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,
#901
Lawrence Landweber
#17591
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lawrence Hugh Landweber is John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his bachelor's degree in 1963 at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. at Purdue University in 1967. His doctoral thesis was "A design algorithm for sequential machines and definability in monadic second-order arithmetic."
Go to Profile#902
Sandy Douglas
#8607
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas CBE was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical computer game, OXO, a version of noughts and crosses, in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#903
Jen Golbeck
#14221
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Jennifer Golbeck is a computer scientist. She currently is a professor at the College of Information Studies, an affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department, and an affiliate professor in the Journalism Department, all at the University of Maryland, College Park. Golbeck was director of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab from 2011 to 2014.
Go to Profile#904
Robert Sproull
#14496
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Robert Lamb Sproull was an American educator, physicist and US Department of Defense official. Sproull was born in Lacon, Illinois. A graduate of Deep Springs College, Sproull studied English literature at Cornell University before taking a PhD at the same university in physics. He began a promising and productive career as a physicist at Cornell and headed the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics and the Materials Science Center. Sproull left Cornell to become director of ARPA, where he was a strong advocate of cooperation among academia, government, and industry to meet US scient...
Go to Profile#905
Michele Mosca
#12406
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Michele Mosca is co-founder and deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, researcher and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and professor of mathematics in the department of Combinatorics & Optimization at the University of Waterloo. He has held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation since January 2002, and has been a scholar for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since September 2003. Mosca's principal research interests concern the design of quantum algorithms, but he is also known for his early work on NMR quantum computation together with Jonathan A.
Go to Profile#906
Hava Siegelmann
#19029
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hava Siegelmann is an American computer scientist and Provost Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Biography Siegelmann earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rutgers University under Eduardo Sontag. Her dissertation was on the topic of Hypercomputation. She earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science at Hebrew University and a B.A. in Computer Science at the Technion .
Go to Profile#907
Walter F. Tichy
#18189
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Walter F. Tichy is a German computer scientist. He was professor of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany where he taught classes in software engineering until April 2022 when he retired.
Go to Profile#908
Albert Lindsey Zobrist
#18328
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Albert Lindsey Zobrist is an American computer scientist, games researcher, and inventor of the famous Zobrist Hashing, which was published in 1970. He is further author of the first Go program in 1968 as part of his PhD Thesis on pattern recognition at the Computer Science Department of the University of Wisconsin.
Go to Profile#909
Jeffrey Snover
#9426
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jeffrey Snover is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. Previously a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for Windows Server and the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell and was the chief architect for Windows Server.
Go to Profile#910
Wietse Venema
#11556
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit.
Go to Profile#911
Victor Zue
#17016
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Victor Waito Zue is a Chinese American computer scientist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The group pioneered the development of many systems enabling interactions between human and computers using spoken language. Then, he served a ten-year tenure as Director of the Lab for Computer Science , and the Co-Director and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab . Since 2001, Victor has returned to teaching and research from the director position in 2011.
Go to Profile#912
Arvind
#13875
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery . He was also elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for contributions to dataflow and multithread computing and the development of tools for the high-level synthesis of digital electronics hardware.
Go to Profile#913
Kurt Akeley
#13840
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kurt Akeley is an American computer graphics engineer. Akeley was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for contributions to the architecture of 3-D graphics systems and the definition of Open GL, now the industry standard.
Go to Profile#914
David Ungar
#17284
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David Michael Ungar, an American computer scientist, co-created the Self programming language with Randall Smith. The Self development environment's animated user experience was described in the paper Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface co-written with Bay-Wei Chang, which won a lasting impact award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2004.
Go to Profile#915
Klaus-Robert Müller
#15637
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Klaus-Robert Müller is a German computer scientist and physicist, most noted for his work in machine learning and brain–computer interfaces. Career Klaus-Robert Müller received his Diplom in mathematical physics and PhD in theoretical computer science from the University of Karlsruhe. Following his Ph.D. he went to Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow at GMD Berlin , where he started building up the Intelligent Data Analysis group.
Go to Profile#916
Kobbi Nissim
#13758
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Kobbi Nissim is a computer scientist at Georgetown University, where he is the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science. His areas of research include cryptography and data privacy. He is known for the introduction of differential privacy.
