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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#101
Maurice Wilkes
#681
Overall Influence
1913 - 2010 (97 years)
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator , one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#102
Michael Stonebraker
#1385
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."
Go to Profile#103
Anders Hejlsberg
#1804
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anders Hejlsberg is a Danish software engineer who co-designed several programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C# and core developer on TypeScript.
Go to Profile#104
Alain Colmerauer
#1099
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Alain Colmerauer was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog. Early life Alain Colmerauer was born on 24 January 1941 in Carcassonne. He graduated from the Grenoble Institute of Technology, and he earned a PhD from the Ensimag in Grenoble.
Go to Profile#105
Shigeru Miyamoto
#258
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors as an executive since 2002. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in the history of video games, he is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox and Pikmin.
Go to Profile#106
Ross Quinlan
#2355
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Ross Quinlan is a computer science researcher in data mining and decision theory. He has contributed extensively to the development of decision tree algorithms, including inventing the canonical C4.5 and ID3 algorithms. He also contributed to early ILP literature with First Order Inductive Learner . He is currently running the company RuleQuest Research which he founded in 1997.
Go to Profile#107
Leonard Adleman
#542
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Leonard Adleman is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing.
Go to Profile#108
Raj Reddy
#881
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#109
Robert Taylor
#1028
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Robert William Taylor , known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.
Go to Profile#110
J. Presper Eckert
#329
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer , presented the first course in computing topics , founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay-line memory.
Go to Profile#111
Charles Bachman
#1702
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Charles William Bachman III was an American computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher, developer, and manager rather than in academia. He was particularly known for his work in the early development of database management systems. His techniques of layered architecture include his namesake Bachman diagrams.
Go to Profile#112
Ehud Shapiro
#1762
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ehud Shapiro is an Israeli scientist, artist, and entrepreneur, who is Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With international reputation, he made fundamental contributions to many scientific disciplines, laying in each a long-term research agenda by asking a novel basic question and offering a first step towards answering it, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for faul...
Go to Profile#113
Guido van Rossum
#1500
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.
Go to Profile#114
Sid Meier
#762
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sidney K. Meier is a Canadian-born Swiss-American programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the Civilization series. Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#115
Christos Papadimitriou
#875
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christos Charilaos Papadimitriou is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Education Papadimitriou studied at the National Technical University of Athens, where in 1972 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in electrical engineering. He then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1976 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The complexity of combinatorial optimization problems."
Go to Profile#116
Edward Yourdon
#1320
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Edward Nash Yourdon was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#117
Stephen C. Johnson
#2117
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen Curtis Johnson is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and AT&T for nearly 20 years. He is best known for Yacc, Lint, spell, and the Portable C Compiler, which contributed to the spread of Unix and C. He has also contributed to fields as diverse as computer music, psychometrics and VLSI design.
Go to Profile#118
Teuvo Kohonen
#2361
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen was a Finnish computer scientist. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. Career Kohonen studied at the Helsinki University of Technology and graduated with a master's degree in engineering in 1957. He received his doctorate in 1962 and stayed at the university with a faculty position until 1993. He was an academy professor of the Academy of Finland between 1975 and 1999.
Go to Profile#119
Dave Cutler
#1529
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Neil Cutler Sr. is an American software engineer. He developed several computer operating systems, namely Microsoft's Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS. Personal history Cutler was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in DeWitt, Michigan. After graduating from Olivet College, Michigan, in 1965, he went to work for DuPont.
Go to Profile#120
Whitfield Diffie
#960
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie , ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
Go to Profile#121
Cleve Moler
#1592
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
Go to Profile#122
Wil van der Aalst
#1779
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Willibrordus Martinus Pancratius van der Aalst is a Dutch computer scientist and full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science group. His research and teaching interests include information systems, workflow management, Petri nets, process mining, specification languages, and simulation. He is also known for his work on workflow patterns.
Go to Profile#123
Jim Blinn
#1796
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James F. Blinn is an American computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the 1980 Carl Sagan documentary series Cosmos, and the research of the Blinn–Phong shading model.
Go to Profile#124
Fernando J. Corbató
#1770
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. Career Corbató was born on July 1, 1926, in Oakland, California, to Hermenegildo Corbató, a Spanish literature professor from Villarreal, Spain, and Charlotte Corbató. In 1930 the Corbató family moved to Los Angeles for Hermenegildo's job at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#125
Patrick Winston
#1942
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Patrick Henry Winston was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab. Winston was succeeded as director by Rodney Brooks.
Go to Profile#126
Steve Crocker
#1501
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen D. Crocker is an Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Networking Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2011 through 2017.
Go to Profile#127
Manuel Blum
#1115
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#128
Randy Pausch
#1653
Overall Influence
1960 - 2008 (48 years)
Randolph Frederick Pausch was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learned he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006. In August 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis: "three to six months of good health left". He gave an upbeat lecture titled, "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He co-authored a book of the same name, The Last Lect...
