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,
#951
Michael Schroeder
#17192
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Schroeder is an American computer scientist. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems and he is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the assistant managing director until the lab was disbanded in 2014.
Go to Profile#952
Allan Cullimore
#4970
Overall Influence
Allan R. Cullimore was an American academic administrator. He was the 3rd President of New Jersey Institute of Technology from 1920 until 1947. Cullimore was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#953
Jeffrey L. Whitten
#10677
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jeffrey L. Whitten is an American computer scientist, and professor of information technology at Purdue University, known with Kevin C. Dittman and Lonnie D. Bentley as co-author of the textbook Systems Analysis and Design Methods, which is now in its 7th edition.
Go to Profile#954
John E. Laird
#11849
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John E. Laird is a computer scientist who, with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#955
William Opdyke
#17541
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
William F. "Bill" Opdyke is an American computer scientist and enterprise architect at JPMorgan Chase, known for his early work on code refactoring. Education Opdyke received a B.S. from Drexel University in 1979, an M.S. from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1992 under the supervision of Ralph Johnson. His Ph.D. thesis, Refactoring Object-Oriented Frameworks, was the first in-depth study of code refactoring as a software engineering technique.
Go to Profile#956
Roberto Tamassia
#18031
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Roberto Tamassia is an American Italian computer scientist, the Plastech Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, and served as the chair of the Brown Computer Science department from 2007 to 2014. His research specialty is in the design and analysis of algorithms for graph drawing, computational geometry, and computer security; he is also the author of several textbooks.
Go to Profile#957
Owen Astrachan
#16223
Overall Influence
Owen Astrachan is an American computer scientist and professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University, where he is also the department's director of undergraduate studies. He is known for his work in curriculum development and methods of teaching computer science. He was one of the first National Science Foundation CISE Distinguished Education Fellows, and is a recipient of the ACM Outstanding Educator Award. He was the principal investigator on the multi-year NSF/College Board project that led to the release of the AP Computer Science Principles course and exam.
Go to Profile#958
Dennis Allison
#19102
Overall Influence
Dennis Allison is a lecturer at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1976. Allison was a founding member of the People's Computer Company. Allison in 1975 wrote a specification for a microcomputer interpreter for the BASIC programming language which became known as Tiny Basic. Allison was urged to create the standard by Bob Albrecht of the Homebrew Computer Club who had seen BASIC on minicomputers and felt it would be the perfect match for new machines like the MITS Altair 8800, which had been released in January 1975. This design did not support text strings or floating point arithmetic, thus only using integer arithmetic.
Go to Profile#959
Alexander Schrijver
#8335
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alexander Schrijver is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1993 he has been co-editor in chief of the journal Combinatorica.
Go to Profile#960
Anja Feldmann
#13950
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Anja Feldmann is a German computer scientist. Education and career Feldmann studied computer science at Universität Paderborn and received her degree in 1990. She continued her studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her M.Sc. in 1991 and her Ph.D. in 1995. Following four years of postdoctoral work at AT&T Labs Research, she held research positions at Saarland University and Technical University Munich.
Go to Profile#961
Masahiro Sakurai
#5807
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
is a Japanese video game director and game designer best known as the creator of the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series. Apart from his work on those series, he also led the design of Meteos in 2005 and directed Kid Icarus: Uprising in 2012.
Go to Profile#962
T. V. Raman
#11447
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
T. V. Raman is a computer scientist who specializes in accessibility research. His research interests are primarily in the areas of auditory user interfaces and structured electronic documents. He has worked on speech interaction and markup technologies in the context of the World Wide Web at Digital's Cambridge Research Lab , Adobe Systems and IBM Research. He currently works at Google Research. Raman has himself been partially sighted since birth, and blind since the age of 14.
Go to Profile#963
John Reif
#14281
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
John H. Reif is an American academic, and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University, who has made contributions to large number of fields in computer science: ranging from algorithms and computational complexity theory to robotics. He has also published in many other scientific fields including chemistry , optics , and mathematics
Go to Profile#964
Gene Ball
#20065
Overall Influence
Gene Ball is a computer science researcher and computer programmer. Ball obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma, and attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, completing a master's degree and finishing his doctorate in 1982. While at Rochester, he met Rick Rashid, and together they created Alto Trek, one of the earlier networked multiplayer computer games.
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Mary Ann Horton
#12642
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mary Ann Horton , is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX , including the vi editor and terminfo database, created the first email binary attachment tool uuencode, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#966
Cecilia R. Aragon
#18898
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, author, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers .
Go to Profile#967
C. J. van Rijsbergen
#18165
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen FREng is a professor of computer science at the University of Glasgow, where he founded the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group. He is one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval and the author of the seminal monograph Information Retrieval and of the textbook The Geometry of Information Retrieval.
Go to Profile#968
Yoshitaka Amano
#3002
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Yoshitaka Amano is a Japanese visual artist, character designer, illustrator, a scenic designer for theatre and film, and a costume designer. He first came into prominence in the late 1960s working on the anime adaptation of Speed Racer. Amano later became the creator of iconic and influential characters such as Gatchaman, Tekkaman, Honeybee Hutch, and Casshern. In 1982 he went independent and became a freelance artist, finding success as an illustrator for numerous authors, and worked on best-selling novel series, such as The Guin Saga and Vampire Hunter D. He is also known for his commission...
