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,
#851
Bruce Wilcox
#16370
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bruce Wilcox is an artificial intelligence programmer. Work MTS/LISP and Computer Go A graduate of Michigan, Wilcox wrote the MTS/LISP interpreter back in the early 1970s, in order to be able to write a Go program for Dr. Walter Reitman. The Go program was the first one to be able to give a 9-stone handicap to a human beginner and win.
Go to Profile#852
Katia Sycara
#5329
Overall Influence
Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara is a Greek computer scientist. She is an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She also serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
Go to Profile#853
Michael L. Kazar
#9728
Overall Influence
Michael L. Kazar is an American engineer and technology executive. Kazar received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Computer Science.
Go to Profile#854
Rosalind Picard
#7374
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Rosalind Wright Picard is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica.
Go to Profile#855
Michael Mitzenmacher
#15487
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Michael David Mitzenmacher is an American computer scientist working in algorithms. He is Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and was area dean of computer science July 2010 to June 2013. He also runs My Biased Coin, a blog about theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#856
Jonathan Bowen
#14065
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jonathan P. Bowen FBCS FRSA is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University, where he headed the Centre for Applied Formal Methods. Prof. Bowen is also the Chairman of Museophile Limited and has been a Professor of Computer Science at Birmingham City University, Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute , University of Westminster and King's College London, and a visiting academic at University College London.
Go to Profile#857
Nitin Saxena
#9698
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Nitin Saxena is an Indian scientist in mathematics and theoretical computer science. His research focuses on computational complexity. He attracted international attention for proposing the AKS Primality Test in 2002 in a joint work with Manindra Agrawal and Neeraj Kayal, for which the trio won the 2006 Fulkerson Prize, and the 2006 Gödel Prize. They provided the first unconditional deterministic algorithm to test an n-digit number for primality in a time that has been proven to be polynomial in n. This research work came out as a part of his undergraduate study.
Go to Profile#858
Arthur Burks
#3221
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Arthur Walter Burks was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff. Burks was also for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Go to Profile#859
Victor Basili
#16312
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Victor R. Basili , is an emeritus professor at the Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and two honorary degrees. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers .
Go to Profile#860
Barbara J. Grosz
#15053
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
Go to Profile#861
Martin Charles Golumbic
#12700
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin Charles Golumbic is a mathematician and computer scientist known for his research on perfect graphs, graph sandwich problems, compiler optimization, and spatial-temporal reasoning. He is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Haifa, and was the founder of the journal Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#862
Jeff Bezanson
#9795
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
#863
Chip Morningstar
#7322
Overall Influence
Chip Morningstar is an American software architect, mainly for online entertainment and communication. Morningstar held many jobs throughout his career in the research and development of technology and programs. Most notably was Morningstar's role as project leader for Lucasfilm's Habitat, the first large-scale virtual multiuser environment. In March 2001, Morningstar and colleague Randy Farmer were awarded the inaugural "First Penguin Award" by the International Game Developers Association for their work on Habitat. He also participated in Project Xanadu, for which the word hypertext was first coined.
Go to Profile#864
Rod Burstall
#15179
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at Birmingham University. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley.
Go to Profile#865
Steven Skiena
#14892
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Steven Sol Skiena is a Computer Scientist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He is also Director of AI Institute at Stony Brook. He was co-founder of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company, and served as Chief Science Officer from 2009 until it shut down in 2015. His research interests include algorithm design and its applications to biology. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and mathematics. The Algorithm Design Manual is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation.
Go to Profile#866
Mark Adler
#7432
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mark Adler is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Go to Profile#867
Lorne Lanning
#18343
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lorne Lanning is an American game designer, director, writer and voice actor. He is also co-founder and president of the video game developer Oddworld Inhabitants. He is best known for creating the Oddworld series including the games Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! and Oddworld: Soulstorm.
Go to Profile#868
Matt Blaze
#7753
Overall Influence
Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.
Go to Profile#869
Jerre Noe
#13305
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Jerre Noe was an American computer scientist. In the 1950s, he led the technical team for the ERMA project, the Bank of America's first venture into computerized banking. In 1968 he became the first chair of the University of Washington's Computer Science Group, which later evolved into the Computer Science and Engineering Department.
