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,
#7051
Vijay Pratap Singh
#143606
Overall Influence
#7052
Alexandru Nicolau
#143607
Overall Influence
#7053
Michael Mateas
#143610
Overall Influence
#7054
Joel Singer
#143618
Overall Influence
#7055
Takayuki Hirai
#143664
Overall Influence
#7056
Sally Hopewell
#143669
Overall Influence
#7057
Mario Vanhoucke
#143677
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
#7058
Christian Schindler
#143682
Overall Influence
#7059
David A. Basin
#143683
Overall Influence
#7060
Hiroshi Irie
#143712
Overall Influence
#7061
Frederick R. Blattner
#143736
Overall Influence
#7062
Sam Toueg
#143768
Overall Influence
#7063
Rabha Waell Ibrahim
#143776
Overall Influence
#7064
Todd Scheuer
#143791
Overall Influence
#7065
Masahiro Yamashita
#143795
Overall Influence
#7066
Kouichi Sakurai
#143801
Overall Influence
#7067
Lawrence Banks
#143809
Overall Influence
#7068
Enrico Tronconi
#143811
Overall Influence
#7069
Kazuma Ohyashiki
#143816
Overall Influence
#7070
Marina Davoli
#143824
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#7071
Wan-chi Siu
#143838
Overall Influence
#7072
Danny Liew
#143840
Overall Influence
#7073
Arnulf Rainer
#25259
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Arnulf Rainer is an Austrian painter noted for his abstract informal art. Rainer was born in Baden, Austria. During his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer's style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism, featuring body art and painting under the influence of drugs. He painted extensively on the subject of Hiroshima such as it rel...
Go to Profile#7074
Khalil Abnous
#143847
Overall Influence
#7075
Joel D. Kaufman
#143849
Overall Influence
#7076
Keqin Li
#143859
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Keqin Li was born in Songjiang, Shanghai, China, on May 26, 1963. He received a B.S. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University in 1985, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Houston in 1990. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of the Computer Science Department at the University of Houston.
Go to Profile#7077
Steven J. Durning
#143865
Overall Influence
#7078
Alexander T. Borgida
#143872
Overall Influence
#7079
Debasis Mitra
#46953
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Debasis Mitra is an Indian-American mathematician, known for his numerous contributions to the theory of communication systems, control theory and queueing theory. He got his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of London, on an Atomic Energy Research fellowship , while he was simultaneously affiliated with the Control systems center at the University of Manchester. His work focused on control of nuclear power systems. He then joined Bell Labs as a member of the technical staff , working on semiconductor networks, diffusion models for service adoption and traffic modeling.
Go to Profile#7080
Wolfgang Michel-Zaitsu
#38641
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Wolfgang Michel/Michel-Zaitsu is a professor emeritus of Kyushu University in Fukuoka . He is a specialist in medicine and allied sciences in the history of east–west cultural exchange. In 1984 he was granted tenure as the first foreigner in a Japanese national university.
Go to Profile#7081
Antonio Evidente
#143892
Overall Influence
#7082
Morihito Okada
#143895
Overall Influence
#7083
Dimitra Markovitsi
#46122
Overall Influence
Dimitra Markovitsi is a Greek-French photochemist. She is currently an Emeritus Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research . She pioneered studies on the electronically excited states of liquid crystals and made significant advances to the understanding of processes triggered in DNA upon absorption of UV radiation. The two facets of her work have been the subject of a recent Marie Skodowska Curie European training network entitled "Light DyNAmics - DNA as a training platform for photodynamic processes in soft materials."
Go to Profile#7084
Betty Kirkwood
#133752
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Betty Rosamund Kirkwood FMedSci is Professor of Epidemiology & International Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her research is driven by a desire to improve the health of mothers and young children in low and middle-income countries . Her textbook, Essential Medical Statistics, co-authored with Professor Jonathan Sterne.
Go to Profile#7085
Renata Basto
#70688
Overall Influence
Renata Homem de Gouveia Xavier de Basto is a researcher in cell and developmental biology. She is currently a team leader at the Institut Curie in Paris. She is also the deputy director of the CNRS research Unit UMR144 'Cell biology and cancer' at the Institut Curie which, comprises 14 research teams.
Go to Profile#7086
Albert Bifet
#143916
Overall Influence
#7087
Wilfried Vandervorst
#143918
Overall Influence
#7088
Taisen Iguchi
#143919
Overall Influence
#7089
Hideki Kato
#143923
Overall Influence
#7090
Finn Verner Jensen
#143936
Overall Influence
#7091
Jean-Marc Egly
#99117
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jean-Marc Egly, born on 27 December 1945, is a French molecular biology researcher specialising in the field of transcription. Research Director at Inserm, he was also Chairman of the Scientific Council of the ARC from 2006 to 2011. He is a member of the French Academy of sciences.
Go to Profile#7092
Toshimasa Yamauchi
#143956
Overall Influence
#7093
William Conger
#32278
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
William Conger is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations. He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s. ...
Go to Profile#7094
Jacques Blacher
#143968
Overall Influence
#7095
Deli Chen
#143969
Overall Influence
#7096
Bertrand Thirion
#143973
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
#7097
Yongdan Li
#143988
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#7098
Ming Cao
#143996
Overall Influence
#7099
Leonora Carrington
#3308
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Mary Leonora Carrington was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Go to Profile#7100
Tohru Fukuyama
#144019
Overall Influence
