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,

#5501

Kenneth L. Clarkson

Kenneth L. Clarkson
#81464
Overall Influence
Kenneth Lee Clarkson is an American computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. He is a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center, and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Geometry.
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#5502

Thomas A. Funkhouser

#128252
Overall Influence
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#5503

Alev Erisir

#53278
Overall Influence
Alev Erisir is a Turkish-American neuroscientist. She is a Professor of Psychology and the Department Chair at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Her primary research areas include synaptic connectivity in the visual and taste systems, neuronal circuit plasticity, and ultrastructural neuroanatomy.
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#5504

Véronique Cortier

#68565
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Véronique Cortier is a French mathematician and computer scientist specializing in cryptography. Her research has applied mathematical logic in the formal verification of cryptographic protocols, and has included the development of secure electronic voting systems. She has also contributed to the public dissemination of knowledge about cryptography through a sequence of posts on the binaire blog of Le Monde. She is a director of research with CNRS, associated with the Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications at the University of Lorraine in Nancy.
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#5505

Marco Conti

#128281
Overall Influence
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#5506

Adam M. Phillippy

#124926
Overall Influence
Adam M. Phillippy is an American bioinformatician serving as senior investigator and head of the Genome Informatics Section at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. He is known for his work in that resulted in the first complete sequence of a human genome.
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#5507

Vincenzo Denaro

#128308
Overall Influence
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#5508

Ergin Sezgin

#128309
Overall Influence
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#5509

Mauro Birattari

#128312
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
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#5510

David W. Aha

#128319
Overall Influence
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#5511

Muhammad Yahuza Bello

#71198
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Muhammad Yahuza Bello is a Nigerian mathematician who served as the 10th vice chancellor of Bayero University Kano. Early life and education Yahuza was Born on 22nd January, 1959 in Nassarawa Local Government in Kano state he attended Giginyu Primary School between 1966 and 1973, he attended Government Secondary School, Gaya where he graduated in 1977, he obtained first and second Degree in Mathematics Education from Bayero University Kano.
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#5512

Hiroyuki Arai

#128345
Overall Influence
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#5513

Hadi Beitollahi

#128346
Overall Influence
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#5514

Mauro Bernardi

#128353
Overall Influence
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#5515

Guilherme Luiz Dotto

#128358
Overall Influence
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#5516

Jun Ding

#128359
Overall Influence
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#5517

Philip Yeagle

#128361
Overall Influence
Philip Yeagle is an American biologist, focusing in critical problems of membrane protein structure, currently at University of Connecticut and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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#5518

Alessandro Acquisti

#128370
Overall Influence
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#5519

David P. Woodruff

#128375
Overall Influence
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#5520

William B. Langdon W. Langdon

#128396
Overall Influence
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#5521

Jiangzhou Wang

#123754
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jiangzhou Wang FREng is the former Dean of Engineering and a professor at University of Kent, UK. He is a specialist in wireless mobile communications. Education Wang obtained his bachelor and master degrees in communications engineering in 1983 and 1986, respectively, from Xidian University, China, and his PhD degree in applied sciences in 1990 from the University of Ghent, Belgium. Also, he studied for PhD degree from 1986 to 1988 from Southeast University, China.
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#5522

Takayuki Yanagida

#128399
Overall Influence
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#5523

Notker Rösch

#128410
Overall Influence
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#5524

Raphael E. Freundlich

#38713
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Raphael E. Freundlich was a classical scholar, humanist and Latinist trained in structural linguistics. He was a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His fields of study and teaching included: ancient Greek, Biblical studies and classical Latin.
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#5525

Tawanna Dillahunt

#99205
Overall Influence
Tawanna Dillahunt is an American computer scientist and information scientist based at the University of Michigan School of Information. She runs the Social Innovations Group, a research group that designs, builds, and enhances technologies to solve real-world problems. Her research has been cited over 2,700 times according to Google Scholar.
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#5526

Colin Eden

#128458
Overall Influence
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#5527