Go to Profile#870
Henning Schulzrinne
#10271
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Henning Schulzrinne is a German-American computer scientist who led research and development of the voice over IP network protocols. Life Schulzrinne studied engineering management at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the German Technische Universität Darmstadt in Darmstadt, where he earned his Vordiplom , then went on to earn his M.Sc. at the University of Cincinnati and his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#871
Dries Buytaert
#11546
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Dries Buytaert is a Belgian open-source software programmer. He is the founder and lead developer of the Drupal content management system. He also serves as the CTO of Acquia. Career Buytaert was born in Wilrijk, Antwerp, Belgium. He defended his PhD dissertation in computer science on 27 January 2008, at Ghent University in Belgium.
Go to Profile#872
Lois Haibt
#10162
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Lois B. Mitchell Haibt is an American computer scientist best known for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. She is known as an early pioneer in computer science.
Go to Profile#873
Juraj Hromkovič
#15633
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Juraj Hromkovič is a Slovak Computer Scientist and Professor at ETH Zürich. He is the author of numerous monographs and scientific publications in the field of algorithmics, computational complexity theory, and randomization.
Go to Profile#874
Mohammad Hajiaghayi
#13438
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi is a computer scientist known for his work in algorithms, game theory, social networks, network design, graph theory, and big data. He has over 200 publications with over 185 collaborators and 10 issued patents.
Go to Profile#875
Makoto Nagao
#13723
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
was a Japanese computer scientist. He contributed to various fields: machine translation, natural language processing, pattern recognition, image processing and library science. He was the 23rd president of Kyoto University and the 14th director of National Diet Library in Japan .
Go to Profile#876
Jon Crowcroft
#14035
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jonathan Andrew Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, and the chair of the programme committee at the Alan Turing Institute.
Go to Profile#877
Ric Holt
#15730
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Richard Craig Holt was an American-Canadian computer scientist. Early life Holt was born on in 1941 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Vashti Young and C.P. Holt, but later moved to Toronto, Canada. As a teenager, he competed in track and field. He graduated from Cornell University in 1964 in engineering physics. He spent a year in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and then worked for IBM. He went back to Cornell and obtained a PhD in computer science in 1970 under Alan Shaw.
Go to Profile#878
Terry Halpin
#15573
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Terence Aidan Halpin is an Australian computer scientist who is known for his formalization of the Object Role Modeling notation. Biography Born in Australia, Halpin studied at the University of Queensland starting in the 1970s and eventually received a BSc, DipEd, BA, MLitStud and in 1989 a PhD with the thesis "A logical analysis of information systems : static aspects of the data-oriented perspective" under John Staples.
Go to Profile#879
Tobias Nipkow
#17234
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Tobias Nipkow is a German computer scientist. Career Nipkow received his Diplom in computer science from the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in 1982, and his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1987.
Go to Profile#880
Omer Reingold
#11687
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Omer Reingold is an Israeli computer scientist. He is the Rajeev Motwani professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the director of the Simons Collaboration on the Theory of Algorithmic Fairness. He received a PhD in computer science at Weizmann in 1998 under Moni Naor. He received the 2005 Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in finding a deterministic logarithmic-space algorithm for st-connectivity in undirected graphs. He, along with Avi Wigderson and Salil Vadhan, won the Gödel Prize for their work on the zig-zag product. He became a Fel...
Go to Profile#881
David Wolpert
#9916
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received two awards. His name is particularly associated with a theorem in computer science known as "no free lunch".
Go to Profile#882
Josh Fisher
#10484
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Joseph A "Josh" Fisher is an American and Spanish computer scientist noted for his work on VLIW architectures, compiling, and instruction-level parallelism, and for the founding of Multiflow Computer. He is a Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow .
Go to Profile#883
Cecilia Berdichevsky
#12569
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Cecilia Berdichevsky or Berdichevski was a pioneering Argentinian computer scientist and began her work in 1961 using the first Ferranti Mercury computer in that country. Biography She was born Mirjam Tuwjasz on 30 March 1925 in Vidzy, at that time part of Poland, now Belarus.
