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,
#10401
Simone Fischer-Hübner
#94542
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Simone Fischer-Hübner is an expert on IT security and personal integrity and a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Karlstad University. Fischer-Hübner has been a member of the Cyber Security Council at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency since 2011. Moreover, she is the Swedish representative and vice chair of IFIP Technical Committee 11 on Information Security and Privacy, board member of the Swedish Forum för Dataskydd, advisory board member of PETS and NordSec, and coordinator of the Swedish IT Security Network for PhD Students .
Go to Profile#10402
Catherine Meadows
#73950
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Catherine Ann Meadows is an American cryptographer known for her development of tools for the formal verification and automated discovery of flaws in cryptographic protocols. She is a senior researcher in the Center for High Assurance Systems at the Naval Research Laboratory and the head of the laboratory's Formal Methods Section.
Go to Profile#10403
Rashid Hassan
#93832
Overall Influence
1953 - 2023 (70 years)
Rashid Mekki Hassan is the Professor and Director at the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He specialises in natural resource and environmental economics, agricultural economics, and optimisation and modelling of economic systems.
Go to Profile#10404
Ph. Lambin
#170240
Overall Influence
#10405
Eike Best
#120113
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eike Best is a German computer scientist, best known for his contributions to concurrency theory. Early life and education Eike Best was born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße. During his childhood, he lived in Argentina, Germany, and Turkey, where his father worked as high school teacher. Best received a high school diploma from the German School of Istanbul in 1969, a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe in 1974, and a PhD from Newcastle University in 1981 for a dissertation on semantics, verification, and design of concurrent programs, supervised by Peter Lauer and Brian Randell.
Go to Profile#10406
Bill Buchanan
#151311
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
William Johnston Buchanan OBE FBCS CEng PFHEA is a Scottish computer scientist. Buchanan is a professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He currently leads the Blockpass ID Lab and the Centre for Cybersecurity, IoT and Cyberphysical at Edinburgh Napier University. In 2017, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cyber security.
Go to Profile#10407
Alicia Alonso
#170267
Overall Influence
#10408
Amit Agrawal
#170282
Overall Influence
#10409
Vicky Goh
#89983
Overall Influence
Vicky Goh is a professor, chair of clinical cancer imaging, and head of cancer imaging department at the King's College London, England, United Kingdom. She joined King's College London in 2011. She is also a consultant radiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London.
Go to Profile#10410
Herbert Bos
#170311
Overall Influence
#10411
Michael D Smith
#170312
Overall Influence
#10412
Ian A. Nicholls
#49265
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ian Alan Nicholls is an educator and researcher in the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering and an academic leader. Since 2013 he has held the position of Dean of the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and is a Deputy Vice Chancellor of the university.
Go to Profile#10413
Jerzy Respondek
#121365
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jerzy Respondek is a Polish computer scientist and mathematician, professor at Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice. His research interests cover numerical methods and mathematical control theory. Respondek is best known for his works on special matrices and their applications in control theory.
Go to Profile#10414
Pan Liu
#170351
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#10415
David Ross
#121085
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Ross is an English actor who has worked in theatre, cinema and television. His best-known roles include playing the first Kryten and the second Talkie Toaster in science-fiction comedy Red Dwarf, Elgin Sparrowhawk in the BBC One sitcom The Green Green Grass, and as Mr. Sedley in a 1998 serial adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair.
Go to Profile#10416
Vivek Polshettiwar
#168308
Overall Influence
Vivek Vijayrao Polshettiwar is an Indian chemist who is a professor of chemistry at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He was awarded the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry prize for Green Chemistry in 2022. He was the winner of the prestigious Falling Walls Prize in the Physical Sciences category.
Go to Profile#10417
Don Heck
#65979
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Donald L. Heck was an American comics artist best known for co-creating the Marvel Comics characters Iron Man, the Wasp, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Wonder Man and for his long run penciling the Marvel superhero-team series The Avengers during the 1960s Silver Age of comic books.
Go to Profile#10418
Linda Kitson
#93646
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Linda Kitson is a British artist. She is best known for her work as an official war artist during the Falklands Conflict. Early life Kitson studied at St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where she specialised in illustration. She then taught at Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design the City and Guilds Art School and the Royal College of Art.
Go to Profile#10419
Yingjie Jay Guo
#92348
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yingjie Jay Guo is a research scientist and an technology innovator in Australia, specialising in antennas, wireless communications and sensing research. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and Fellow of IEEE. He is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of Global Big Data Technology Centre at the University of Technology Sydney, and the Technical Director of NSW Connectivity Innovation Network . He served as the Director of the Wireless Technologies Laboratory at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. He is a rec...
Go to Profile#10420
Jianjun Shi
#101656
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jianjun "Jan" Shi is a Chinese-born American engineer and the Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He also works at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for the "development of data fusion-based quality methods and their implementation in multistage manufacturing systems".
Go to Profile#10421
Mark d'Inverno
#144801
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mark d'Inverno is a British computer scientist, currently a professor of Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London, in east London, England. Biography d'Inverno studied for an MA in Mathematics and an MSc in Computation at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He was awarded a PhD from University College London in artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#10422
Skunder Boghossian
#49610
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian was an Ethiopian-Armenian painter and art teacher. He spent much of his life living and working in the United States. He was one of the first, and by far the most acclaimed, contemporary Black artists from the African continent to gain international attention.
