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,
#801
Stephen Hillenburg
#1020
Overall Influence
1961 - 2018 (57 years)
Stephen McDannell Hillenburg was an American animator, voice actor, and marine biology educator. He is best known for creating the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants for Nickelodeon in 1999 — serving as the showrunner for its first three seasons, and again from season nine until his death — which has become the fifth-longest-running American animated series. He also performed the original voice of Patchy's pet bird Potty the Parrot from the show.
Go to Profile#802
Irene Greif
#10049
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Irene Greif is an American computer scientist and a founder of the field of computer-supported cooperative work . She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#803
Henri Bal
#12469
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Henri Elle Bal is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is a well-known researcher in computer systems with a specialization in parallel computer systems, languages, and applications.
Go to Profile#804
Toru Iwatani
#9387
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Toru Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer who spent much of his career working for Namco. He is best known as the creator of the arcade game Pac-Man . In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
Go to Profile#805
Pietro Perona
#12526
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Pietro Perona is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in computer vision and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group.
Go to Profile#806
Jimmy Kimmel
#507
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
James Christian Kimmel is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer, and political commentator. He is the host and executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a late-night talk show which premiered on ABC on January 26, 2003, at Hollywood Masonic Temple in Hollywood, California; and on April 1, 2019, at a secondary home, the Zappos Theater on the Las Vegas Strip. Kimmel hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2012, 2016 and 2020. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 2017, 2018 and 2023.
Go to Profile#807
Bruce Arden
#14347
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Bruce Wesley Arden was an American computer scientist. Arden enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a Radar Technician Third Class in California, Chicago, and Kodiak, Alaska. He graduated from Purdue University with a BS in 1949 and started his computing career in 1950 with the wiring and programming of IBM's hybrid Card Programmed Computer/Calculator at the Allison Division of General Motors. Next he spent a short period as a programmer for computations being done at the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratory using the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer.
Go to Profile#808
Joseph F. Traub
#8561
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Joseph Frederick Traub was an American computer scientist. He was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia, as well as sabbatical positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, California Institute of Technology, and Technical University, Munich.
Go to Profile#809
Andris Ambainis
#17717
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Andris Ambainis is a Latvian computer scientist active in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum computing. Education and career Ambainis has held past positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He is currently a professor in the Faculty of Computing at the University of Latvia.
Go to Profile#810
Stephanie Forrest
#12736
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Stephanie Forrest is an American computer scientist and director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. She was previously Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is best known for her work in adaptive systems, including genetic algorithms, computational immunology, biological modeling, automated software repair, and computer security.
Go to Profile#811
Joyce K. Reynolds
#10138
Overall Influence
1952 - 2015 (63 years)
Joyce Kathleen Reynolds was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.
Go to Profile#812
Stephanie Seneff
#7231
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Working primarily in the Spoken Language Systems group, her research at CSAIL relates to human-computer interaction, and algorithms for language understanding and speech recognition. In 2011, she began publishing controversial papers in low-impact, open access journals on biology and medical topics; the articles have received "heated objections from experts in almost every field she's delved into," according to the food columnist Ari Le...
Go to Profile#813
David S. Touretzky
#8971
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David S. Touretzky is a research professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a BA in Computer Science at Rutgers University in 1978, and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Touretzky has worked as an Internet activist in favor of freedom of speech, especially what he perceives as abuse of the legal system by government and private authorities. He is a notable critic of Scientology.
Go to Profile#814
Micha Sharir
#9530
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Micha Sharir is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor at Tel Aviv University, notable for his contributions to computational geometry and combinatorial geometry, having authored hundreds of papers.
Go to Profile#815
Tim Schafer
#5792
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Timothy John Schafer is an American video game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and Broken Age, co-designer of Day of the Tentacle, and assistant designer on The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. He is well known in the video game industry for his storytelling and comedic writing style, and has been given both a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Choic...
Go to Profile#816
Irwin Sobel
#21027
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Irwin Sobel is a scientist and researcher in digital image processing. Biography Irwin Sobel was born in New York City. He graduated from MIT in 1961 and did his Ph.D. research at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project with thesis Camera Models and Machine Perception.
Go to Profile#817
Matthew Flatt
#14981
Overall Influence
Matthew Flatt is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of Utah School of Computing in Salt Lake City. He is also a member of the core development team for the Racket programming language.