Go to Profile#969
James Pustejovsky
#8054
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
James Pustejovsky is an American computer scientist. He is the TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. His expertise includes theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal and spatial reasoning and Extraction. His main topics of research are Natural language processing generally, and in particular, the computational analysis of linguistic meaning. He holds a B.S. from MIT as well as a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, ...
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Eric Freeman
#12858
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eric Freeman is a computer scientist, author and constituent of David Gelernter on the Lifestreaming concept. Authored works Eric Freeman has publishing accolades for Head First HTML and CSS which he co-authored with Elisabeth Robson, and Head First Design Patterns also co-authored with Elisabeth Robson, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.
Go to Profile#971
Nir Friedman
#15863
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nir Friedman is an Israeli Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research combines Machine Learning and Statistical Learning with Systems Biology, specifically in the fields of Gene Regulation, Transcription and Chromatin.
Go to Profile#972
Mary Allen Wilkes
#15090
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Mary Allen Wilkes is a lawyer, former computer programmer and logic designer, known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first "personal computer". Career Wilkes was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 where she majored in philosophy and theology. Wilkes planned to become a lawyer, but was discouraged by friends and mentors from pursuing law because of the challenges women faced in the field. A geography teacher in the eighth grade had told Wilkes, "Mary Allen, when you grow up, you ought to be a computer programmer." Sh...
Go to Profile#973
Bart Selman
#18482
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bart Selman is a Dutch-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. He has previously worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is also co-founder and principal investigator of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Berkeley artificial intelligence expert Stuart J. Russell, and co-chair of the Computing Community Consortium's 20-year roadmap for AI research.
Go to Profile#974
Andrew V. Goldberg
#17877
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrew Vladislav Goldberg is an American computer scientist working primarily on design, analysis, and experimental evaluation of algorithms. He also worked on mechanism design, computer systems, and complexity theory. Currently he is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon.com.
Go to Profile#975
Annie Easley
#11313
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energ...
Go to Profile#976
Raúl Rojas
#9187
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Raúl Rojas González is an emeritus professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, and a renowned specialist in artificial neural networks. The FU-Fighters, football-playing robots he helped build, were world champions in 2004 and 2005. He is now leading an autonomous car project called Spirit of Berlin.
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Abhay Bhushan
#10678
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Abhay Bhushan is an Indian computer scientist. Bhushan has been a major contributor to the development of the Internet TCP/IP architecture, and is the author of the File Transfer Protocol and the early versions of email standards. He is currently chairman of Asquare Inc., Secretary of Indians for Collective Action and the former President of the IIT-Kanpur Foundation. In 2023, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#978
Barney Pell
#16302
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Barney Pell is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and computer scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Powerset, a pioneering natural language search startup, search strategist and architect for Microsoft's Bing search engine, a pioneer in the field of general game playing in artificial intelligence, and the architect of the first intelligent agent to fly onboard and control a spacecraft. He was co-founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Moon Express; co-founder and chairman of LocoMobi; and Associate Founder of Singularity University.
Go to Profile#979
John Daugman
#12676
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Gustav Daugman is a British-American professor of computer vision and pattern recognition at the University of Cambridge. His major research contributions have been in computational neuroscience, pattern recognition, and in computer vision with the original development of wavelet methods for image encoding and analysis. He invented the IrisCode, a 2D Gabor wavelet-based iris recognition algorithm that is the basis of all publicly deployed automatic iris recognition systems and which has registered more than 1.5 billion persons worldwide in government ID programs.
Go to Profile#980
Uwe Schöning
#16753
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Uwe Schöning is a retired German computer scientist, known for his research in computational complexity theory. Education and career Schöning earned his Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart in 1981, under the supervision of Wolfram Schwabhäuser. He was a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Informatics at the University of Ulm until his retirement in 2021.
Go to Profile#981
Shlomo Zilberstein
#12537
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Shlomo Zilberstein is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research and Engagement in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science summa cum laude from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1982, and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1993, advised by Stuart J. Russell. He is known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, anytime algorithms, multi-agent systems, and automated...
Go to Profile#982
Alan Yuille
#17793
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan Yuille is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computational Cognitive Science with appointments in the departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Yuille develops models of vision and cognition for computers, intended for creating artificial vision systems. He studied under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University on a PhD in theoretical physics, which he completed in 1981.
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Martín Abadi
#18393
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martín Abadi is an Argentine computer scientist, working at Google . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Stanford University in 1987 as a student of Zohar Manna. He is well known for his work on computer security and on programming languages, including his paper on the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic for analyzing authentication protocols, and his book A Theory of Objects, laying out formal calculi for the semantics of object-oriented programming languages.
