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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#10201

Rosanna Coppo

#167640

Overall Influence

#10202

Christian Fankhauser

#167646

Overall Influence

#10203

Jens Juul Rasmussen

#167648

Overall Influence

#10204

Perla Werner

#167649

Overall Influence

#10205

Shan Cang Li

#167663

Overall Influence

#10206

Sandra Van Vlierberghe

#167664

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

#10207

John D. Kubiatowicz

#167688

Overall Influence

#10208

Gustavo Barja

#167690

Overall Influence

#10209

Jeffrey L. Curtis

#167698

Overall Influence

#10210

Vijayan Sugumaran

#167715

Overall Influence

#10211

Felix Stickel

#167717

Overall Influence

#10212

Fabrizio De Ponti

#167721

Overall Influence

#10213

Subbu S. Venkatraman

#167738

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

#10214

Nicholas Graves

#167743

Overall Influence

#10215

Jonathan Cummings Levy

#167750

Overall Influence

#10216

Thomas Chesney

#103501

Overall Influence

Thomas Chesney is a British–Irish Professor of computational social science at Nottingham University Business School. Born in Northern Ireland, Chesney uses simulation to study economic behaviour such as the problem of modern slavery. He is also the coauthor of a widely used textbook, Principles of Business Information Systems.

#10217

Simon Penny

#66377

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Simon Graeme Penny is an Australian artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the fields of digital cultural practices, embodied interaction and interactive art. Early life Penny was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1955. Penny is the older brother of Benjamin Penny an academic specialising in religious and spiritual movements in modern and contemporary China. He attended Newington College before receiving an undergraduate diploma in Fine Art from the South Australian School of Art in 1979. He then went on to get his graduate degree form the Sydney College of the Arts in 1982 after which he b...

#10218

Jordi Cortadella

#165871

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Jordi Cortadella Fortuny is a Spanish computer scientist specializing in electronic design automation. He is a professor of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Cortadella was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2013. He was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to the design of asynchronous and elastic circuits.

#10219

Marcello Pelillo

#167787

Overall Influence

Marcello Pelillo from the University of Venice, Venezia Mestre, Italy was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to graph-theoretic and optimization-based approaches in pattern recognition and computer vision.

#10220

Kensaku Mori

#167798

Overall Influence

#10221

Jutta Treviranus

Jutta Treviranus

#90494

Overall Influence

Jutta Treviranus is a full Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. She is the director and founder of the Inclusive Design Research Centre and the Inclusive Design Institute .

#10222

Ian Michael

#58830

Overall Influence

1915 - 2014 (99 years)

Ian Lockie Michael was a British academic who was the founding Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi. Biography Ian Michael was born in Kelso in Scotland in 1915. After becoming the first Professor of Education at the University of Khartoum, Dr Michael was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malawi in 1964. In 1973 he became Deputy Director of the University of London Institute of Education before retiring in 1978.

#10223

Thomas Dean

#126703

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Thomas L. Dean is an American computer scientist known for his work in robot planning, probabilistic graphical models, and computational neuroscience. He was one of the first to introduce ideas from operations research and control theory to artificial intelligence. In particular, he introduced the idea of the anytime algorithm and was the first to apply the factored Markov decision process to robotics. He has authored several influential textbooks on artificial intelligence.

#10224

David G Beer

#167846

Overall Influence

#10225

Leila Takayama

#132950

Overall Influence

Leila A. Takayama is an associate professor of Human–computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has previously held positions at Google X and Willow Garage. She was elected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013.

#10226

Leah Findlater

#108533

Overall Influence

Leah K. Findlater is a Canadian-American computer scientist specializing in human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and computer accessibility. She is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington.

#10227

Carol Steen

#71818

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Carol Steen is an artist, writer and curator who lives and works in New York. She has had over 20 solo gallery exhibitions, her first solo exhibition in 1973 was at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and her work has been in over 50 group exhibitions including shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brookgreen Gardens Museum in South Carolina, the Cranbrook Museum in Michigan, and the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts. Steen's work has also been exhibited at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine, and Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

#10228

Drude Berntsen

#100022

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Drude Elisabeth Berntsen is a Norwegian computer scientist who was director of the Norwegian Computing Center from 1970 to 1990. It was unusual for a woman to hold such a high-ranking position at a time of male dominance in computing.

#10229

Edouard Bugnion

#149519

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Edouard "Ed" Bugnion is a Swiss computer science professor and the co-founder of VMware. Biography Bugnion was raised in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Bugnion graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from ETH Zurich in 1994 and a master's degree from Stanford University in 1996. He was one of the five founders of VMware in 1998 and was the chief architect until 2004. He had been a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University prior to co-founding VMware. While he was chief architect, VMware developed the secure desktop initiative also known as NetTop for the US National Security Agency.

#10230

Michael Pound

#77009

Overall Influence

Michael P. Pound is a researcher at the University of Nottingham. He is known for his work in the areas of bioimage analysis, computer vision, image recognition, computer security, and for his appearances on the video series Computerphile.

