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,
#701
Franco P. Preparata
#10629
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Franco P. Preparata is a computer scientist, the An Wang Professor, Emeritus, of Computer Science at Brown University. He is best known for his 1985 book "Computational Geometry: An Introduction" into which he blended salient parts of M. I. Shamos' doctoral thesis . This book, which represents a snapshot of the disciplines as of 1985, has been for many years the standard textbook in the field, and has been translated into four foreign Languages . He has made several contributions to the computational geometry, the most recent being the notion of "algorithmic degree" as a key feature to contro...
Go to Profile#702
Simson Garfinkel
#7800
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Simson L. Garfinkel is the Chief Scientist of BasisTech, LLC in Somerville, Ma . He was previously a Program Scientist at AI2050, part of Schmidt Futures He has held several roles across government, including a Senior Data Scientist at the Department of Homeland Security , the US Census Bureau's Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access. and a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology . Prior to that, he was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California . In addition to his research, Garfinkel is a journalist...
Go to Profile#703
Vasant Dhar
#12992
Overall Influence
Vasant Dhar is a professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at New York University, former editor-in-chief of the journal Big Data and the founder of SCT Capital, one of the first machine-learning-based hedge funds in New York City in the 1990s. His research focuses on building scalable decision-making systems from large sources of data using techniques and principles from the disciplines of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Go to Profile#704
Shang-Hua Teng
#8285
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Shang-Hua Teng is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is the Seeley G. Mudd Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. Previously, he was the chairman of the Computer Science Department at the Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#705
Yoav Shoham
#11255
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Yoav Shoham is a computer scientist and a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His research spans artificial intelligence, logic and game theory. He has also founded and sold several AI companies.
Go to Profile#706
Ian Horrocks
#7691
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ian Robert Horrocks is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, description logic and optimised tableaux decision proceduress.
Go to Profile#707
Vitalik Buterin
#5522
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (30 years)
Vitaly Dmitrievich Buterin , better known as Vitalik Buterin , is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer, and co-founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding Bitcoin Magazine in 2011. In 2014, Buterin deployed the Ethereum blockchain with Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio, and Joseph Lubin.
Go to Profile#708
Philippe Dreyfus
#9376
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Philippe Dreyfus is a French informatics pioneer. After gaining his master's degree in physics in 1950 from the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, he became a professor at the Informatics faculty at Harvard University using Mark I, the first automated computer ever built. In 1958 he was nominated director of the Bull Calculus Centre. In 1962 he coined the new term informatique.
Go to Profile#709
John Yen
#11523
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
John Yen is Professor of Data Science and Professor-in-Charge of Data Science in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He currently leads the Laboratory of AI for Cyber Security at Penn State. He was the founder and a former Director of the Cancer Informatics Initiative there.
Go to Profile#710
Stefan Karpinski
#7995
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Stefan Karpinski is an American computer scientist known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He is an alumnus of Harvard and works at Julia Computing, which he co-founded with Julia co-creators, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah as well as Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi.
Go to Profile#711
Andrew Appel
#13760
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrew Wilson Appel is the Eugene Higgins Professor of computer science at Princeton University. He is especially well-known because of his compiler books, the Modern Compiler Implementation in ML series, as well as Compiling With Continuations . He is also a major contributor to the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler, along with David MacQueen, John H. Reppy, Matthias Blume and others and one of the authors of Rog-O-Matic.
Go to Profile#712
Anil Jain
#19026
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#713
Roy Fielding
#5880
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Roy Thomas Fielding is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer architectural style. He is an authority on computer network architecture and co-founded the Apache HTTP Server project.
Go to Profile#714
Don Woods
#9961
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Donald R. Woods is an American hacker and computer programmer. He is best known for his role in the development of the Colossal Cave Adventure game. Biography Early programming career Woods teamed with James M. Lyon while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language. Later, he worked at the Stanford AI lab , where among other things he became the SAIL contact for, and a contributor to, the Jargon File. He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with Mark Crispin, Raphael Finkel, and Guy L. Steele Jr.
Go to Profile#715
Shree K. Nayar
#5508
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Shree K. Nayar is an engineer and computer scientist known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision, computational imaging, and computer graphics. He is the T. C. Chang Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering at Columbia University. Nayar co-directs the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center and is the head of the Computer Vision Laboratory , which develops advanced imaging and computer vision systems. Nayar also serves as a director of research at Snap Inc. He was elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts a...
Go to Profile#716
Michael Kearns
#11805
Overall Influence
Michael Justin Kearns is an American computer scientist, professor and National Center Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the founding director of Penn's Singh Program in Networked & Social Systems Engineering , the founding director of Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and also holds secondary appointments in Penn's Wharton School and department of Economics. He is a leading researcher in computational learning theory and algorithmic game theory, and interested in machine learning, artificial intelligence, computational finance, algorithmic trading, computational social science and social networks.
