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,
#10251
James Grant
#84345
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
James Edward Grant was an American painter and sculptor active from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Best known for his sculptural work in plastics, this work by no means defined him but was rather a natural endpoint of an exploration into increased dimensionality—starting from abstract canvases, moving through collages and bas-reliefs until the work finally came off the wall in sculptural form.
Go to Profile#10252
Paul Coldwell
#54702
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Paul V Coldwell is an English artist. Biography Born in Marylebone, London, he studied fine art at the West of England College of Art from 1972 to 1975 and then studied printmaking at postgraduate level at the Slade school of art 1975–77, where his teachers included Barto. Dos Santos and Stanley Jones. He was employed as research assistant at the Slade from 1978 to 1981.
Go to Profile#10253
Máire O'Neill
#140637
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Máire O'Neill is an Irish Professor of Information Security and inventor based at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies Queen's University Belfast. She was named the 2007 British Female Inventors & Innovators Network Female Inventor of the Year. She was the youngest person to be made a professor of engineering at Queen's University Belfast and youngest person to be inducted into the Irish Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#10254
Adam Jones
#15433
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction and other books in genocide studies. He is Executive Director of Gendercide Watch. He was chosen as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide" for the book of that name, which was published in 2010. He is also a published photographer, both in print and online under a Creative Commons license.
Go to Profile#10255
Babak Fahimi
#145235
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Babak Fahimi from the University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for "contributions to modeling and analysis of AC adjustable speed motor drives".
Go to Profile#10256
Sangeeta Mehta
#168295
Overall Influence
#10257
Jamal Malik
#7765
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jamal Malik is a Pakistani-born German professor of Islamic Studies and the chair of Religious Studies — Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Malik was born in 1956 in Peshawar, Pakistan. After finishing his MA in Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn , Jamal Malik received his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg , and completed his post-doctoral work at the University of Bamberg . In 1998, he was appointed head of Religious Studies at the University of Derby. Since 1999 he has been the Chair of Religious Studies — Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany.
Go to Profile#10258
Qi Tian
#168309
Overall Influence
#10259
Blaine Price
#152353
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Blaine Alexander Price is a professor of Computing at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Price was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He obtained his BSc in computing and information science from Queen's University in 1988 and his MSc in computer science from the University of Toronto in 1991.
Go to Profile#10260
Robert Raguso
#147922
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Robert A. Raguso is an American biologist and professor at Cornell University in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. He has expanded the field of chemical ecology by introducing and pioneering floral scent as a key component of plant-pollinator communication, with special focus on hawkmoths and Clarkia plants.
Go to Profile#10261
Chris Shaw
#168357
Overall Influence
#10262
Noel Lloyd
#52493
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
Noel Lloyd , FLSW was a Welsh academic, who served as Vice-Chancellor of Aberystwyth University from 2004 to his retirement in 2011. Biography Noel Lloyd began his academic career at the University of Cambridge, moving to Aberystwyth University in 1975 and subsequently becoming Professor of Mathematics, Dean of Science, Pro Vice-Chancellor and, from 1999 to 2004, Registrar and Secretary. He was awarded a CBE in the Birthday Honours List in 2010 for services to Higher Education in Wales. On his retirement in 2011, he was elected to the Learned Society of Wales. He was admitted as an Honorary M...
Go to Profile#10263
Susumu Koshimizu
#94647
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese sculptor and an installation artist. He is one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who became prominent in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mono-ha was the name given to a loosely associated group of artists whose work was stridently anti-modernist—consisting primarily of sculptures and installations that incorporated basic materials such as rocks, sand, wood, cotton, glass and metal, often in simple arrangements with minimal artistic intervention. From early on, Susumu Koshimizu's investigation of material and space resulted in some of Mono-ha's most definitive artworks.
Go to Profile#10264
Lee Shih-chiao
#50589
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Lee Shih-chiao was a Taiwanese painter. His art education and career began when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. Most of his paintings were realistic, but he also created some cubist works in his mid-life. He contributed significantly to art in Taiwan, as an artist and educator. The Lee Shih-chiao Museum of Art was established in 1992, three years before his death.
Go to Profile#10265
Lee Kyoung-jun
#28518
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Kyoung Jun Lee is a South Korean management professor. He is a professor of the School of Management at Kyung Hee University. He was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley from February to August 2010 and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from September 2009 to January 2010.
