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,
#5601
Oliver Reiser
#129196
Overall Influence
#5602
Yansui Liu
#129197
Overall Influence
#5603
Christian Behl
#129205
Overall Influence
#5604
Lars Larsson
#129209
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
#5605
Yoshihiko Kanemitsu
#129218
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5606
Carsten Rother
#129232
Overall Influence
#5607
Ladislav Volicer
#129239
Overall Influence
#5608
Alan Heslop
#40458
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Alan Heslop is an American academic and government consultant and advisor. He was born in 1938 in England and gained BA and MA degrees from Magdalen College, Oxford. He later became a naturalized American citizen, and gained his PhD from the University of Texas.
Go to Profile#5609
Jack Lutz
#73242
Overall Influence
Jack Lutz is an American theoretical computer scientist best known for developing the concepts of resource bounded measure and effective dimension; he has also published research on DNA computing and self-assembly. He is a professor of computer science and mathematics at Iowa State University.
Go to Profile#5610
J. M. Hyyppä
#129261
Overall Influence
#5611
Paul Howard Williams
#129287
Overall Influence
#5612
Franco Zambonelli
#87497
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Franco Zambonelli is a full professor in Computer Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, since 2010. Education and career He received the PhD in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Bologna in 1997, and started his activity at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 1997.
Go to Profile#5613
Adolfo Correa
#129331
Overall Influence
#5614
Alex Zelinsky
#58753
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Alexander ‘Alex’ Zelinsky, is an Australian computer scientist, systems engineer and roboticist. His career spans innovation, science and technology, research and development, commercial start-ups and education. Professor Zelinsky is Vice-chancellor and President of the University of Newcastle joining the university in November 2018. He was the Chief Defence Scientist of Australia from March 2012 until November 2018. As Chief Defence Scientist he led defence science and technology for Australia's Department of Defence.
Go to Profile#5615
Masashi Kishimoto
#25505
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Masashi Kishimoto is a Japanese manga artist. His manga series, Naruto, which was in serialization from 1999 to 2014, has sold over 250 million copies worldwide in 46 countries as of May 2019. The series has been adapted into two anime and multiple films, video games, and related media. Besides the Naruto manga, Kishimoto also personally supervised the two canonical anime films, The Last: Naruto the Movie and Boruto: Naruto the Movie, and has written several one-shot stories. In 2019, Kishimoto wrote Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru which ended in March 2020. From May 2016 through October 2020...
Go to Profile#5616
Qiang Meng
#129359
Overall Influence
#5617
Kevin Feige
#39078
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Kevin Feige is an American film and television producer, and the president of Marvel Studios and the primary producer of the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise since 2007. The films he has produced have a combined worldwide box office gross of over , making him the highest grossing producer of all time, with Avengers: Endgame becoming the highest-grossing film at the time of its release.
Go to Profile#5618
Thomas John Murray
#74567
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Thomas John "Jock" Murray is a Canadian neurologist, medical historian and author. Following his neurology training, Murray joined the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie in 1970. He was the founding director of the Dalhousie Multiple Sclerosis Research Unit, co-founder of the Consortium of North American Multiple Sclerosis Centres, chair of the Canadian Medical Forum, president of the Canadian Neurological Society and of the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges, vice-president of the American Academy of Neurology, chair of the board of governors and chair of the board of regents for the Am...
Go to Profile#5619
Samuel Wiebe
#129377
Overall Influence
#5620
Kellogg S. Stelle
#129384
Overall Influence
#5621
Jessica Stockholder
#36440
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jessica Stockholder is a Canadian-American artist known for site-specific installation works and sculptures that are often described as "paintings in space." She came to prominence in the early 1990s with monumental works that challenged boundaries between artwork and display environment as well as between pictorial and physical experience. Her art often presents a "barrage" of bold colors, textures and everyday objects, incorporating floors, walls and ceilings and sometimes spilling out of exhibition sites. Critics suggest that her work is informed by diverse artistic traditions, including abstract expressionism, color field painting, minimalism and Pop art.
