Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#601

Alfred Spector

#6911

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alfred Zalmon Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager. He is a visiting scholar in the MIT EECS Department and was previously CTO of Two Sigma Investments. Before that, he was Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google.

#602

Bertrand Serlet

#8085

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Bertrand Serlet is a French software engineer and businessman; he worked first at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc.

#603

Ken Forbus

#10099

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kenneth Dale "Ken" Forbus is an American computer scientist working as the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University. Education Forbus earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science, Master of Science in computer science, and PhD in artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#604

Samir Das

#11033

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Samir R. Das is an Indian-American Stony Brook University professor who attended Jadavpur University and Indian Institute of Science. He was also associated with Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was former faculty in University of Texas at San Antonio and University of Cincinnati where he conducted research in computer science particularly in wireless networking. As of 2017 his work Ad hoc on-demand distance vector was cited over 26,000+ times. Many of his research works are highly cited, giving him an h-index of 54.

#605

James Massey

#5858

Overall Influence

1934 - 2013 (79 years)

James Lee Massey was an American information theorist and cryptographer, Professor Emeritus of Digital Technology at ETH Zurich. His notable work includes the application of the Berlekamp–Massey algorithm to linear codes, the design of the block ciphers IDEA and SAFER, and the Massey-Omura cryptosystem .

#606

Brian D. Ripley

#10820

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Brian David Ripley FRSE is a British statistician. From 1990, he was professor of applied statistics at the University of Oxford and is also a professorial fellow at St Peter's College. He retired August 2014 due to ill health.

#607

Lee Giles

#7956

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Clyde Lee Giles is an American computer scientist and the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Courtesy Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, and Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory. He was Interim Associate Dean of Research in the College of IST. His graduate degrees are from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona and his undergraduate degrees are from Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee.

#608

Jonathan Grudin

Jonathan Grudin

#9789

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jonathan Grudin was a researcher at Microsoft from 1998 to 2022 and is affiliate professor at the University of Washington Information School working in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Grudin is a pioneer of the field of computer-supported cooperative work and one of its most prolific contributors. His collaboration distance to other researchers of human-computer interactions has been described by the "Grudin number". Grudin is also well known for the "Grudin Paradox" or "Grudin Problem", which states basically with respect to the design of co...

#609

Nancy Leveson

#9094

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Nancy G. Leveson is an American specialist in system and software safety and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, United States. Leveson gained her degrees from UCLA, including her PhD in 1980. Previously she worked at University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington as a faculty member. She has studied safety-critical systems such as the Traffic Collision Avoidance System for the avoidance of midair collisions between aircraft and problems with the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine.

#610

Éva Tardos

#6844

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Éva Tardos is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks. She has done some work on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory and simple auctions.

#611

Xuedong Huang

#9096

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Xuedong David Huang is a Chinese American computer scientist and technology executive who has made contributions to spoken language processing and artificial intelligence, including Azure AI Services. He is Zoom's chief technology officer after serving as Microsoft's Technical Fellow and Azure AI Chief Technology Officer for 30 years. Huang is a strong advocate of AI for Accessibility, and AI for Cultural Heritage.

#612

Joseph Sifakis

#3949

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Joseph Sifakis is a Greek-French computer scientist. He received the 2007 Turing Award, along with Edmund M. Clarke and E. Allen Emerson, for his work on model checking. Biography Joseph Sifakis was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1946 and lives in France. He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship. He received his engineering doctorate in 1974 from the University of Grenoble, where he also received a state doctorate in 1979.

#613

Jeff Rulifson

#8089

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Johns Frederick Rulifson is an American computer scientist. Early life and education Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941, in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Virginia Helen Johns. Rulifson married Janet Irving on June 8, 1963, and had two children. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1966. Rulifson earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1973.

#614

Rémi Després

#6044

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Rémi Després is a French engineer and entrepreneur known for his contributions on data networking. Education In 1961–1963, Rémi Després attended École Polytechnique of Paris, of which he holds an Engineer degree.

#615

Andrew Sears

#10890

Overall Influence

Andrew Sears is an American computer scientist. He is a professor and dean of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. His research explores issues related to human-computer interaction including mobile computing, speech recognition, information technology accessibility, and situationally-induced impairments and disabilities. He earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science in College Park. His expert opinion on information technology and IT workforce issues have been repor...

