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,
#751
Yu Suzuki
#4095
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Yu Suzuki is a Japanese game designer, producer, programmer, and engineer, who headed Sega's AM2 team for 18 years. Considered one of the first auteurs of video games, he has been responsible for a number of Sega's arcade hits, including three-dimensional sprite-scaling games that used "taikan" motion simulator arcade cabinets, such as Hang-On, Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner, and pioneering polygonal 3D games such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, which are credited with popularizing 3D graphics in video games; as well as the critically acclaimed Shenmue series. As a hardware engi...
Go to Profile#752
Donn B. Parker
#10877
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Donn B. Parker was an information security researcher and consultant and a 2001 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Parker had over 50 years of experience in the computer field in computer programming, computer systems management, consulting, teaching, and research.
Go to Profile#753
Gilles Kahn
#13198
Overall Influence
1946 - 2006 (60 years)
Gilles Kahn was a French computer scientist. He notably introduced Kahn process networks as a model for parallel processing and natural semantics for describing the operational semantics of programming languages.
Go to Profile#754
Hector Levesque
#12136
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Hector Joseph Levesque is a Canadian academic and researcher in artificial intelligence. His research concerns incorporating commonsense reasoning in intelligent systems and he initiated the Winograd Schemas Challenge.
Go to Profile#755
Jochen Liedtke
#13268
Overall Influence
1953 - 2001 (48 years)
Jochen Liedtke was a German computer scientist, noted for his work on microkernel operating systems, especially in creating the L4 microkernel family. Career Education In the mid-1970s Liedtke studied for a diploma degree in mathematics at the Bielefeld University. His thesis project was to build a compiler for the programming language ELAN, which had been launched for teaching programming in German schools. The compiler was written in ELAN.
Go to Profile#756
Burt Kaliski
#16022
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Burton S. "Burt" Kaliski, Jr. is a cryptographer, who is currently the chief technology officer and senior vice president at Verisign. Before joining Verisign in 2011, he was the founding director of the EMC Innovation Network at EMC Corporation since its 2006 acquisition of RSA Security where he was Chief Scientist for RSA Laboratories. His notable work includes the development of such public key cryptography standards as PKCS and IEEE P1363, the extension of linear cryptanalysis to use multiple approximations, and the design of the block cipher Crab.
Go to Profile#757
Sjaak Brinkkemper
#10712
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Jacobus Nicolaas Brinkkemper is a Dutch computer scientist, and Full Professor of organisation and information at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University. Biography Brinkkemper received a BA from the University of Amsterdam in 1980 and an MSc from the Radboud University Nijmegen in 1984, both in Mathematics. In 1990 he received a PhD at the same university with his thesis Formalisation of information systems modelling, supervised by Eckhard Falkenberg and Alex Verrijn Stuart.
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Douglas C. Schmidt
#14370
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Douglas C. Schmidt is a computer scientist and author in the fields of object-oriented programming, distributed computing and design patterns. Biography In August 1994 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. From August 1999 to December 2002 he was associate professor with tenure at the University of California, Irvine. During much of this time he worked for DARPA managing US federal funded research programs. In 2003 he became professor of computer Science at Vanderbilt University, and associate chair of computer science and engineering in December 2004. In August 2010 he became a deputy director, research, and chief technology officer at Software Engineering Institute.
Go to Profile#759
David Cournapeau
#12237
Overall Influence
David Cournapeau is a data scientist. He is the original author of the scikit-learn package, an open source machine learning library in the Python programming language. Early life and education Cournapeau graduated with a MSc in Electrical Engineering from Telecom Paristech, Paris in 2004, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science at Kyoto University, Japan, in the domain of speech recognition.
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David A. Wagner
#11710
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
David A. Wagner is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and a well-known researcher in cryptography and computer security. He is a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. He is also a member of the ACCURATE project.
Go to Profile#761
Dan Roth
#16752
Overall Influence
Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Roth got his B.A summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995. He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1998 to 2017 before moving to the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#762
Vijay P. Bhatkar
#6178
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar is an Indian computer scientist, IT leader and educationalist. He is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. He is a Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, and Maharashtra Bhushan awardee. Indian computer magazine Dataquest placed him among the pioneers of India's IT industry. He was the founder and executive director of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and is currently working on developing exascale supercomputing for India.
Go to Profile#763
Jordan Hubbard
#11513
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jordan K. Hubbard is an open source software developer, authoring software such as the Ardent Window Manager and various other open source tools and libraries before co-founding the FreeBSD project with Nate Williams and Rodney W. Grimes in 1993, for which he contributed the initial FreeBSD Ports collection, package management system and sysinstall. In July 2001 Hubbard joined Apple Computer in the role of manager of the BSD technology group, during which time he was one of the creators of MacPorts. In 2005, his title was "Director of UNIX Technology" and in October 2007, Hubbard was promote...
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Gregory Abowd
#13837
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Gregory Dominic Abowd is a computer scientist best known for his work in ubiquitous computing, software engineering, and technologies for autism. He currently serves as the Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Previously he was the J.Z. Liang Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1994.