Go to Profile#884
Avinash Kak
#12150
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Avinash C. Kak is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University who has conducted pioneering research in several areas of information processing. His most noteworthy contributions deal with algorithms, languages, and systems related to networks , robotics, and computer vision. Born in Srinagar, Kashmir, he did his Bachelors in BE at University of Madras and Phd in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He joined the faculty of Purdue University in 1971.
Go to Profile#885
Eric Bina
#10058
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Eric J. Bina is an American software programmer who is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#886
Willis Ware
#5497
Overall Influence
1920 - 2013 (93 years)
Howard George Willis Ware , popularly known as Willis Howard Ware was an American computer pioneer who co-developed the IAS machine that laid down the blueprint of the modern day computer in the late 20th century. He was also a pioneer of privacy rights, social critic of technology policy, and a founder in the field of computer security.
Go to Profile#887
Igor Aleksander
#5166
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Igor Aleksander FREng is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#888
Roger Dingledine
#4786
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director.
Go to Profile#889
Bruce H. McCormick
#11774
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Bruce Howard McCormick was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University. Biography McCormick took his BS in Physics from MIT in 1950, followed by two years on a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University, England. There he studied quantum field theory with Professor Paul Dirac, founder of the field of quantum mechanics and holder of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Professor Erwin Schrödinger. McCormick returned to the U.S. to take his PhD in physics at Harvard U...
Go to Profile#890
Patrick C. Fischer
#12214
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Patrick Carl Fischer was an American computer scientist, a noted researcher in computational complexity theory and database theory, and a target of the Unabomber. Biography Fischer was born December 3, 1935, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Carl H. Fischer, became a professor of actuarial mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1941, and the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he grew up. Fischer himself went to the University of Michigan, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1957 and an MBA in 1958. He went on to graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#891
Charles Rosen
#11892
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Charles Rosen was a pioneer in artificial intelligence and founder of SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center. He led the project that led to the development of Shakey the Robot, "who" now resides in a glass case at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.
Go to Profile#892
Saul Rosen
#14477
Overall Influence
1922 - 1991 (69 years)
Saul Rosen was an American computer science pioneer. He is known for designing the software of the first transistor-based computer Philco Transac S-2000, and for his work on programming language design which influenced the ALGOL language.
Go to Profile#893
Peter Elias
#11828
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Peter Elias was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991. In 1955, Elias introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes. He also established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.
Go to Profile#894
Daniel Siewiorek
#16494
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel P. Siewiorek is an American computer engineer and computer scientist, currently the Buhl University Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#895
Wilfried Brauer
#15895
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Wilfried Brauer was a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich. Life and work Brauer studied Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He received a PhD in Mathematics 1966 from the University of Bonn for a dissertation on the theory of profinite groups.
Go to Profile#896
Taher Elgamal
#5433
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Taher Elgamal is an Egyptian cryptographer and entrepreneur. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer of Security at Salesforce since 2013. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of Securify and the director of engineering at RSA Security. From 1995 to 1998, he was the chief scientist at Netscape Communications. He has been described as the "father of SSL" for the work he did in computer security while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.
Go to Profile#897
Selim Akl
#19278
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Selim G. Akl is a professor at Queen's University in the Queen's School of Computing, where he leads the Parallel and Unconventional Computation Group. His research interests are primarily in the area of algorithm design and analysis, in particular for problems in parallel computing and unconventional computing.
Go to Profile#898
Jos Stam
#14292
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jos Stam is a researcher in the field of computer graphics, focusing on the simulation of natural physical phenomena for 3D-computer animation. He achieved technical breakthroughs with the simulation of fluids and gases, new rendering algorithms and subdivision surfaces, which are a mix between two previously incompatible worlds of Nurbs- and polygon-modeling in 3D.
Go to Profile#899
Richard Bartle
#11247
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created MUD1 in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds.
Go to Profile#900
Hartmut Neven
#16279
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hartmut Neven is a scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he is leading the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab which he founded in 2012.
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