#10231

Bob Ross

#76834

Overall Influence

1942 - 1995 (53 years)

Robert Norman Ross was an American painter, art instructor, and television host. He was the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States, CBC in Canada, and similar channels in Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. Ross would subsequently become widely known through his posthumous internet presence.

#10232

Pablo Ferrari

#65572

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Pablo Augusto Ferrari is an Argentine mathematician, member of the Bernoulli Society, the Institute for Mathematical Statistics, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and the International Statistical Institute. He is also co-principal investigator at the Brazilian research center NeuroMat. Ferrari investigates probabilistic models of microscopic phenomena and macroscopic counterpart. He is the son of the contemporary conceptual artist León Ferrari.

#10233

Hiroaki Matsui

#168005

Overall Influence

#10234

Maury Van Vliet

#52655

Overall Influence

1913 - 2001 (88 years)

Maurice Lewis Van Vliet, was a USA-born Canadian academic who taught physical education and fitness. Born in Bellingham, Washington, the son of Frank D. and Nellie Van Vliet, he was raised in Monrovia, California. He played baseball and football at the University of Oregon where he received a B.Sc. in 1935. He received a Master of Science from the University of Oregon in 1940 and a Doctor of Education from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1951.

#10235

Xi Zhang

#90967

Overall Influence

Xi Zhang is a Full Professor and the Founding Director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to quality of service in mobile wireless networks. His research interests include statistical delay-bounded QoS provisioning for multimedia mobile wireless networks, edge computing, finite blocklength coding theory, in-network caching, and offloading over 5G mobile wireless networks.

#10236

Colin Bailey

#44644

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Colin F. Bailey is a researcher in structural engineering, who became the President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. Prior to that, Bailey was Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers and a member of the Institution of Fire Engineers.

#10237

James Claussen

#48796

Overall Influence

James Claussen is a contemporary American lithographer and abstract painter. His lithography is distinguished by the technique of drawing directly on the stone surface as a second drawing process. His paintings combine surrealism with abstraction.

#10238

David Blair

#168024

Overall Influence

#10239

Balu Sankaran

#44410

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Balu Sankaran was a professor, scientist and recipient of the Padma Shri and Padma Vibushan awards. He helped establish an artificial limbs manufacturing corporation and a rehabilitation institute. Biography Sankaran was born in Tamil Nadu on 4 September 1926. He graduated with a medical degree from Stanley Medical College in Chennai in 1948. He travelled to United States and England and received training from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center during 1951–1955 and Manchester Royal Infirmary in 1955.

#10240

Roselyn J. Eisenberg

#130909

Overall Influence

Roselyn J. Eisenberg is a professor at The University of Pennsylvania and a member of the University's School of Veterinary Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. The majority of Eisenberg's research is focused on the herpes simplex virus and the poxvirus and how they enter into susceptible cells. She also studies glycoproteins, vaccines, virology and microbiology.

#10241

Amalia Amaki

#94388

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Amalia K. Amaki is an African-American artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who recently resided in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa from 2007 to 2012.

#10242

Michael Kimmelman

Michael Kimmelman

#10542

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for The New York Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure and urban design. He has reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, most recently in 2018 for his series on climate change and global cities. In March 2014, he was awarded the Brendan Gill Prize for his "insightful candor and continuous scrutiny of New York's architectural environment" that is "journalism at its finest."

#10243

Aiichiro Nakano

#154573

Overall Influence

Aiichiro Nakano from the University of Southern California, was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Division of Computational Physics in 2009, for the development and implementation of scalable parallel and distributed algorithms for large-scale atomistic simulations to predict, visualize, and analyze reaction processes for novel nano-mechano-chemical phenomena encompassing diverse spatiotemporal scales.

#10244

Mansoor Khan

#168095

Overall Influence

#10245

KC Claffy

#113629

Overall Influence

Kimberly C. "KC" Claffy is director of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California, San Diego. In 2017 she was awarded the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award and inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019.

#10246

Martine Labbé

#94516

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Martine Labbé is a Belgian operations researcher known for her work on mathematical optimization, facility location, and road pricing. She is an honorary professor of graphs and mathematical optimization in the department of computer science at the Université libre de Bruxelles, editor-in-chief of the EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, and a former president of the Association of European Operational Research Societies .

#10247

Pheoris West

#148329

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Pheoris West was an African-American artist. He was an Associate Professor Emeritus Ohio State University College of the Arts, where he joined the faculty in 1976. Early life West was born in 1950 in Albany, New York. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University.

#10248

Yaakov Malkin

#50818

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Yaakov Malkin was a Polish-Israeli educator, literary critic, and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University. He was active in several institutions that deal with both cultural and Humanistic Judaism.

#10249

Charles Umlauf

#66743

Overall Influence

1911 - 1994 (83 years)

Charles Umlauf was an American sculptor and teacher who was born in South Haven, Michigan. His sculptures can be found in churches, numerous public institutions, outdoor locations, and museums, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as in many private collections. Umlauf received a number of accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Grant.

#10250

Ravindra Pandey

#168214

Overall Influence

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