Go to Profile#818
James L. Brooks
#770
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Lawrence Brooks is an American director, producer, screenwriter and co-founder of Gracie Films. His television and film work includes The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Simpsons, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets, and Terms of Endearment.
Go to Profile#819
Luigi Dadda
#13148
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Luigi Dadda was an Italian computer engineer, best known for the design of the Dadda multiplier and as one of the first researchers on modern computers in Italy. He was rector at the Politecnico di Milano technical university from 1972 to 1984, collaborating on research at the same university until 2012. He was a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
Go to Profile#820
Bernd Bruegge
#17105
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bernd Bruegge is a German computer scientist, full professor at the Technische Universität München and the head of the Chair for Applied Software Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#821
Tomáš Mikolov
#11514
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Tomáš Mikolov is a Czech computer scientist working in the field of machine learning. In March of 2020, Mikolov became a senior research scientist at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics.
Go to Profile#822
Rosemary Candlin
#15234
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Rosemary Candlin is a crystallographer and computer scientist who joined the University of Edinburgh Computer Science Department shortly after it was first established, and for some time was the only woman lecturer on the staff. She worked there from 1968 to 1995, helped design the curriculum in its early years, and developed a specialist interest in parallel programming. She then went on to work for CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Go to Profile#823
Franz Baader
#10723
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Franz Baader is a German computer scientist at Dresden University of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1989 from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he was a teaching and research assistant for 4 years. In 1989, he went to the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence as a senior researcher and project leader.
Go to Profile#824
Julian Bigelow
#2714
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Julian Bigelow was a pioneering American computer engineer. Life Bigelow was born in 1913 in Nutley, New Jersey. He obtained a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying electrical engineering and mathematics. During World War II, he assisted Norbert Wiener in his research on automated fire control for anti-aircraft guns, leading to the development of the so-called Wiener filter.
Go to Profile#825
Bruce Webster
#10377
Overall Influence
Bruce F. Webster is an American academic and software engineer. He is a principal at Bruce F. Webster & Associates and an adjunct professor in computer science at Brigham Young University. Early life and education Webster received a full National Merit Scholarship to study computer science at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1978 with a bachelor's degree. He went on to work in computer science at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas.
Go to Profile#826
Wen-mei Hwu
#14622
Overall Influence
Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center , and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPA...
Go to Profile#827
Özalp Babaoğlu
#13530
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Özalp Babaoğlu , is a Turkish computer scientist. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Bologna, Italy. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the UNIX system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoğlu was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He has participated in several European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems.
Go to Profile#828
Vladimir Lifschitz
#12276
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Vladimir Lifschitz is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Russia in 1971 and emigrated to the United States in 1976. Lifschitz's research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and an Editorial Advisor of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
Go to Profile#829
Gio Wiederhold
#14291
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Giovanni Corrado Melchiore Wiederhold was an Italian-born American computer scientist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. His research focused on the design of large-scale database management systems, the protection of their content, often using knowledge-based techniques. After his formal retirement he focused on valuation methods for intellectual property and intellectual capital.
Go to Profile#830
Julia Hirschberg
#14911
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
Go to Profile#831
Cliff Jones
#15984
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Clifford "Cliff" B. Jones is a British computer scientist, specializing in research into formal methods. He undertook a late DPhil at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory under Tony Hoare, awarded in 1981. Jones' thesis proposed an extension to Hoare logic for handling concurrent programs, rely/guarantee.
Go to Profile#832
Deborah Estrin
#11426
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013. Estrin is known for her work on sensor networks, participatory sensing, mobile health, and small data. She is one of the most-referenced computer scientists of all time, with her work cited over 128,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#833
Jarkko Oikarinen
#10474
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jarkko Oikarinen is a Finnish IT professional and the inventor of the first Internet chat network, called Internet Relay Chat , where he is known as WiZ. Biography and career Oikarinen was born in Kuusamo. While working at the University of Oulu in August 1988, he wrote the first IRC server and client programs, which he produced to replace the MUT program on the Finnish BBS OuluBox. Using the Bitnet Relay chat system as inspiration, Oikarinen continued to develop IRC over the next four years, receiving assistance from Darren Reed in co-authoring the IRC Protocol. In 1997, his development of ...