Muntasir Murshed

#128476
Overall Influence
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#5528

Zhiyuan Zhong

#128481
Overall Influence
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#5529

Gennady Osipov

Gennady Osipov
#24870
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Gennady Vasilievich Osipov is a Russian scientist, sociologist and philosopher, Ph.D., Professor, full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences /RAS/ since 1991; scientific leader of the Institute of Socio-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences ; President of the Russian Academy of Social Sciences ; member of RAS Social Sciences Department Bureau; President of the Eurasian International Association; member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Security Council; Honorary President of the Russian Sociological Association. Osipov graduated from Moscow State Institute of Inte...
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#5530

Stephen R. Wisniewski

#128507
Overall Influence
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#5531

Laurin Wolf

#128520
Overall Influence
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#5532

Yutaka Seino

#128534
Overall Influence
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#5533

Reinhart Ceulemans

#126887
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Reinhart Jan Maria Ceulemans is an emeritus professor of Ecology and previous director of the Research Center of Excellence PLECO of the University of Antwerp. He has been vice-dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Antwerp, and was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA , at the Université Paris-Sud XI, Orsay and at the University of Ghent . He officially retired in October 2019 and is now a visiting professor at the University of Antwerp , a researcher at CzechGlobe Academy of Sciences in Brno and an international consultant to the Slovenian Fores...
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#5534

Ralf Wagner

#37229
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ralf Wagner is a German university professor for administration in the field of business science at the University of Kassel. Since 2006 he has been the chair of the SVI Endowed Chair for International Direct Marketing there.
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#5535

Ruth M. Hall

#128563
Overall Influence
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#5536

Kenneth Baillie

#109359
Overall Influence
Kenneth Baillie , Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, is a medical scientist working in genomics in critical care medicine and respiratory infection. Research Through his work in genomics, he has made several discoveries including finding multiple human genes that are important in critical illness caused by influenza. and COVID-19. He started the GenOMICC study in 2016, to study genetic predisposition to a wide range of severe infections. In 2020 he expanded the study and used it to discover human genes that cause susceptibility to severe Covid-19 This discovery...
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#5537

Ioannis Kakadiaris

#111597
Overall Influence
Ioannis A. Kakadiaris is a Greek-born American computer scientist who has developed an identity verification system at the University of Houston. He is a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston, a position to which he was appointed in 2011.
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#5538

Giovanni Passalacqua

#128608
Overall Influence
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#5539

Kensuke Miyake

#128623
Overall Influence
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#5540

Mark Bolas

Mark Bolas
#68140
Overall Influence
Mark Bolas is a researcher exploring perception, agency, and intelligence. He is a Professor of Interactive Media in the USC Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, Director of their Interactive Narrative and Immersive Technologies Lab, Director of Mixed Reality Laboratory at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, and chairman of Fakespace Labs in Mountain View, California. Bolas is currently on leave from USC, working on the Hololens team at Microsoft.
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#5541

Lindsay Grace

Lindsay Grace
#67115
Overall Influence
Lindsay Grace is an American academic, artist, and video game designer. He currently serves as the Knight Chair of Interactive Media and is also an Associate Professor at the School of Communication, University of Miami.
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#5542

Raymond Saunders

#36024
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.
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#5543

Tal Malkin

#97023
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Tal Geula Malkin is an Israeli-American cryptographer who works as a professor of computer science at Columbia University, where she heads the Cryptography Lab and the Data Science Institute Cybersecurity Center.
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#5544

Iskander Tlili

#128647
Overall Influence
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#5545

John James. Mccann

#128668
Overall Influence
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#5546

Annamaria Vezzani

#128675
Overall Influence
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#5547

Bo Du

#128679
Overall Influence
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#5548

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze
#14921
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Sarah Sze is an American artist and professor of visual arts at Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally and her works are in the collections of several major museums. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze's work often represents objects caught in suspension.
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#5549

Ladislav Kavan

#128683
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
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#5550

Claudio Napoli

#128684
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
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