#616

Boris Babayan

#4829

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Boris Artashesovich Babayan is a Soviet and Russian computer scientist of Armenian descent, notable as the pioneering creator of supercomputers in the former Soviet Union and Russia. Biography Babayan was born in Baku, Soviet Union to an Armenian family. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1957. He completed his Ph.D. in 1964 and his doctorate of science in 1971.

#617

Albert R. Meyer

#9099

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Albert Ronald da Silva Meyer is Hitachi America Professor emeritus of computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Biography Meyer received his PhD from Harvard University in 1972 in applied mathematics, under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT in 1969. Meyer became the Hitachi America Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in 1991. He retired from MIT in 2016.

#618

Ingemar Cox

#10911

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ingemar J. Cox is Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he is Head of the Future Media Group, and he is Professor in the Machine Learning department at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Director of UCL's Adastral Park Campus.

#619

Michael Fredman

#12332

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Michael Lawrence Fredman is an emeritus professor at the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, United States. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1972 under the supervision of Donald Knuth. He was a member of the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1974 to 1976. and of the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California, San Diego until 1992. Among his contributions to computer science are the development of the Fibonacci heap in a joint work with Robert Tarjan, the transdichotomous model of intege...

#620

Yuji Naka

#3175

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Yuji Naka, credited in some games as YU2, is a Japanese video game programmer, designer and producer. He is the co-creator of the Sonic the Hedgehog series and was the president of Sonic Team at Sega until his departure in 2006.

#621

Ian Foster

#9423

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ian Tremere Foster is a New Zealand-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished fellow, senior scientist, and director of the Data Science and Learning division at Argonne National Laboratory, and a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago.

#622

Cynthia Solomon

Cynthia Solomon

#7874

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Cynthia Solomon is an American computer scientist known for her work in popularizing computer science for students. She is a pioneer in the fields of computer science, and educational computing. While working as a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Solomon took it upon herself to understand and program in the programming language Lisp. As she began learning this language, she realized the need for a programming language that was more accessible and understandable for children. Throughout her research studies in education, Solomon worked full-time as a computer teacher in elementary and secondary schools.

#623

Moni Naor

#7895

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Moni Naor is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.

#624

Keith Bostic

#11335

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution Unix and open-source software. In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the principal architects of the Berkeley 2BSD, 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite releases. Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD Unix, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

#625

Matthew Hennessy

#12297

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Matthew Hennessy is an Irish computer scientist who has contributed especially to concurrency, process calculi and programming language semantics. Career During 1976–77, Matthew Hennessy was an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Then during 1977–78, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. Subsequently, he was a research associate and then lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. During 1985, he was a guest lecturer/researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

#626

Nigel Shadbolt

#7917

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee. He is also a visiting professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator. His research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the Web, and has made contribut...

#627

Godfried Toussaint

Godfried Toussaint

#7581

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Godfried Theodore Patrick Toussaint was a Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science, and the head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He is considered to be the father of computational geometry in Canada. He did research on various aspects of computational geometry, discrete geometry, and their applications: pattern recognition , motion planning, visualization , knot theory , linkage reconfiguration, the art gallery problem, polygon triangulation, the largest empty circle problem, unimodality , and others. O...

#628

Sally Floyd

#11954

Overall Influence

1950 - 2019 (69 years)

Sally Jean Floyd was an American computer scientist known for her work on computer networking. Formerly associated with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she retired in 2009 and died in August 2019. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control, and was in 2007 one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.

#629

E. Mark Gold

#10695

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

E. Mark Gold is an American physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist. He became well known for his article Language identification in the limit which pioneered a formal model for inductive inference of formal languages, mainly by computers. Since 1999, an award of the conference on Algorithmic learning theory is named after him.

#630

Jorma Rissanen

#8002

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Jorma Johannes Rissanen was an information theorist, known for originating the minimum description length principle and practical approaches to arithmetic coding for lossless data compression. His work inspired the development of the theory of stochastic chains with memory of variable length.

#631

Bernhard Thalheim

Bernhard Thalheim

#10384

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Bernhard Karl Thalheim is a German computer scientist and professor of information systems engineering at the University of Kiel in Kiel, Germany. He is known for his work on conceptual modeling and its theoretical foundational contributions.

#632

Yorick Wilks

#9083

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Yorick Alexander Wilks FBCS was a British computer scientist. He was an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College , senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, senior scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and a member of the Epiphany Philosophers.