Go to Profile#834
Robert M. Gray
#13707
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert M. Gray is an American information theorist, and the Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He is best known for his contributions to quantization and compression, particularly the development of vector quantization.
Go to Profile#835
Regina Barzilay
#11797
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Go to Profile#836
Edward Tsang
#10126
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Edward Tsang is a Computer Science professor at the University of Essex. He holds a first degree in Business Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong , and an MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex . Prior to his PhD studies, he served for five years in various positions in the commercial sector in Hong Kong.
Go to Profile#837
Tom Maibaum
#15027
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Stephen Edward Maibaum Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts is a computer scientist. Maibaum has a Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Toronto, Canada , and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Queen Mary and Royal Holloway Colleges, University of London, England .
Go to Profile#838
Richard Lipton
#14864
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Jay Lipton is an American computer scientist who is Associate Dean of Research, Professor, and the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worked in computer science theory, cryptography, and DNA computing.
Go to Profile#839
Jeff Eppinger
#11413
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Lee Eppinger is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and Professor of the Practice at the Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. Eppinger was a co-founder of Transarc Corporation, which was bought by IBM in 1994.
Go to Profile#840
Peter van Emde Boas
#17373
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Peter van Emde Boas is a Dutch computer scientist and professor at the University of Amsterdam. He gained his doctorate in 1974 under Adriaan van Wijngaarden. The Van Emde Boas tree is named after him.
Go to Profile#841
Lou Montulli
#8590
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Louis J. Montulli II is a computer programmer who is well known for his work in producing web browsers. In 1991 and 1992, he co-authored a text web browser called Lynx, with Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac, while he was at the University of Kansas. This web browser was one of the first available and is still in use today.
Go to Profile#842
Stephen Muggleton
#14447
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Stephen H. Muggleton FBCS, FIET, FAAAI, FECCAI, FSB, FREng is Professor of Machine Learning and Head of the Computational Bioinformatics Laboratory at Imperial College London. Education Muggleton received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and Doctor of Philosophy in artificial intelligence supervised by Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#843
Nick Pippenger
#12169
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nicholas John Pippenger is a researcher in computer science. He has produced a number of fundamental results many of which are being widely used in the field of theoretical computer science, database processing and compiler optimization. He has also achieved the rank of IBM Fellow at Almaden IBM Research Center in San Jose, California. He has taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and at Princeton University in the US. In the Fall of 2006 Pippenger joined the faculty of Harvey Mudd College.
Go to Profile#844
Nachum Dershowitz
#12114
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nachum Dershowitz is an Israeli computer scientist, known e.g. for the Dershowitz–Manna ordering and the multiset path ordering used to prove termination of term rewrite systems. He obtained his B.Sc. summa cum laude in 1974 in Computer Science–Applied Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University, and his Ph.D. in 1979 in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. From 1978, he worked at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was hired as a full professor of the Tel Aviv University in 1998. He was a guest researcher at Weizmann Inst...
Go to Profile#845
Bill English
#10904
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
William Kirk English was an American computer engineer who contributed to the development of the computer mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI International's Augmentation Research Center. He would later work for Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems.
Go to Profile#846
Christiane Floyd
#15653
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Christiane Floyd is an Austrian computer scientist. In 1978, she became the first female professor of computer science in Germany, and was a pioneer of evolutionary participatory software design—a precursor to open-source software development.
Go to Profile#847
Sheila Greibach
#13505
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sheila Adele Greibach is an American researcher in formal languages in computing, automata, compiler theory and computer science. She is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and notable work include working with Seymour Ginsburg and Michael A. Harrison in context-sensitive parsing using the stack automaton model.
Go to Profile#848
Qiang Yang
#17153
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Qiang Yang is the Chair Professor, Department Head of CSE, HKUST in Hong Kong and University New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor from 2015. He was the founding head of Noah's Ark Lab. He had taught at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. His research interests are data mining and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#849
Colette Rolland
#14057
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Colette Rolland is a French computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science in the department of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, and a leading researcher in the area of information and knowledge systems, known for her work on meta-modeling, particularly goal modelling and situational method engineering.
Go to Profile#850
Doug Cutting
#14388
Overall Influence
Douglass Read Cutting is a software designer, advocate, and creator of open-source search technology. He founded two technology projects, Lucene, and Nutch, with Mike Cafarella. Both projects are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. Cutting and Cafarella are also the co-founders of Apache Hadoop.
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