computer scientist, professor of computer science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Chicago. He held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , a postdoc at the University of Chicago, 1991–92, and a postdoc at Bell Laboratories .
Go to Profile