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J. Halcombe Laning
#9116
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
J. Halcombe "Hal" Laning Jr. was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer pioneer who in 1952 invented an algebraic compiler called George that ran on the MIT Whirlwind, the first real-time computer. Laning designed George to be an easier-to-use alternative to assembly language for entering mathematical equations into a computer. He later became a key contributor to the 1960s race to the Moon, with pioneering work on space-based guidance systems for the Apollo Moon missions. From 1955 to 1980, he was deputy associate director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.
Go to Profile#766
Myron W. Krueger
#12207
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Myron Krueger is an American computer artist who developed early interactive works. He is also considered to be one of the first generation virtual reality and augmented reality researchers. While earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Krueger worked on a number of early interactive computer artworks. In 1969, he collaborated with Dan Sandin, Jerry Erdman and Richard Venezky on a computer-controlled environment called "glowflow," a computer-controlled light sound environment that responded to the people within it. Krueger went on to develop Metaplay, an integration of visuals, sounds, and responsive techniques into a single framework.
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Franklin H. Westervelt
#11875
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Franklin Herbert Westervelt was an American engineer, computer scientist, and educator at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. Westervelt received degrees in Mathematics, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He attained his PhD in 1961. He was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and an Associate Director at the U-M Computing Center. He was involved in early studies on how to use computers in engineering education.
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William Cheswick
#13071
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
William R. "Bill" Cheswick is a computer security and networking researcher. Education Cheswick graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1970 and received a B.S. in Fundamental Science in 1975 from Lehigh University. While at Lehigh, working with Doug Price and Steve Lidie, Cheswick co-authored the Senator line-oriented text editor.
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Paul Dourish
#12799
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Paul Dourish is a computer scientist best known for his work and research at the intersection of computer science and social science. Born in Scotland, he holds the Steckler Endowed Chair of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000, and where he directs the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, and the BCS, and is a two-time winner of the ACM CSCW "Lasting Impact" award, in 2016 and 2021.
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Clay Shirky
#3434
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism. In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University , after serving as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai from 2014 to 2017. He also is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program. His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technologi...
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Erkki Oja
#14689
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Erkki Oja is a Finnish computer scientist and Aalto Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at Aalto University School of Science. He is recognized for developing Oja's rule, which is a model of how neurons in the brain or in artificial neural networks learn over time.
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Daniel Spielman
#5929
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Daniel Alan Spielman has been a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale University since 2006. As of 2018, he is the Sterling Professor of Computer Science at Yale. He is also the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, since its founding, and chair of the newly established Department of Statistics and Data Science.
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Murray Turoff
#7382
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Murray Turoff was a Distinguished Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology who was a key founding father of computer-mediated communication. Career Turoff received his B.A. degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. He received his PhD in Physics from Brandeis University in 1965.
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Jim Kajiya
#14143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
James Kajiya is a pioneer in the field of computer graphics. He is perhaps best known for the development of the rendering equation. Kajiya received his PhD from the University of Utah in 1979, was a professor at Caltech from 1979 through 1994, and is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research.
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Neil Immerman
#10726
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Neil Immerman is an American theoretical computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is one of the key developers of descriptive complexity, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory.
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Poul-Henning Kamp
#12942
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Poul-Henning Kamp is a Danish computer software developer known for work on various projects including FreeBSD and Varnish. He currently resides in Slagelse, Denmark. Involvement in the FreeBSD project Poul-Henning Kamp has been committing to the FreeBSD project for most of its duration. He is responsible for the widely used MD5crypt implementation of the MD5 password hash algorithm, a vast quantity of systems code including the FreeBSD GEOM storage layer, GBDE cryptographic storage transform, part of the UFS2 file system implementation, FreeBSD Jails, malloc library, and the FreeBSD and NTP...
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Wolfgang Wahlster
#12490
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Wolfgang Wahlster is a German artificial intelligence researcher. He was CEO and Scientific Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and full professor of computer science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken. Wahlster remains Chief Executive Advisor of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. In May 2019, he was honored by the Gesellschaft für Informatik as one of 10 most important heads of German artificial intelligence history. He is sometimes called the inventor of the "Industry 4.0" term.
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Robert M. Graham
#13801
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Robert M. Graham was a cybersecurity researcher computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was born to a Scottish emigrant. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan. While working at the UofM's Computing Center he co-authored two compilers, GAT for the IBM 650 and MAD for the IBM 704/709/7090.
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George G. Robertson
#12333
Overall Influence
George G. Robertson is an American information visualization expert and senior researcher, Visualization and Interaction Research Group, Microsoft Research. With Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay and others he invented a number of Information Visualization techniques.
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Eli Biham
#7986
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Eli Biham is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst who is a professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science department. From 2008 to 2013, Biham was the dean of the Technion Computer Science department, after serving for two years as chief of CS graduate school. Biham invented differential cryptanalysis, for which he received his Ph.D., while working under Adi Shamir. It had been invented before by a team at IBM during their Data Encryption Standard work; the National Security Agency told IBM to keep the discovery secret.