Go to Profile#717
Margo Seltzer
#11723
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.
Go to Profile#718
Harry Huskey
#6933
Overall Influence
1916 - 2017 (101 years)
Harry Douglas Huskey was an American computer design pioneer. Early life and career Huskey was born in Whittier, in the Smoky Mountains region of North Carolina and grew up in Idaho. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Idaho. He was the first member of his family to attend college. He gained his Master's and then his PhD in 1943 from the Ohio State University on Contributions to the Problem of Geöcze. Huskey taught mathematics to U.S. Navy students at the University of Pennsylvania and then worked part-time on the early ENIAC and EDVAC computers in 1945.
Go to Profile#719
Nobuo Yoneda
#5131
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Nobuo Yoneda was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist. In 1952, he graduated the Department of Mathematics, the Faculty of Science, the University of Tokyo, and obtained his Bachelor of Science. That same year, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Tokyo. He obtained his Doctor of Science degree from the University of Tokyo in 1961, under the direction of Shokichi Iyanaga. In 1962, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Faculty of Science at Gakushuin University, and was promoted in 1966 to the rank of Professor. He became a professor of Theoretical Foundation of Information Science in 1972.
Go to Profile#720
Doug Lea
#12075
Overall Influence
Douglas S. Lea is a professor of computer science and current head of the computer science department at State University of New York at Oswego, where he specializes in concurrent programming and the design of concurrent data structures. He was on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process and chaired JSR 166, which added concurrency utilities to the Java programming language . On October 22, 2010, Doug Lea notified the Java Community Process Executive Committee he would not stand for reelection. Lea was re-elected as an at-large member for the 2012 OpenJDK governing board.
Go to Profile#721
Andy Gavin
#7834
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Andrew Scott Gavin is an American video game programmer, entrepreneur, and novelist. Gavin co-founded the video game company Naughty Dog with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#722
Monty Newborn
#11850
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Monroe "Monty" Newborn , former chairman of the Computer Chess Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, is a professor emeritus of computer science at McGill University in Montreal . He briefly served as president of the International Computer Chess Association and co-wrote a computer chess program named Ostrich In the 1970's.
Go to Profile#723
Jinde Cao
#13471
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jinde Cao is an Endowed Chair Professor at Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He is a Distinguished Professor, the Dean of School of Mathematics and the Director of the Research Center for Complex Systems and Network Sciences at Southeast University.
Go to Profile#724
Jenny Preece
#13553
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jenny Preece is an American academic who is the Dean Emerita of the College of Information Studies, a Professor at the University of Maryland, and a member of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She researches online communities and is known for her work on what makes such a community successful, and how usability factors interact with sociability in online communities.
Go to Profile#725
Demetri Terzopoulos
#11091
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Demetri Terzopoulos is a Greek-Canadian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory.
Go to Profile#726
Michael Witbrock
#11918
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#727
Glen Keane
#5735
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Glen Keane is an American animator, director, author and illustrator. Keane was a character animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios for 38 years between 1974 and 2012, working on feature films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Tarzan, and Tangled. He received the 1992 Annie Award for character animation and the 2007 Winsor McCay Award for lifetime contribution to the field of animation. He was named a Disney Legend in 2013, a year after retiring from the studio.
Go to Profile#728
David Canfield Smith
#11951
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
David Canfield Smith is an American computer scientist best known for inventing computer icons and the programming technique known as programming by demonstration. His primary emphasis has been in the area of human–computer interaction design. His goal was to make computers easier for ordinary people to use. He is one of the pioneers of the modern graphical user interfaces for computers, having invented such techniques as the desktop metaphor, dialog boxes, and universal commands.
Go to Profile#729
Hod Lipson
#7249
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Hod Lipson is an Israeli - American robotics engineer. He is the director of Columbia University's Creative Machines Lab. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating machines that can demonstrate some aspects of human creativity. His publications have been cited more than 43,000 times, and he has an h-index of 86, . Lipson is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?
Go to Profile#730
Peter Lee
#15674
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Peter Lee is an American computer scientist. He is Corporate Vice President and head of Microsoft Research. Previously, he was the head of the Transformational Convergence Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on software security and reliability.
Go to Profile#731
Richard Veryard
#9761
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Richard Veryard FRSA is a British computer scientist, author and business consultant, known for his work on service-oriented architecture and the service-based business. Biography Veryard attended Sevenoaks School from 1966 to 1972, where he attended classes by Gerd Sommerhoff. He received his MA Mathematics and Philosophy from Merton College, Oxford, in 1976, and his MSc Computing Science at the Imperial College London in 1977. Later he also received his MBA from the Open University in 1992.
