Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#1001

Lars Bak

#13375

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Lars Bak is a Danish computer programmer. He is known as a JavaScript expert and for his work on virtual machines. He previously worked for Google, having contributed to the Chrome browser by developing the V8 JavaScript engine.

#1002

Gunther Schmidt

#8177

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

#1003

Mark N. Wegman

#18814

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Mark N. Wegman is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to algorithms and compiler optimization. Wegman received his B.A. from New York University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined IBM Research in 1975, where he currently serves as head of Computer Science. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He became an IBM Fellow in 2007. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010.

#1004

Masaru Tomita

#8672

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Masaru Tomita is a Japanese scientist in the fields of systems biology and computer science, best known as the founder of the E-Cell simulation system and/or the inventor of GLR parser algorithm. He served a professor of Keio University, Director of the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, and the founder and board member of various spinout companies, including Human Metabolome Technologies, Inc. and Spiber Inc. He is also the co-founder and on the board of directors of The Metabolomics Society. His father was the renowned composer and synthesiser pioneer Isao Tomita.

#1005

Franz Josef Och

#10888

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Franz Josef Och is a German computer scientist. He is best known for being the chief architect of Google Translate. He has worked as a Director at Facebook. Prior to this, he was Head of Data Science at Grail, , Chief Data Scientist at Human Longevity Inc., and earlier worked for Google as a Distinguished Research Scientist and head of machine translation based at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters south of San Francisco.

#1006

Rachel Harrison

#26799

Overall Influence

Rachel Harrison is a British computer scientist and software engineer whose research interests include mobile apps and object-oriented design. She is a professor of computer science at Oxford Brookes University.

#1007

Michael L. Littman

Michael L. Littman

#21601

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Michael Lederman Littman is a computer scientist, researcher, educator, and author. His research interests focus on reinforcement learning. He is currently a University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has taught since 2012.

#1008

Yael Tauman Kalai

Yael Tauman Kalai

#20074

Overall Influence

Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and as an adjunct professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

#1009

Sam Ruby

#18034

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the Atom standard and the Feed Validator web service.

#1010

Miklós Ajtai

#15870

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Miklós Ajtai is a computer scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center, United States. In 2003, he received the Knuth Prize for his numerous contributions to the field, including a classic sorting network algorithm , exponential lower bounds, superlinear time-space tradeoffs for branching programs, and other "unique and spectacular" results. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

#1011

Munindar P. Singh

#21035

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Munindar P. Singh is a SAS institute distinguished professor and a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Singh is an IEEE Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, a AAAS Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a Member of Academia Europaea, and a ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award recipient.

#1012

Randy Katz

#15250

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Randy Howard Katz is a distinguished professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley of the electrical engineering and computer science department. Biography Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955. He was first exposed to computers in Canarsie High School's well equipped laboratory. After graduating in 1973, Katz received an A.B. from Cornell University , where he was a Cornell College Scholar majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, an M.S. from UC Berkeley , under the direction of Larry Rowe, and a Ph.D., from UC Berkeley , under the direction of Eugene Wong. He was a memb...

#1013

Fred B. Schneider

#19645

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Fred Barry Schneider is an American computer scientist, based at Cornell University, where he is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science. He has published in numerous areas including science policy, cybersecurity, and distributed systems. His research is in the area of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity and mission-critical applications.

#1014

Niels Provos

#13336

Overall Influence

Niels Provos is a German-American researcher in security engineering, malware, and cryptography. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan. From 2003 to 2018, he worked at Google as a Distinguished Engineer on security for Google. In 2018, he left Google to join Stripe as its new head of security. In 2022, Provos left Stripe and joined Lacework as head of Security Efficacy.

#1015

Alan Bundy

#17204

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alan Richard Bundy is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially to proof planning, the use of meta-level reasoning to guide proof search.

#1016

Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson

#286

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson is an English television presenter, journalist, and writer who specialises in motoring. He is best known for the motoring programmes Top Gear and The Grand Tour alongside Richard Hammond and James May. He also currently writes weekly columns for The Sunday Times and The Sun. Since 2018, Clarkson has hosted the ITV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

#1017

Clifford A. Pickover

Clifford A. Pickover

#3429

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Clifford Alan Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.

#1018

Keith Clark

#14430

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Keith Leonard Clark is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, England. Education Clark studied Mathematics at Durham University , graduating in 1964 with a first-class degree. Clark then continued his studies at Cambridge University, taking a second undergraduate degree in Philosophy in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of London with thesis titled Predicate logic as a computational formalism.