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Theodore Ts'o
#11152
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o is an American software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the secondary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.
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James Demmel
#6168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Weldon Demmel Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Ronald R. Yager
#17055
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ronald Robert Yager is an American researcher in computational intelligence, decision making under uncertainty and fuzzy logic. He is currently Director of the Machine Intelligence Institute and Professor of Information Systems at Iona College.
Go to Profile#784
Dawn Song
#10608
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Dawn Song is a Chinese American academic and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2010.
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Michael Luby
#14008
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Michael George Luby is a mathematician and computer scientist, CEO of BitRipple, senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute , former VP Technology at Qualcomm, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Digital Fountain. In coding theory he is known for leading the invention of the Tornado codes and the LT codes. In cryptography he is known for his contributions showing that any one-way function can be used as the basis for private cryptography, and for his analysis, in collaboration with Charles Rackoff, of the Feistel cipher construction. His distribute...
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David Luckham
#12795
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
David Luckham is an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he was one of the implementers of the first systems for the programming language Lisp.
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Frances Spence
#5009
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Frances V. Spence was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC . She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.
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Phillip Rogaway
#12290
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Phillip Rogaway is an American cryptographer who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School, and later earned a BA in computer science from UC Berkeley and completed his PhD in cryptography at MIT, in the Theory of Computation group. He has taught at UC Davis since 1994. He was awarded the Paris Kanellakis Award in 2009 and the first Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography in 2016. Rogaway received an NSF CAREER award in 1996, which the NSA had attempted to prevent by influencing the NSF.
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Raimund Seidel
#16075
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist and an expert in computational geometry. Seidel was born in Graz, Austria, and studied with Hermann Maurer at the Graz University of Technology. He received his M. Sc. in 1981 from University of British Columbia under David G. Kirkpatrick. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Cornell University under the supervision of John Gilbert. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved in 1994 to Saarland University. In 1997 he and Christoph M. Hoffmann were program chairs for the Symposium on Computational Geometry.
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Don Coppersmith
#7284
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Don Coppersmith is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis. He also improved the quantum Fourier transform discovered by Peter Shor in the same year . He has also worked on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms, the cryptanalysis of RSA, methods for rapid matrix multiplication and IBM's MARS cipher. He is also a co-designer of the SEAL and Scream ciphers.
Go to Profile#791
Krishna Bharat
#11791
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Krishna Bharat is an Indian research scientist at Google Inc. He was formerly a founding adviser for Grokstyle Inc. a visual search company and Laserlike Inc., an interest search engine startup based on Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#792
Jim Coplien
#15632
Overall Influence
James O. Coplien, also known as Cope, is a writer, lecturer, and researcher in the field of computer science. He held the 2003–4 Vloeberghs Leerstoel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and has been a visiting professor at University of Manchester.
Go to Profile#793
Clifford Cocks
#4535
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Clifford Christopher Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In the early 1970s, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters , he developed an early public-key cryptography system. This predated commercial offerings, but due the classified nature of Cocks' work, it did not become widely known until 1997 when the work was declassified.
Go to Profile#794
Hari Balakrishnan
#7475
Overall Influence
Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Co-founder and CTO at Cambridge Mobile Telematics.
Go to Profile#795
Bill Dally
#11910
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. Formerly a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT, he is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia where he leads the company's research efforts in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#796
Ben Fry
#13937
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Benjamin Fry is an American designer who has expertise in data visualization. Early life and education Fry was born in 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan . Fry received his BFA in Communication Design, minor in Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University. He received Master and Ph.D. degrees from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab, under the direction of John Maeda. His doctoral dissertation, "Computational Information Design" introduces the seven stages of visualizing data: acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting.
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Mads Tofte
#12927
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mads Tofte is a Danish computer scientist who has contributed in particular to functional programming and the Standard ML programming language. Education Tofte was born in Lyngby, Denmark and grew up in Holbæk, Denmark. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Copenhagen where he obtained an MSc degree in 1984; then at University of Edinburgh where he obtained a PhD degree in 1988 . He is doctor honoris causa 2007 from Kingston University.
Go to Profile#798
Tom Van Vleck
#11022
Overall Influence
Tom Van Vleck is an American computer software engineer. Life and work Van Vleck graduated from MIT in 1965 with a BS in Mathematics. He worked on CTSS at MIT, and co-authored its first email program with Noel Morris. In 1965, he joined Project MAC, the predecessor of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He worked on the development of Multics for more than 16 years at MIT and at Honeywell Information Systems. He has also worked at Tandem Computers, Taligent, CyberCash, Sun Microsystems, Encirq , and SPARTA .
Go to Profile#799
Charles Rackoff
#11842
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA in France.
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Yves Pigneur
#4571
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Yves Pigneur is a Belgian computer scientist, and Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Lausanne since 1984, known for his work on the business model canvas with Alexander Osterwalder. He is considered a "mastermind" among business strategics, his canvas have been used by numerous companies such as P&G, Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Tesla.
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