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,
#6551
Susan Rankaitis
#65931
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susan Rankaitis is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy , whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
Go to Profile#6552
William G. Honer
#138940
Overall Influence
#6553
Nicky J. Welton
#138941
Overall Influence
#6554
James Michael Carpenter
#138945
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#6555
Taina Rantanen
#138960
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#6556
Gail E. Kaiser
#138986
Overall Influence
#6557
Diana Williams
#139002
Overall Influence
#6558
Henry Prakken
#139016
Overall Influence
#6559
Jerzy Adamski
#139017
Overall Influence
#6560
Arman
#3690
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman was a painter who moved from using objects for the ink or paint traces they leave to using them as the artworks themselves. He is best known for his Accumulations and destruction/recomposition of objects.
Go to Profile#6561
Jean Vanderdonckt
#139048
Overall Influence
#6562
Tom Luedde
#139055
Overall Influence
#6563
Itaru Endo
#139078
Overall Influence
#6564
Jacky Even
#139087
Overall Influence
#6565
Nicholas Roussopoulos
#139090
Overall Influence
#6566
Karen Petrie
#92694
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Areas of Specialization: Constraints Programming, Artifical Intelligence Karen Elizabeth Jefferson Petrie was born in the UK. She is currently Reader in the Department of Computing in the School of Science and Engineering at the University of Dundee in Scotland, as well as Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching of the same School. Petrie has stated that she first learned to program computers on a Commodore 64 when she was eight years old. Petrie received her bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2001 from the University of St Andrews, and her PhD in artificial intelligence in 2004 from the University of Huddersfield.
Go to Profile#6567
Marco Roffi
#139108
Overall Influence
#6568
Yasser Zare
#139118
Overall Influence
#6569
Nicola Normanno
#139133
Overall Influence
#6570
Rolando Herrero
#139137
Overall Influence
#6571
Sudhir Agrawal
#139173
Overall Influence
#6572
Maggie Cheng
#70770
Overall Influence
Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Scientific Computation. Her research interests include cyber security and Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#6573
Gérard P. Huet
#139193
Overall Influence
#6574
Emil. M. Petriu
#139201
Overall Influence
#6575
Peter R. Holt
#139202
Overall Influence
#6576
Volker Wulf
#139206
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#6577
Kell Mortensen
#139209
Overall Influence
#6578
Catuscia Palamidessi
#131650
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Catuscia Palamidessi is a computer scientist whose research topics have included differential privacy, location obfuscation, fairness in machine learning, the logic of concurrent systems, and the design of programming languages that combine logic programming and functional programming. Originally from Italy, she has worked in Italy, the US, and France, where she is a director of research for the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation .
Go to Profile#6579
Ewing L. Lusk
#139215
Overall Influence
#6580
Ugo Pastorino
#139233
Overall Influence
#6581
Marcel Verheij
#139246
Overall Influence
#6582
Alfred Kobsa
#139269
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#6583
Alexandra Boer Kimball
#139273
Overall Influence
#6584
Nikos Makris
#139274
Overall Influence
#6585
Harold Krikke
#66764
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Hans Ronald "Harold" Krikke is a widely recognized scientist in Closed Loop Supply Chains. Education and career He studied Industrial Engineering and Management at University of Twente in Enschede. He completed his Ph.D. in 1998 in the field of reverse logistics and subsequently he worked as an assistant professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and as a business consultant at Tebodin.
Go to Profile#6586
Christoph A. Heinrich
#139306
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#6587
Marco Esposito
#139316
Overall Influence
#6588
Christopher Rensing
#139326
Overall Influence
#6589
Majid Montazer
#139329
Overall Influence
#6590
Sandro Giannini
#139357
Overall Influence
#6591
Keith Wheatley
#139362
Overall Influence
#6592
Antonio C. Wolff
#139363
Overall Influence
#6593
Stuart Rich
#139366
Overall Influence
#6594
Borko Furht
#68562
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Borivoje "Borko" Furht is a Serbian American scientist and author in the field of computer science and engineering. He is a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is also director of the National Science Foundation's Industry and University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement at FAU. In 2019, he was inducted into Academia Europaea, which is The Academy of Europe.
Go to Profile#6595
Brian Olshansky
#139385
Overall Influence
#6596
Robert Tappan Morris
#139386
Overall Influence
#6597
Chen Houei-kuen
#51608
Overall Influence
1907 - 2011 (104 years)
Chen Huei-kuhn was a Taiwanese artist, notable for being an activist in merching Chinese painting styles and techniques in art of Europe. Some of his work are considered as a fusion of Eastern Gouache, oil paintings and ink wash painting skills. Born in Lungching Hsiang, Taichung , Taiwan, and trained in Tokyo, Chen worked as a teacher in secondary school, as an art professor in universities for more than 45 years and a contemporary artist. He has a long history of involvement and contribution in contemporary art and education. His painting style integrate both eastern and western styles. Bes...
Go to Profile#6598
Vimal Chandra Srivastava
#139421
Overall Influence
#6599
Kodi Ravichandran
#121433
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Kodimangalam S. Ravichandran is a U.S. immunologist and a leading researcher in the area of how we remove billions of dying cells in the body on a daily basis, and how such dead cell removal impacts many human inflammatory diseases . Dr. Kodi Ravichandran obtained his degree in Veterinary Medicine from Madras Veterinary College in 1987. During the last two years of Veterinary School, he became interested in the molecular biology of cellular processes, and how specific drugs function at a molecular level. This led to his pursuing a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the United States.
Go to Profile#6600
Ken Keeler
#82763
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ken Keeler is an American television producer and writer. He has written for numerous television series, most notably The Simpsons and Futurama. According to an interview with David X. Cohen, he proved a theorem that appears in the Futurama episode "The Prisoner of Benda".
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