#633

Edward Felten

#4564

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Edward William Felten is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he was also the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy from 2007 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2019. On November 4, 2010, he was named Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, a position he officially assumed January 3, 2011. On May 11, 2015, he was named the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In 2018, he was nominated to and began a term as Board Member of PCLOB.

#634

Jun Rekimoto

#16851

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jun Rekimoto is a Professor of Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at The University of Tokyo. He is also a co-founder of Koozyt Inc., and a Deputy Director of the Interaction Laboratory at Sony Computer Sciences Laboratories.

#635

Jim Gettys

#7904

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer. He was involved in multiple computer related projects. Activity Gettys worked at DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1.

#636

Loren Carpenter

#9481

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Loren C. Carpenter is a computer graphics researcher and developer. Biography He was a co-founder and chief scientist of Pixar Animation Studios. He is the inventor of the Reyes rendering algorithm and is one of the authors of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which implements Reyes and renders all of Pixar's movies. Following Disney's acquisition of Pixar, Carpenter became a senior research scientist at Disney Research. He retired in early 2014.

#637

Robert Morris

#9190

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Robert H. Morris Sr. was an American cryptographer and computer scientist. Family and education Morris was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris, a homemaker. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1957 and a master's degree in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1958.

#638

Alan Sherman

#9380

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Alan Theodore Sherman is a full professor of computer science at UMBC, director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance , and director of the UMBC Chess Program. Sherman is an editor for Cryptologia, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.

#639

Michael Garey

#10870

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Michael Randolph Garey is a computer science researcher, and co-author of Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-completeness. He and Johnson received the 1979 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize from the Operations Research Society of America for the book. Garey earned his PhD in computer science in 1970 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was employed by AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Mathematical Sciences Research Center from 1970 until his retirement in 1999. For his last 11 years with the organization, he served as its director. His technical specialties included...

#640

Charlotte Froese Fischer

Charlotte Froese Fischer

#8503

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.

#641

Urs Hölzle

#10393

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Urs Hölzle is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its engineering culture. His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking. Until July 2023, he was the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. In July 2023, he transitioned to being a Go...

#642

Dorothy E. Denning

Dorothy E. Denning

#10417

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Dorothy Elizabeth Denning is a US-American information security researcher known for lattice-based access control , intrusion detection systems , and other cyber security innovations. She published four books and over 200 articles. Inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame in 2012, she is now Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School.

#643

Arthur Whitney

#12323

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing three programming languages inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies Kx Systems and Shakti Software.

#644

He Jifeng

#9024

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

He Jifeng is a Chinese computer scientist. He Jifeng graduated from the mathematics department of Fudan University in 1965. From 1965 to 1985, he was an instructor at East China Normal University. During 1980–81, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco in California, United States.

#645

Steve Schneider

#11236

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Steve Schneider FBCS, CITP is an English computer scientist and Professor of Security. He is Director of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security and Associate Dean at the University of Surrey. Biography Steve Schneider studied at Oxford University, joining the Oxford University Computing Laboratory to study for a Doctorate on CSP, which was awarded in 1989, supervised by Mike Reed. He joined Royal Holloway, University of London as a lecturer in 1994, becoming a senior lecturer in 1999 and a professor in 2002. He moved to the University of Surrey in 2004, and was head of the Department of Compu...

#646

Noam Nisan

#7899

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Noam Nisan is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his research in computational complexity theory and algorithmic game theory.

#647

Thomas A. DeFanti

#10084

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology .

#648

George Klir

#3821

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

George Jiří Klir was a Czech-American computer scientist and professor of systems sciences at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. Biography George Klir was born in 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he received a M.S. degree in electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In the early 1960s he taught at the Institute of Computer Research in Prague. In 1964 he received a doctorate in computer science from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

#649

John Krogstie

#6117

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

John Krogstie is a Norwegian computer scientist, professor in information systems at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and an expert in the field of enterprise modelling.

#650

Viral B. Shah

#5132

Overall Influence

Viral B Shah is an Indian computer scientist, best known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He was also actively involved in the initial design of the Aadhaar project in India which provides a 12-digit unique identity number to each Indian resident based on their biometric and demographic data. Based on his experiences implementing Aadhaar and other complex technology projects in government, he co-authored the book Rebooting India with Nandan Nilekani.

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