Go to Profile#10266
Vittorio Krogh
#168373
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#10267
Kim Cameron
#103620
Overall Influence
Kim Cameron was a Canadian computer scientist who was Microsoft's chief architect of access and worked since the emergence of the Internet to create a humanistic system of Digital Identity. He was the originator of the 7 Laws of Identity, and developed the InfoCard architecture.
Go to Profile#10268
Wei Guo
#168380
Overall Influence
#10269
Dick Giordano
#40237
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Richard Joseph Giordano was an American comics artist and editor whose career included introducing Charlton Comics' "Action Heroes" stable of superheroes and serving as executive editor of DC Comics.
Go to Profile#10270
Manuel Neri
#25400
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
Go to Profile#10271
Antonio Gambardella
#168417
Overall Influence
#10272
María-Esther Vidal
#72363
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
María-Esther Vidal Serodio is a Venezuelan professor at the Computer Science Department of the Simón Bolívar University since 2005 and dean assistant for research and development in applied science and engineering since 2011, on-leave since 2015. She currently leads the Semantic Web Group, which includes members from multiple fields such as databases, distributed systems and artificial intelligence, and whose research is focused on the solving problems from said fields.
Go to Profile#10273
Claudia Wiesemann
#35820
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Claudia Wiesemann is a German medical ethicist and medical historian. She is full professor and head of the Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at Göttingen University Medical Center. Being a member of the German Ethics Council since 2012, she was elected Deputy Chair in 2016.
Go to Profile#10274
Holland Cotter
#18954
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Holland Cotter is co-chief art critic with The New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, where he studied English literature under poet Robert Lowell and was an editor of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine. His first art course was an anthropology course on primitive art, which led to his first of many visits to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Go to Profile#10275
Pantur Silaban
#17482
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Pantur Silaban was an Indonesian physicist, regarded as one of the foremost in his profession in Indonesia, especially in the field of theoretical physics. He was also one of the earliest physicists from ASEAN countries who studied Einstein's general relativity theories in depth.
Go to Profile#10276
Chris Power
#168510
Overall Influence
#10277
Emily Mower Provost
#115980
Overall Influence
Emily Mower Provost is a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. She directs the Computational Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Professional history Provost received her B.S. in electrical engineering from Tufts University in 2004, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA in 2007 and 2010, respectively. After postdoctoral research in the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab at the University of Southern California, Provost joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the ...
Go to Profile#10278
Heidrun Schumann
#163553
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Heidrun Schumann is a German computer scientist specializing in data visualization. She is a professor emerita in the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Rostock. Education Schumann completed her doctorate at the University of Rostock in 1981. Her dissertation, Automatische Wegfindung von Rohrleitungen, was jointly supervised by Karl-Heinz Kutschke, Helmut Kiesewetter, , and K. Willnow. In 1989, she received her post-doctoral degree .
Go to Profile#10279
Michelangelo Pistoletto
#8744
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Go to Profile#10280
Panagiota Fatourou
#166329
Overall Influence
Panagiota Fatourou is a Greek computer scientist, specializing in distributed computing and concurrent computing, including the design of data structures that can be used in non-blocking algorithms. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Crete, the former chair of the ACM Europe Council, and the founder of the Greek chapter of the ACM Council on Women in Computing.
Go to Profile#10281
Michael A. Padlipsky
#137756
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
Michael A. Padlipsky, , known as MAP or Mike, was an early member of the working group that developed the ARPANET networking protocols that underpin today's Internet, and an internetworking polemicist.
Go to Profile#10282
Clarissa Tossin
#94987
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Clarissa Tossin is a visual artist from Brazil and based in Los Angeles. Her collaborative, research-based practice develops alternative narratives found in the built environment, using elements of installation, sculpture, and moving image to explore intersections of place, history, and aesthetics.
Go to Profile#10283
Vartkess Ara Apkarian
#79097
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Vartkess Ara Apkarian is a noted physical chemist and a Professor of Chemistry at The University of California, Irvine. He is the Director of Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit, a National Science Foundation Center for Chemical Innovation. He graduated from University of Southern California with B.S. degrees in Chemistry followed by Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Northwestern University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University, he joined the University of California as Chemistry faculty in 1983. He served as the Chair of the Chemistry Department at UC Irvine. He ...
Go to Profile#10284
Scott N. Keeney
#137235
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Scott Neal Keeney is an American molecular biologist. Early life and education Keeney was born on December 3, 1965, in Baltimore, Maryland. Growing up, he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and was allowed to use the laboratories at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health due to his mother's position as secretary in the Biochemistry Department. While attending Virginia Tech, Keeney came out as gay and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley for his PhD. After receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1993, Keeney decided to switch fields and change his focus from mammalian cells to yeast.