Go to Profile#5622
Sanjeev P. Khudanpur
#129391
Overall Influence
#5623
Mohammed Atiquzzaman
#129425
Overall Influence
#5624
Abdelhamid Sayari
#129429
Overall Influence
#5625
Jeffrey T. Parsons
#92928
Overall Influence
Jeffrey T. Parsons is an American psychologist, researcher, and educator; he was a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was the Director of Hunter College's Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies & Training, which he founded in 1996. Parsons was trained as a developmental psychologist and applied this training to understand health, with a particular emphasis on HIV prevention and treatment. He was known for his research on HIV risk behaviors of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men , HIV-related syndemics, and sexual compulsivity.
Go to Profile#5626
David Proud
#129444
Overall Influence
#5627
Sandhya Dwarkadas
#114719
Overall Influence
Sandhya Dwarkadas is a professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. She was formerly the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. She is known for her research on shared memory and reconfigurable computing.
Go to Profile#5628
Landon Myer
#129474
Overall Influence
#5629
Rui Kang
#129481
Overall Influence
#5630
Nathan Srebro
#129498
Overall Influence
#5631
David R. Kaeli
#102878
Overall Influence
David R. Kaeli is an American computer scientist and Northeastern University College of Engineering Distinguished Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been cited over 16,000 times. His research involves the design and performance of high-performance computer systems and software.
Go to Profile#5632
Amber Settle
#104818
Overall Influence
Amber Settle is an American computer scientist and professor of education and theory in the department of Computer Science at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for her work in computer science education and her continuing service and leadership in Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education . She is also known for her work on computational thinking.
Go to Profile#5633
Kaliat Ramesh
#84227
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Kaliat T. Ramesh is the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, the founding Director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute , and a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#5634
Xu Jianbin
#127269
Overall Influence
Xu Jianbin is the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Electronic Engineering and director of the material research center at The Chinese University of Hong Kong . He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, one of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#5635
Niels H. Batjes
#129538
Overall Influence
#5636
Stephen P. Fortmann
#129557
Overall Influence
#5637
Edmund H. Durfee
#129563
Overall Influence
#5638
Elena Tremoli
#129576
Overall Influence
#5639
Pierre Verbaeten
#93297
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Petrus Verbaeten, born April 23rd, usually called Pierre, is a Belgian professor emeritus in the Computer Science Department at the KU Leuven, and has more than 226 publications to its name. He managed the internet domain field .be from 1989 to 2000.
Go to Profile#5640
Cas Cremers
#123397
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Casimier Joseph Franciscus "Cas" Cremers is a computer scientist and a faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbruecken, Germany. Career Cremers received his PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology in 2006, under the supervision of Sjouke Mauw and Erik de Vink. Between 2006 and 2013, he worked at the Information Security Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, until joining the University of Oxford in 2013. He was made full professor of Information Security in 2015. His research focuses on information security, in particular the formal analysis of security protocols.
Go to Profile#5641
Katherine Esposito
#129628
Overall Influence
#5642
Fabio Piscaglia
#129631
Overall Influence
#5643
Tatyana Sharpee
#92314
Overall Influence
Tatyana Sharpee is an American neuroscientist. She is a Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where she spearheads a research group at the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, with the support from Edwin Hunter Chair in Neurobiology. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Physics at University of California, San Diego. She was elected a fellow of American Physical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#5644
Đàm Thanh Sơn
#8046
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Đàm Thanh Sơn is a Vietnamese theoretical physicist working in quantum chromodynamics, applications of string theory and many-body physics. Early life and education Born in North Vietnam, Bac Ninh. Sơn attended HUS High School for Gifted Students, where he won gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad with an absolute score, and received his Ph.D. at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow in 1995.
Go to Profile#5645
Yuping Wu
#129709
Overall Influence
#5646
Dongpu Cao
#129715
Overall Influence
#5647
Alexander Borst
#129716
Overall Influence
#5648
Rotimi Emmanuel Aluko
#129723
Overall Influence
#5649
Igor Kononenko
#129727
Overall Influence
#5650
Itaru Honma
#129736
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