#1019

Abbas Edalat

#7044

Overall Influence

Abbas Edalat is a British-Iranian academic who is a professor of computer science and mathematics at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London and a political activist. In a 2018 letter to The Guardian, 129 experts in computer science, mathematics and machine learning described him as "a prominent academic, making fundamental contributions to mathematical logic and theoretical computer science" Edalat also founded SAF and CASMII, a campaign against sanctions and military intervention in Iran.

#1020

James K. Baker

#13915

Overall Influence

James K. Baker and his wife Janet M. Baker are the co-founders of Dragon Systems. Together they are credited with the creation of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. James Baker is an expert in speech recognition technology and a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

#1021

Matthias Jarke

#17859

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Matthias Jarke is a German computer scientist. Life and work After double master's degrees in computer science and business administration at the University of Hamburg, Germany, he received his doctorate in operations research there in 1980. In 1981 he joined the Stern School of Management at New York University as an Assistant Professor, where he received an early promotion to Associate Professor in 1983, and early tenure in 1985. In 1986 he returned to Germany as a full professor of dialog-oriented systems at the University of Passau, from where he moved to RWTH Aachen University as Professor of Information Systems in 1991.

#1022

Jacek Karpiński

Jacek Karpiński

#14973

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Jacek Karpiński was a Polish pioneer in computer engineering and computer science. During World War II, he was a soldier in the Batalion Zośka of the Polish Home Army, and was awarded multiple times with a Cross of Valour. He took part in Operation Kutschera and the Warsaw Uprising, where he was heavily wounded.

#1023

Susanne Albers

#11167

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Susanne Albers is a German theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich. She is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal and the Leibniz Prize.

#1024

George Necula

#11216

Overall Influence

George Ciprian Necula is a Romanian computer scientist, engineer at Google, and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley who does research in the area of programming languages and software engineering, with a particular focus on software verification and formal methods. He is best known for his Ph.D. thesis work first describing proof-carrying code, a work that received the 2007 SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award.

#1025

Mark Zbikowski

#14024

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Mark "Zibo" Joseph Zbikowski is a former Microsoft Architect and an early computer hacker. He started working at the company only a few years after its inception, leading efforts in MS-DOS, OS/2, Cairo and Windows NT. In 2006, he was honored for 25 years of service with the company, the third employee to reach this milestone, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He retired the same year from Microsoft.

#1026

Bernard Richards

#19295

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Bernard Richards is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor of Medical Informatics at the University of Manchester, England. Richards studied mathematics and physics for his bachelor's degree. For his master's degree, he worked under the supervision of Alan Turing at Manchester as one of Turing's last students, helping to validate Turing’s theory of morphogenesis. Reflecting on Turing's death at the age of 80 during Turing's centenary year in 2012, Richards commented: "The day he died felt like driving through a tunnel and the lights being switched off".

#1027

Cathy O'Neil

#10969

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Catherine Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.

#1028

Simon Phipps

#13625

Overall Influence

Simon Phipps is a computer scientist and web and open source advocate. Phipps was instrumental in IBM's involvement in the Java programming language, founding IBM's Java Technology Center. He left IBM for Sun Microsystems in 2000, taking leadership of Sun's open source programme from Danese Cooper. Under Phipps, most of Sun's core software was released under open source licenses, including Solaris and Java.

#1029

Magnus Manske

#8371

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Heinrich Magnus Manske is a German biochemist, who is a leading researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of the MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia and a number of other websites.

#1030

Peter O'Hearn

#18533

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Peter William O'Hearn , formerly a research scientist at Meta, is a Distinguished Engineer at Lacework and a Professor of Computer science at University College London . He has made significant contributions to formal methods for program correctness. In recent years these advances have been employed in developing industrial software tools that conduct automated analysis of large industrial codebases.

#1031

Gernot Heiser

#20005

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Gernot Heiser is a Scientia Professor and the John Lions Chair for operating systems at UNSW Sydney, where he leads the Trustworthy Systems group . Life In 1991, Heiser joined the School of Computer Science and Engineering of UNSW Sydney, originally as a lecturer, reaching the rank of full professor in 2002, a position he retains to date.

#1032

Bill Gropp

#17312

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

William Douglas Gropp is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is also the founding Director of the Parallel Computing Institute. Gropp helped to create the Message Passing Interface, also known as MPI, and the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation, also known as PETSc.

#1033

Dietmar Saupe

#7799

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Dietmar Saupe is a fractal researcher and professor of computer science, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany. Saupe's book, Chaos and Fractals, won the Association of American Publishers award for Best Mathematics Book of the Year in 1992. His current research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization, and image processing.

