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,
#6001
Weiming Shen
#114409
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Weiming Shen is Chinese engineer and academic working as a professor at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and University of Western Ontario. Education Shen earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University and a PhD in system control from the University of Technology of Compiègne.
Go to Profile#6002
Candace Sidner
#129637
Overall Influence
Candace Lee Sidner is an American computer scientist whose research has applied artificial intelligence and natural language processing to problems in personal information management, intelligent user interfaces, and human–robot interaction. She is a research professor of computer science at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a former president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Go to Profile#6003
Curt D. Sigmund
#133560
Overall Influence
#6004
Shuiwang Ji
#133576
Overall Influence
#6005
Simon S. Cross
#133594
Overall Influence
#6006
Rajasekhar Balasubramanian
#133606
Overall Influence
#6007
Md. Rabiul Awual
#133617
Overall Influence
#6008
Cosmo Campoli
#40970
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Cosmo Campoli was a Chicago-based sculptor, known for his figurative work centered on the themes of birth and death, and for his use of bold, surreal bird and egg imagery. He was a member of a group of School of the Art Institute of Chicago artists collectively dubbed the "Monster Roster" by critic Franz Schulze in the late 1950s, based on their affinity for sometimes gruesome, expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and existential thought. That group included, among others, Leon Golub, George Cohen, June Leaf, H.C. Westermann, Seymour Rosofsky, and Theodore Halkin. Campoli rose to pro...
Go to Profile#6009
Tadeusz Lis
#133633
Overall Influence
#6010
Sakae Tanaka
#133634
Overall Influence
#6011
Christophe Dessimoz
#64411
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Christophe Dessimoz is a Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at University College London and a group leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. He was awarded the Overton Prize in 2019 for his contributions to computational biology. Starting in April 2022, he will be joint executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, along with Ron Appel.
Go to Profile#6012
Raymond T. Ng
#133649
Overall Influence
#6013
Akira Yoshikawa
#133651
Overall Influence
#6014
Trevor K. Archer
#133652
Overall Influence
#6015
Tatsuaki Okamoto
#133655
Overall Influence
#6016
Gaurav Sharma
#87491
Overall Influence
Gaurav Sharma from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for "contributions to electronic imaging and media security".
Go to Profile#6017
Partha Sarathi Mukherjee
#133670
Overall Influence
#6018
Rudolf Bauer
#133693
Overall Influence
#6019
Amandeep Dhir
#133699
Overall Influence
#6020
Hugues H. Hoppe
#133708
Overall Influence
#6021
Umapada Pal
#133715
Overall Influence
#6022
R. Edwin Garcia
#50052
Overall Influence
R. Edwin Garcia is a Professor of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. Garcia's research group focuses on the design of materials and devices through the development of a fundamental understanding of the solid state physics of the individual phases, their short and long range interactions, and its associated microstructural evolution.
Go to Profile#6023
Robert P. Kimberly
#133750
Overall Influence
#6024
Sue Leurgans
#85162
Overall Influence
Sue Ellen Leurgans is a biostatistician known for her work on disorders of human movement, including those caused by occupational injury and Parkinson's disease. She is a professor of neurological sciences at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Go to Profile#6025
Dao Wen Wang
#133770
Overall Influence
#6026
Bernhard Witzenbichler
#133779
Overall Influence
#6027
Mubashir Husain Rehmani
#110740
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Mubashir Husain Rehmani is a Pakistani researcher and computer scientist. His areas of work are computer networking, telecommunications, wireless communications and blockchain. He was recognised in 2020 and 2021 as one of the Highly Cited Researchers in computer science by Clarivate.
Go to Profile#6028
Claudio Silva
#103795
Overall Influence
Claudio Silva is a Brazilian American computer scientist and data scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, the head of disciplines at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and affiliate faculty member at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He co-developed the open-source data-exploration system VisTrails with his wife Juliana Freire and many other collaborators. He is a former chair of the executive committee for the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics.