Go to Profile#917
Brian Reid
#11399
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Brian Keith Reid is an American computer scientist. He developed an early use of a markup language in his 1980 doctoral dissertation. His other principal interest has been computer networking and the development of the Internet.
Go to Profile#918
Joseph S. B. Mitchell
#11830
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Joseph S. B. Mitchell is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.
Go to Profile#919
Philip Pearlstein
#5916
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Philip Martin Pearlstein was an American painter best known for Modernist Realist nudes. Cited by critics as the preeminent figure painter of the 1960s to 2000s, he led a revival in realist art. Biography Pearlstein was born on May 24, 1924, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to David and Libby Kalser Pearlstein. During the Great Depression, his parents sold chickens and eggs to support the family. As a child his parents supported his interest in art, sending him to Saturday morning classes at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1942, at the age of 18, two of his paintings won a national competition sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, and were reproduced in color in Life magazine.
Go to Profile#920
Ravindran Kannan
#14872
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ravindran Kannan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#921
Richard DeMillo
#14776
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard Allan DeMillo is an American computer scientist, educator and executive. He is Professor and holds the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair in Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#922
Hiroshi Ishiguro
#9307
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Hiroshi Ishiguro is a Japanese engineer and director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. A notable development of the laboratory is the Actroid, a humanoid robot with lifelike appearance and visible behaviour such as facial movements.
Go to Profile#923
Thomas Huang
#19749
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.
Go to Profile#924
Bill Buxton
#18567
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
William Arthur Stewart Buxton is a Canadian computer scientist and designer. Most recently -having left in December 2022 - he was a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. He is known for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field. He is still active in research, especially the curation of his collection documenting the history of interactive devices.
Go to Profile#925
Matt Cutts
#10399
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Matthew Cutts is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 2018. Cutts previously worked with Google as part of the search quality team on search engine optimization issues. He is the former head of the web spam team at Google.
Go to Profile#926
Mike Cafarella
#18090
Overall Influence
Mike Cafarella is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is a principal research scientist of computer science at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Before coming to MIT, he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2020. Along with Doug Cutting, he is one of the original co-founders of the Hadoop and Nutch open-source projects. Cafarella was born in New York City but moved to Westwood, MA early in his childhood. After completing his bachelor's degree at Brown University, he earned a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#927
Ramanathan V. Guha
#9230
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ramanathan V. Guha is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. He is also responsible for products such as Google Custom Search. He was a co-founder of Epinions and Alpiri. He currently works at Google as a Google Fellow.
Go to Profile#928
Herbert Gelernter
#14829
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Herbert Leo Gelernter was a professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University. Short biography Having taken his B.S. in 1951 from Brooklyn College, Gelernter received his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1957.
Go to Profile#929
Andrew Herbert
#15612
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Andrew James Herbert, OBE, FREng is a British computer scientist, formerly Chairman of Microsoft Research, for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Biography Herbert received a bachelor's of science degree in computational science from the Leeds University in 1975, and a PhD degree in computer science from Cambridge University in 1978 for his work on "A Microprogrammed Operating System Kernel".
Go to Profile#930
Bonnie Berger
#8181
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Go to Profile#931
Wau Holland
#12755
Overall Influence
1951 - 2001 (50 years)
Herwart Holland-Moritz, known as Wau Holland, was a German computer security activist and journalist who in 1981 cofounded the Chaos Computer Club , one of the world's oldest hacking clubs. Career From 1979 onwards, Holland supported the film historian Hans-Michael Bock with the development of the filmographic database CineGraph - a lexicon for German-language films, which appeared as a loose-leaf collection from 1984. In 1981, Holland co-founded the Chaos Computer Club .
Go to Profile#932
Mike Muuss
#18108
Overall Influence
1958 - 2000 (42 years)
Michael John Muuss was the American author of the freeware network tool ping. Career A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist specializing in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland when he died. He wrote a number of software packages and network tools and contributed to many others .
Go to Profile#933
Edward D. Lazowska
#17481
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Edward D. "Ed" Lazowska is an American computer scientist. He is a Professor, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair emeritus, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#934
Brad Fitzpatrick
#10355
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep.
Go to Profile#935
Ali Ghodsi
#7656
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ali Ghodsi is an Iranian-Swedish AI leader, computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in distributed systems and big data. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. Ideas from his academic research in the area of resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied in popular open source projects such as Apache Mesos, Apache Spark, and Apache Hadoop.