Go to Profile#984
Berthold K.P. Horn
#20011
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Berthold Klaus Paul Horn is an American scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence and computer vision. He is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is also Principal Investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
Go to Profile#985
François Chollet
#20058
Overall Influence
François Chollet is a French software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher currently working at Google. Chollet is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library, released in 2015, and a main contributor to the TensorFlow machine learning framework. His research focuses on computer vision, the application of machine learning to formal reasoning, abstraction, and how to achieve greater generality in artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#986
Riccardo Poli
#14426
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Riccardo Poli is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems of the University of Essex. His work has centered on genetic programming. Education Poli started his academic career with a Laurea in electronic engineering from the University of Florence in 1989. He then did a PhD in biomedical image analysis at the same university. He later became an expert in the field of evolutionary computation, working as a Lecturer and then a Reader at the University of Birmingham from 1994 until 2001, when he moved to Essex as a professor. Poli has published around 240 refereed papers...
Go to Profile#987
Jeff Hammerbacher
#12071
Overall Influence
Jeff Hammerbacher is a data scientist. He was chief scientist and cofounder at Cloudera and later served on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Early life Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father worked at the General Motors plant and his mother was a nurse. From an early age he had an interest in numbers.
Go to Profile#988
Christopher D. Manning
#22823
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Christopher David Manning is an Australian computer scientist, best known for co-developing GloVe word vectors and the bilinear or multiplicative form of attention in artificial neural networks and for his books Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing and Introduction to Information Retrieval . He is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning and a professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He was previously President of the Association for Computational Linguistics and he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam .
Go to Profile#989
Yoky Matsuoka
#9393
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Yoky Matsuoka is the CEO and Founder of Yohana . She was the CTO of Google Nest, a co-founder of Google X and previously held roles as VP of Technology and Analytics at Twitter, technology executive at Apple, and as VP of Technology at Nest.
Go to Profile#990
Pito Salas
#20448
Overall Influence
Pito Salas is a Curaçaoan-American Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software developer. While working with Lotus Advanced Technology Group in 1986, Salas invented the pivot table, a "next-generation" spreadsheet concept that was released by Lotus in 1989, as Lotus Improv.
Go to Profile#991
Cornelis H. A. Koster
#19999
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Cornelis Hermanus Antonius "Kees" Koster was a Dutch computer scientist who was a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Born in Haarlem, his family moved to Jakarta after the war. At the age of 11 he returned to the Netherlands on his own. After his study at the University of Amsterdam he worked at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam under Adriaan van Wijngaarden.
Go to Profile#992
Mary Lee Woods
#8389
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
Go to Profile#993
Salil Vadhan
#15479
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Salil Vadhan is an American computer scientist. He is Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. After completing his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard in 1995, he obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, where his advisor was Shafi Goldwasser. His research centers around the interface between computational complexity theory and cryptography. He focuses on the topics of pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge proofs. His work on the zig-zag product, with Omer Reingol...
Go to Profile#994
Paul Debevec
#16107
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Paul Ernest Debevec is a researcher in computer graphics at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He is best known for his work in finding, capturing and synthesizing the bidirectional scattering distribution function utilizing the light stages his research team constructed to find and capture the reflectance field over the human face, high-dynamic-range imaging and image-based modeling and rendering.
Go to Profile#995
Phil Bernstein
#17960
Overall Influence
Philip Alan Bernstein is a computer scientist specializing in database research in the Database Group of Microsoft Research. Bernstein is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and frequent committee member or chair of conferences such as VLDB and SIGMOD. He won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 1994, and in 2011 with Jayant Madhavan and Erhard Rahm the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award for their VLDB 2001 paper "Generic Schema Matching with Cupid".
Go to Profile#996
Mary Shaw
#14119
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mary Shaw is an American software engineer, and the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work in the field of software architecture.
Go to Profile#997
Hans-Peter Seidel
#13926
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Hans-Peter Seidel is a computer graphics researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and Saarland University. Education and career Hans-Peter Seidel earned his doctorate degree in mathematics at the University of Tübingen in 1987, under the supervision of Rainer Löwen; his dissertation was entitled "Symmetrische Strukturen und Zentralkollineationen auf topologischen Ebenen". In 1989, still at Tübingen University, he earned a habilitation degree in computer science. Since 1999, he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and a professor at Saarland University.
Go to Profile#998
Harry R. Lewis
#6773
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Essentially all of Lewis's career has been at Harvard, where he has been honored for his "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching"; his students have included future entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and numerous future faculty members at Harvard and other schools. The website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis", created by Zuckerberg while at Harvard, was a precursor to Facebook.
Go to Profile#999
Michael Georgeff
#17577
Overall Influence
Michael Peter Georgeff is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has made contributions in the areas of Intelligent Software Agents and eHealth. Georgeff is a former program director in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, and former director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute Ltd., at the University of Melbourne. Georgeff is Founder and chief executive officer of Precedence Health Care and Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University.
Go to Profile#1000
George Sadowsky
#11980
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
George Sadowsky is an American computer scientist who has worked in a number of entities related to promotion of the Internet worldwide. He is known through his decades of work with developing countries. In many of these countries, he was the one to actually bring the Internet, or make it affordable, or help change the legislation to make sure it minimized government control and regulation.
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