Go to Profile#6029
Neil Crosby
#18604
Overall Influence
Neil Crosby is an academic valuer, Professor of Real Estate at the University of Reading. He has been instrumental in changing property valuation practices in the United Kingdom through a series of journal publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which dealt with questions of investment property valuation methodology, and through an influential book . The RICS adopted the 'Short-cut DCF' method proposed by Crosby, in the 1997 Valuation Information Paper: Commercial Investment Property - Valuation Methods.
Go to Profile#6030
Ana Paiva
#131052
Overall Influence
Ana Maria Severino de Almeida e Paiva is a full professor at the University of Lisbon. Her work is around artificial intelligence and robotics. She is an elected fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#6031
Jia Deng
#133786
Overall Influence
#6032
Margitta Worm
#133787
Overall Influence
#6033
St́ephane Ducasse
#133788
Overall Influence
#6034
Hatem Alkadhi
#133790
Overall Influence
#6035
Loreto Gesualdo
#133792
Overall Influence
#6036
Alison Holmes
#81764
Overall Influence
Alison Helen Holmes is a British infectious diseases specialist, who is a professor at Imperial College London and the University of Liverpool. Holmes serves as Director of the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance and Consultant at Hammersmith Hospital. Holmes is on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases, and she serves on a variety of World Health Organization expert groups related to antimicrobial use, Antimicrobial Resistance , infection prevention and sepsis.
Go to Profile#6037
María Luisa Bonet
#109017
Overall Influence
María Luisa Bonet Carbonell is a Spanish computer scientist interested in logic in computer science, including proof complexity and algorithms for the maximum satisfiability problem. She is a professor of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Go to Profile#6038
Hervé Tilly
#133821
Overall Influence
#6039
Franco Zunino
#133833
Overall Influence
#6040
Venkata N. Padmanabhan
#133834
Overall Influence
#6041
Horst Olschewski
#133862
Overall Influence
#6042
Arthur K. Smith
#45628
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Arthur K. Smith is an American academic. He served as the president of the University of Utah from 1991 to 1997. At the time of his appointment, he was the first non-member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to hold the position. He was previously the vice president for academic affairs, provost and acting president of the University of South Carolina, and vice president of administration of the Binghamton University. Smith is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy . He later attended the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University and earned a master's degree in comparative and international politics, as well as a Doctor of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#6043
Makoto Araie
#133881
Overall Influence
#6044
Christine Bell
#37827
Overall Influence
Christine Bell, FBA, FRSE, is a legal scholar, specialising in human rights law. As of 2018, she is Professor of Constitutional Law and Assistant Principal at the University of Edinburgh. Life Bell graduated from Selwyn College, Cambridge, with her undergraduate law degree in 1988, before completing a master of laws degree at Harvard University in 1990. She qualified as a Barrister in that year and, after passing the New York bar examination, she worked at Debevoise & Plimpton. She was then Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law at Queen's University Belfast...
Go to Profile#6045
Cem Ersoy
#95531
Overall Influence
Cem Ersoy is a professor at the department of computer engineering at Boğaziçi University, and the President of the IEEE Communications Society Turkish Chapter. Following his election as the head of society, IEEE COMSOC Turkey Section received the Region 8 achievement award for its activities. Also, he is representing Turkey in the European Union ICT COST Action WiNeMO: Wireless Networks for Moving Objects.
Go to Profile#6046
David Komander
#133890
Overall Influence
#6047
Damien Bonnet
#133891
Overall Influence
#6048
Mukesh Kumar Awasthi
#133894
Overall Influence
#6049
Christian Heath
#123250
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Interaction at King's College London. He is known for his research in which he uses video to analyse social interaction in everyday settings in particular the workplace.
Go to Profile#6050
John Lewis
#78718
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John Alan Lewis is an American computer science educator, and the owner of a Twitter account that is well-known for its frequent cases of mistaken identity. Computer science Formerly of Villanova University and the New York Institute of Technology, Lewis is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech. He is one of the coauthors of Java Software Solutions, an introductory text on Java programming.
Go to Profile