Go to Profile#10285
Thorsten Walles
#84173
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Thorsten Walles is a German general thoracic surgeon and professor at the University Hospital of Würzburg. He is known for his works in the field of trachea surgery and his research for early diagnosis of lung cancer.
Go to Profile#10286
Michael Orshansky
#155690
Overall Influence
Michael Orshansky is an American researcher in integrated circuit design, currently with University of Texas at Austin since 2003. He received his undergraduate education and Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley.
Go to Profile#10287
Jacques Zeelen
#45452
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
J.J.M. "Jacques" Zeelen is Professor of Lifelong Learning and Social Intervention in the Context of Globalisation at the Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen. Zeelen is also working as an associate professor at the department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of the same university. In 2016 Prof. Jacques Zeelen was appointed UNESCO Chair Lifelong Learning, Youth and Work, Gulu University Uganda.
Go to Profile#10288
Gary B. Fogel
#134364
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Gary Bryce Fogel is an American biologist and computer scientist. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Natural Selection, Inc. He is most known for his applications of computational intelligence and machine learning to bioinformatics, computational biology, and industrial optimization.
Go to Profile#10289
Ken Winters
#168039
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ken C. Winters is an American psychologist known for his research on addictive behaviors such as problem gambling. He is a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute , a consultant for the National American Indian & Alaska Native Addiction Technology Transfer Center, and a Research Associate Professor for the Office of Research and Economic Development at Florida International University. He previously served as a tenured professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, as a Senior Scientist with the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Treatment Research Institute, and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#10290
Venkata Padmanabhan
#139711
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Venkata Narayana Padmanabhan is a computer scientist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research India. He is known for his research in networked and mobile systems. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engine...
Go to Profile#10291
Richard W. Ziolkowski
#82251
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Richard W. Ziolkowski is an American electrical engineer and academician, who was the president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society , and a former vice president of this same society . In 2006, he became an OSA Fellow. He is also an IEEE Fellow. He was born on November 22, 1952, in Warsaw, New York.
Go to Profile#10292
Ole Didrik Lærum
#59455
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Ole Didrik Lærum was a Norwegian professor of medicine. Life and career Lærum was born in Bærum on 23 April 1940, as a son of physician Birger Lærum, Jr. and weaver Goro Lynne . He grew up in Vossevangen, and finished his secondary education there in 1959. He has been married twice.
Go to Profile#10293
Julian Schnabel
#24997
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving no...
Go to Profile#10294
Avner Magen
#153967
Overall Influence
1968 - 2010 (42 years)
Avner Magen was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto whose research focused on the theory of metric embeddings, discrete geometry and computational geometry. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2002, under the supervision of Nati Linial. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at NEC Research in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2000 until 2002. He joined the University of Toronto in 2002, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as an assistant professor in 2004. He was...
Go to Profile#10295
Ettore Perazzoli
#108672
Overall Influence
1974 - 2003 (29 years)
Ettore Perazzoli was an Italian free software developer. Biography Born in Milan, Italy, he studied Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano university. He wrote a port of x64, a Commodore 64 emulator for Unix, to DOS, thus turning it into a cross-platform emulator, which was renamed to VICE. He has been a maintainer of VICE for many years, and started the Microsoft Windows port, which is now the most popular version of VICE.
Go to Profile#10296
David P. Dobkin
#168896
Overall Influence
#10297
Max Price
#32985
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Max Price is a former vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He succeeded Njabulo Ndebele and held this position for 10 years from 19 August 2008 until 30 June 2018.
Go to Profile#10298
Babatunde Adetokunbo Sofoluwe
#72119
Overall Influence
1950 - 2012 (62 years)
Babatunde Adetokunbo Sofoluwe was a Nigerian professor of Computer science, educational administrator and former vice chancellor of the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He was appointed vice chancellor of the University of Lagos on 31 January 2010, to succeed professor Tolu Olukayode Odugbemi.
Go to Profile#10299
Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi
#101978
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sandra Mitchell Hedetniemi is an American mathematician and computer scientist, known for her research in graph theory and algorithms on graphs. She is a professor of computer science at Clemson University.
Go to Profile#10300
Robert Storr
#16838
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer. Early life and education Storr received his B.A. in History and French from Swarthmore College in 1972, and earned an M.F.A. in Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978.
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