Go to Profile#129
Chris Lattner
#2627
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Christopher Arthur Lattner is an American computer scientist, former Google and Tesla employee and co-founder of LLVM, Clang compiler, MLIR compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language. He worked as the President of Platform Engineering, SiFive after two years at Google Brain. Prior to that, he briefly served as Vice President of Autopilot Software at Tesla, Inc. and worked at Apple Inc. as Senior Director of the Developer Tools department, leading the Xcode, Instruments, and compiler teams.
Go to Profile#130
Herman Goldstine
#250
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Herman Heine Goldstine was a mathematician and computer scientist, who worked as the director of the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study and helped to develop ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers. He subsequently worked for many years at IBM as an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical position.
Go to Profile#131
Gordon Plotkin
#2323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gordon David Plotkin, is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics and his work on denotational semantics. In particular, his notes on A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics were very influential. He has contributed to many other areas of computer science.
Go to Profile#132
David C. Evans
#2123
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
David Cannon Evans was the founder of the computer science department at the University of Utah and co-founder of Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering firm in computer graphics hardware. Biography Evans was born in Salt Lake City. He attended the University of Utah and studied electrical engineering; he earned his Bachelor of Science in Physics in 1949 and his Doctorate in Physics in 1953. Evans first worked at the Bendix aviation electronics company, where he acted as project manager in 1955 to develop what some describe as an early personal computer that ran on an interpretive operating system.
Go to Profile#133
Daphne Koller
#1375
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#134
Douglas Comer
#2325
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Douglas Earl Comer is a professor of computer science at Purdue University, where he teaches courses on operating systems and computer networks. He has written numerous research papers and textbooks, and currently heads several networking research projects. He has been involved in TCP/IP and internetworking since the late 1970s, and is an internationally recognized authority. He designed and implemented X25NET and Cypress networks, and the Xinu operating system. He is director of the Internetworking Research Group at Purdue, editor of Software - Practice and Experience, and a former member of the Internet Architecture Board.
Go to Profile#135
Ingo Rechenberg
#2516
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Ingo Rechenberg was a German researcher and professor in the field of bionics. Rechenberg was a pioneer of the fields of evolutionary computation and artificial evolution. In the 1960s and 1970s he invented a highly influential set of optimization methods known as evolution strategies . His group successfully applied the new algorithms to challenging problems such as aerodynamic wing design. These were the first serious technical applications of artificial evolution, an important subset of the still growing field of bionics.
Go to Profile#136
Scott Fahlman
#1275
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Scott Elliott Fahlman is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks , on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp , and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc. During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network.
Go to Profile#137
Thomas E. Kurtz
#2053
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Thomas Eugene Kurtz is a retired Dartmouth professor of mathematics and computer scientist, who along with his colleague John G. Kemeny set in motion the then revolutionary concept of making computers as freely available to college students as library books were, by implementing the concept of time-sharing at Dartmouth College. In his mission to allow non-expert users to interact with the computer, he co-developed the BASIC programming language and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System during 1963 to 1964.
Go to Profile#138
Lawrence Roberts
#1280
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002. As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and Polish-American engineer Paul Baran. The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn who worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman . Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure th...
Go to Profile#139
Pedro Domingos
#2035
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pedro Domingos is a Professor Emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He is a researcher in machine learning known for Markov logic network enabling uncertain inference.
Go to Profile#140
Hal Abelson
#1376
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Harold Abelson is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely-used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book."
Go to Profile#141
Peter Landin
#2269
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Peter John Landin was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.
Go to Profile#142
Richard P. Gabriel
#2206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Richard P. Gabriel is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big", which introduced the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of benchmarks for Lisp, termed Gabriel Benchmarks, published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems. These became a standard way to benchmark Lisp implementations.
Go to Profile#143
Tom DeMarco
#1272
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tom DeMarco is an American software engineer, author, and consultant on software engineering topics. He was an early developer of structured analysis in the 1970s. Early life and education Tom DeMarco was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a M.S. from Columbia University, and a diplôme from the University of Paris.
Go to Profile#144
Michael O. Rabin
#911
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Michael Oser Rabin is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany , the son of a rabbi. In 1935, he emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine. As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher.
Go to Profile#145
Silvio Micali
#1761
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory centers on cryptography and information security.
Go to Profile#146
Alistair Cockburn
#1566
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alistair Cockburn is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He cosigned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Life and career Cockburn started studying the methods of object oriented software development for IBM. From 1994, he formed "Humans and Technology" in Salt Lake City. He obtained his degree in computer science at the Case Western Reserve University. In 2003, he received his PhD degree from the University of Oslo.
Go to Profile#147
Avi Wigderson
#1758
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Avi Wigderson is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#148
Gregory Chaitin
#827
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gregory John Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a computer-theoretic result equivalent to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He is considered to be one of the founders of what is today known as algorithmic complexity together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff. Along with the works of e.g. Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, Martin-Löf, and Leonid Levin, algorithmic information theory became a foundational part of theoretical computer science, information theory, and mathematical logic.
Go to Profile#149
Bruce Perens
#940
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric S. Raymond.
Go to Profile#150
Alan Edelman
#1328
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society , Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics , Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and Association for Computing Machine...
Go to Profile