Go to Profile#936
Ran Raz
#14969
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ran Raz is a computer scientist who works in the area of computational complexity theory. He was a professor in the faculty of mathematics and computer science at the Weizmann Institute. He is now a professor of computer science at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#937
Robert Bruce Findler
#18025
Overall Influence
Robert Bruce Findler, colloquially known as "Robby", is an American computer scientist, currently, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University. He is also a member of the PLT group and, as such, responsible for the creation and maintenance of DrRacket. In addition to DrRacket, Findler has contributed numerous components to Racket and supervises its Web-based software library, called PLaneT. Findler is also a leading team member of the ProgramByDesign project.
Go to Profile#938
Stan Franklin
#11138
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Stan Franklin was an American scientist. He was the W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee, and co-director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. He is the author of Artificial Minds, and the developer of IDA and its successor LIDA, both computational implementations of Global Workspace Theory. He is founder of the Cognitive Computing Research Group at the University of Memphis.
Go to Profile#939
Larry Heck
#15926
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Larry Paul Heck is currently the Rhesa Screven Farmer, Jr., Advanced Computing Concepts Chair, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, including conversational AI, speech recognition and speaker recognition, natural language processing, web search, online advertising and acoustics. He is probably best known for his role as the founder of the Microsoft Cortana Personal Assistant and his early work in deep learning for speech processing.
Go to Profile#940
Hisao Yamada
#19477
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Hisao Yamada was a Japanese computer scientist, known for his influential contributions to theoretical computer science, as well as for the development of Japanese keyboard layouts, a challenging practical problem. From 1972 to 1991, he was professor of the formal languages division at the Department for Information Science at the University of Tokyo.
Go to Profile#941
Carolyn Talcott
#13058
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carolyn Talcott is an American computer scientist known for work in formal reasoning, especially as it relates to computers, cryptanalysis and systems biology. She is currently the program director of the Symbolic Systems Biology group at SRI International.
Go to Profile#942
Julie Beth Lovins
#14791
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Julie Beth Lovins was a computational linguist who published The Lovins Stemming Algorithm - a type of stemming algorithm for word matching - in 1968. The Lovins Stemmer is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release, having been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al
Go to Profile#943
Charles F. Van Loan
#12810
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Charles Francis Van Loan is an emeritus professor of computer science and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, He is known for his expertise in numerical analysis, especially matrix computations.
Go to Profile#944
Randal Bryant
#13422
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020.
Go to Profile#945
James H. Ellis
#6646
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
James Henry Ellis was a British engineer and cryptographer. Born in Australia but raised and educated in Britain, Ellis joined GCHQ in 1952. He worked on a number of cryptographic projects, but is credited with some of the original thinking that developed into the field of Public Key Cryptography .
Go to Profile#946
Winifred Asprey
#14838
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Winifred "Tim" Alice Asprey was an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was one of only around 200 women to earn PhDs in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s, a period of women's underrepresentation in mathematics at this level. She was involved in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar.
Go to Profile#947
Dana Ron
#19914
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Dana Ron Goldreich is a computer scientist, a professor of electrical engineering at the Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Ron is one of the pioneers of research in property testing, and a leading researcher in that area.
Go to Profile#948
Diomidis Spinellis
#14660
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Diomidis D. Spinellis is a Greek computer science academic and author of the books Code Reading, Code Quality, Beautiful Architecture and Effective Debugging. Education Spinellis holds a Master of Engineering degree in Software Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science both from Imperial College London. His PhD was supervised by Susan Eisenbach and Sophia Drossopoulou.
Go to Profile#949
John Graham-Cumming
#9784
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John Graham-Cumming is a British software engineer and writer best known for starting a successful petition to the Government of the United Kingdom asking for an apology for its persecution of Alan Turing. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued the apology in September 2009., Graham-Cumming serves as Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare; previously he co-founded Electric Cloud.
Go to Profile#950
Craig Chambers
#21918
Overall Influence
Craig Chambers has been a computer scientist at Google since 2007. Prior to this, he was a Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from MIT in 1986 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1992. He is best known for the influential research language Self, which introduced prototypes as an alternative to classes, and code-splitting, a compilation technique that generates separate code paths for fast and general cases to speed execution of dynamically typed programs.
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