Go to Profile#732
Victor Yngve
#9166
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Victor H. Yngve was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text, a children's book called Engineer Small and the Little Train.
Go to Profile#733
Piotr Indyk
#14118
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Piotr Indyk is Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Theory of Computation Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Academic biography Indyk received the Magister degree from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2000 under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. In 2000, Indyk joined MIT where he currently holds the title of Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Go to Profile#734
Lawrence Paulson
#9644
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Lawrence Charles Paulson is an American computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computational Logic at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Education Paulson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 for research on programming languages and compiler-compilers supervised by John L. Hennessy.
Go to Profile#735
Carol E. Reiley
#7268
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine,...
Go to Profile#736
Trenchard More
#12452
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Trenchard More was a mathematician and computer scientist who worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Cambridge Scientific Center after teaching at MIT and Yale. He was also a full professor for two years at the Technical University of Denmark.
Go to Profile#737
Jeff Sutherland
#5534
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jeff Sutherland is one of the creators of Scrum, a framework for product management. Together with Ken Schwaber, he presented Scrum at OOPSLA'95. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework.
Go to Profile#738
Chuck Easttom
#8945
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
William "Chuck" Easttom II is an American computer scientist specializing in cyber security, cryptography, quantum computing, and systems engineering. Education Chuck Easttom holds a B.A. from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, a M.Ed. from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, a master's degree in Applied Computer Science from Northcentral University and a Masters in Systems Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, as well as a D.Sc. Doctor of Science in cyber security from Capitol Technology University dissertation topic "A Comparative Study Of Lattice Based Algorithms ...
Go to Profile#739
Marti Hearst
#14023
Overall Influence
Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word sense disambiguation. She invented an algorithm that became known as "Hearst patterns" which applies lexico-syntactic patterns to recognize hyponymy relations with high accuracy in large text collections, including an early application of it to WordNet; this algorithm is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning. Hearst al...
Go to Profile#740
Pierre Baldi
#10770
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Pierre Baldi is a distinguished professor of computer science at University of California Irvine and the director of its Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Education and early life Born in Rome , Pierre Baldi received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees at the University of Paris, in France. He then obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1986 supervised by R. M. Wilson.
Go to Profile#741
J. Turner Whitted
#12850
Overall Influence
John Turner Whitted is an electrical engineer and computer scientist who introduced recursive ray tracing to the computer graphics community with his 1979 paper "An improved illumination model for shaded display". His algorithm proved to be a practical method of simulating global illumination, inspired many variations, and is in wide use today. Simple recursive implementations of ray tracing are still occasionally referred to as Whitted-style ray tracing.
Go to Profile#742
Jean Paoli
#13412
Overall Influence
Jean Paoli is one of the inventors of XML. Along with Tim Bray and C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Paoli co-edited the XML 1.0 recommendation for the World Wide Web Consortium starting in 1997 and until at least 2008.
Go to Profile#743
Lloyd R. Welch
#3688
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Lloyd Richard Welch is an American information theorist and applied mathematician, and co-inventor of the Baum–Welch algorithm and the Berlekamp–Welch algorithm, also known as the Welch–Berlekamp algorithm.
Go to Profile#744
Eugene Jarvis
#7844
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Eugene Peyton Jarvis is an American game designer and video game programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable among his works are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s, and the Cruis'n series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills Inc. In 2008, Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program. His family owns the Jar...
Go to Profile#745
John Canny
#11014
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John F. Canny is an Australian computer scientist, and Paul E Jacobs and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He has made significant contributions in various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry.
Go to Profile#746
K. Mani Chandy
#9020
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology . He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#747
Don Daglow
#7978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Don Daglow is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game Utopia for Intellivision in 1981, role-playing game Dungeon in 1975, sports games including the first interactive computer baseball game Baseball in 1971, and the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights in 1991. He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988.
Go to Profile#748
Maria Klawe
#6982
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Maria Margaret Klawe is a computer scientist and the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College . Born in Toronto in 1951, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. She was previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is known for her advocacy for women in STEM fields.
Go to Profile#749
Walter Savitch
#10431
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Walter John Savitch was best known for defining the complexity class NL , and for Savitch's theorem, which defines a relationship between the NSPACE and DSPACE complexity classes. His work in establishing complexity classes has helped to create the background against which non-deterministic and probabilistic reasoning can be performed.
Go to Profile#750
Serge Abiteboul
#8462
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Serge Joseph Abiteboul is a French computer scientist working in the areas of data management, database theory, and finite model theory. Education The son of two hardware store owners, Abiteboul attended high-school in Romorantin, and Higher School Preparatory Classes in Tours. He was admitted to the Télécom Paris engineering school and studied at the Technion in Haifa for a year.
Go to Profile