#1034

Manfred Broy

#14429

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Manfred Broy is a German computer scientist, and an emeritus professor in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany. Biography Broy gained his Doctor of Philosophy in 1980 at the chair of Friedrich L. Bauer on the subject of transformation of programs running in parallel .

#1035

Ellen Fetter

#4944

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory. Early life and education Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.

#1036

Ramakrishnan Srikant

Ramakrishnan Srikant

#22857

Overall Influence

Ramakrishnan Srikant is a Google Fellow at Google. His primary field of research is Data Mining. His 1994 paper, Fast algorithms for mining association rules, co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal has acquired over 27000 citations as per Google Scholar as of July 2014, and is thus one of the most cited papers in the area of Data Mining. It won the VLDB 10-year award in 2004. His 1995 paper, Mining Sequential Patterns, also co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal, was awarded the ICDE Influential Paper Award in 2008, and his 2004 paper, Order-Preserving Encryption for Numeric Data, co-authored with Rakesh Ag...

#1037

Kristian Kersting

#20232

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

#1038

Zhou Chaochen

#19570

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Zhou Chaochen is a Chinese computer scientist. Zhou was born in Nanhui, Shanghai, China. He studied as an undergraduate at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics, Peking University and as a postgraduate at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences .

#1039

Luca Trevisan

#16247

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Luca Trevisan is an Italian professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan. His research area is theoretical computer science, focusing on randomness, cryptography, probabilistically checkable proofss, approximation, property testing, spectral graph theory, and sublinear algorithms. He also runs a blog, in theory, about theoretical computer science.

#1040

Fred Forest

#6783

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Fred Forest is a French new media artist making use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, performances, and public interventions that explore both the ramifications and potential of media space. He was a cofounder of both the Sociological Art Collective and the Aesthetics of Communication movement .

#1041

Mihir Bellare

#14105

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Mihir Bellare is a cryptographer and professor at the University of California San Diego. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published several seminal papers in the field of cryptography , many of which were co-written with Phillip Rogaway. Bellare has published a number of papers in the field of Format-Preserving Encryption. His students include Michel Abdalla, Chanathip Namprempre, Tadayoshi Kohno and Anton Mityagin. Bellare is one of the authors of skein.

#1042

Max Welling

#21718

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Max Welling is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also currently the Lead Scientist of the new Microsoft Research Lab in Amsterdam.

#1043

Dave Raggett

#16720

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992. He has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML. Raggett also wrote HTML Tidy and is currently pioneering W3C's work on the Web of Things. He lives in the west of England.

#1044

John D. Lafferty

#21895

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

John D. Lafferty is an American scientist, Professor at Yale University and leading researcher in machine learning. He is best known for proposing the Conditional Random Fields with Andrew McCallum and Fernando C.N. Pereira.

#1045

Trevor Darrell

#25995

Overall Influence

Trevor Jackson Darrell is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research on computer vision and machine learning and is one of the leading experts on topics such as deep learning and explainable AI.

#1046

Julian Lombardi

Julian Lombardi

#15959

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Julian Lombardi is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.

#1047

Erol Gelenbe

#4494

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sami Erol Gelenbe , a Turkish and French computer scientist, electronic engineer and applied mathematician, pioneered the field of Computer System and Network Performance. Currently Professor in the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences , he is also an Associate Researcher in the I3S Laboratory and Abraham de Moivre Laboratory . Fellow of several National Academies, he Chairs the Informatics Section of Academia Europaea since 2023. His previous Professorial Chairs include the University of Liège , University Paris-Saclay , University Paris Descart...

#1048

Jan Dietz

#10039

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jean Leonardus Gerardus Dietz is a Dutch Information Systems researcher, Professor Emeritus of Information Systems Design at the Delft University of Technology, known for the development of the Design & Engineering Methodology for Organisations. and his work on Enterprise Engineering.

#1049

Jesse Schell

#22819

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jesse N. Schell is an American video game designer and author, as well as the CEO of Schell Games, and a distinguished professor of the practice of entertainment technology at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center , a joint master's program between the College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

#1050

Michael Guy

#13735

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Michael J. T. Guy is a British computer scientist and mathematician. He is known for early work on computer systems, such as the Phoenix system at the University of Cambridge, and for contributions to number theory, computer algebra, and the theory of polyhedra in higher dimensions. He worked closely with John Horton Conway, and is the son of Conway's collaborator Richard K. Guy.

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