Go to Profile#10423
Hamdan Dammag
#120865
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Hamdan Dammag , is a Yemeni computer scientist and a prize-winner novelist. He has several poetry and short stories publications. He is the son of Yemeni novelist Zayd Mutee' Dammaj. He is the editor-in-chief of Ghaiman, an Arabic literature journal, the vice president of the Yemen Center for Studies and Research and the Vice President of the International League for Peace and Human Rights - Geneva. He has several publications in computer science and literature. He received his Ph.D in computer science from the University of Reading in 2005. As part of his Ph.D., he introduced a new safety-...
Go to Profile#10424
Jim Mooney
#83603
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
James Noel Mooney was an American comics artist best known for his long tenure at DC Comics and as the signature artist of Supergirl, as well as a Marvel Comics inker and Spider-Man artist, both during what comics historians and fans call the Silver Age of Comic Books and what is known as the Bronze Age of Comic Books. He sometimes inked under the pseudonym Jay Noel.
Go to Profile#10425
Judy Baca
#27324
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Judith Francisca Baca is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which was the largest known communal mural project in the world as of 2018.
Go to Profile#10426
Kayhan Erciyeş
#129166
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Prof. Dr. Kayhan Erciyeş is a Turkish computer engineer, educator and author. Between 2009 and 2016, he was the rector of İzmir University. Biography After receiving the Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Manchester , Kayhan Erciyeş completed the Master of Science degree in Electronic Engineering at the University of Salford and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Engineering at Ege University and at the University of Edinburgh .
Go to Profile#10427
Catherine D'Ignazio
#131993
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Catherine D'Ignazio is an American professor, artist, and software developer who focuses on feminism and data literacy. She is the director of the Data + Feminism lab at MIT. D'Ignazio is best known for her hackathons, such as "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck", and for her book Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein.
Go to Profile#10428
Dede Rosyada
#24467
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Dede Rosyada is a Muslim academic and intellectual from Indonesia. He has been rector of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta since 2015. Position Rector, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, 2015–2019Director of Islamic Higher Education, Ministry of Religious Affairs , 2011–2014Acting Rector, IAIN Sulthan Thaha Saefudin Jambi, 2011
Go to Profile#10429
Wei Shi
#170561
Overall Influence
#10430
George Woodman
#63438
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
George Edgar Woodman was an American ceramicist, painter, and photographer. Biography Woodman went to Harvard University and married Betty Woodman in 1953. After earning a master's degree in painting at the University of New Mexico, he taught painting and art criticism at the University of Colorado at Boulder until 1996. The Woodmans moved to New York in 1980 and had a second home in Italy, where they spent their summers.
Go to Profile#10431
Peter H. Smith
#18104
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Hopkinson Smith is a scholar of Latin American history, politics, economics, and diplomacy. He is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and the Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies at University of California in San Diego. He previously served as a professor of history and Department chairman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and as professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#10432
Eric Aboagye
#127121
Overall Influence
Eric Ofori Aboagye is a Professor of Cancer Pharmacology and Molecular Imaging at Imperial College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and was awarded the British Institute of Radiology Sir Mackenzie Davidson Medal in 2009. He is co-director of the Imperial College London Experimental Cancer Medicine's Centre.
Go to Profile#10433
Abdul Aziz al-Harbi
#77294
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Abdul Aziz bin Ali al-Harbi is a Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar and associate professor at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca. He is one of the founders and the current president of the Arabic Language Academy in Mecca.
Go to Profile#10434
Lana Yarosh
#156935
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Svetlana “Lana” Yarosh is an associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering at University of Minnesota. She is a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and recipient of the McKnight Presidential Fellowship. Yarosh does research as part of the GroupLens Research group.
Go to Profile#10435
Thomas Berger
#170689
Overall Influence
#10436
Arvind Mohan Kayastha
#39685
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Arvind Mohan Kayastha is an Indian Biologist in the field of plant biochemistry and enzyme technology. He is a Professor at School of Biotechnology, Banaras Hindu University and was coordinator of School of Biotechnology. He is a fellow of National Academy of Sciences, India, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and National Academy of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#10437
Linda Pagli
#152225
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Linda Pagli is an Italian computer scientist specializing in computer networks and distributed algorithms. She is a professor at the University of Pisa, and a Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. She has also worked with UNESCO and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help spread expertise in computer science to developing countries.
Go to Profile#10438
Roger Craig
#170712
Overall Influence
#10439
Anne Truitt
#14298
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Anne Truitt , born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and the Jewish Museum in 1966. Unlike her contemporaries, she made her own sculptures by hand, eschewing industrial processes. Drawing from imagery from her past, her work also deals with the visual trace of memory and nostalgia. This is exemplified by a series of early sculptures resembling monumental segments of white picket fence.
Go to Profile#10440
Magnus Langseth
#159666
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Magnus Langseth is a Norwegian researcher. He is a professor at the Department of Structural Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. «His research is primarily related to impact and crashworthiness of aluminium and high-strength steel structures as well as lightweight ballistic protection. Included here is the development of test facilities for material testing at elevated rates of strain as well as facilities for impact and crashworthiness testing of components and structures.»
Go to Profile#10441
Judith Gersting
#98096
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Judith Lee MacKenzie Gersting is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and textbook author. She is a professor emerita of computer science at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.
Go to Profile#10442
Steven Z. Pavletic
#95865
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Steven Z. Pavletic is a Croatian-American physician and researcher in hematology and oncology known for his role in developing consensus guidelines for clinical trials in chronic Graft-versus-host disease .
Go to Profile#10443
Kevin Johnson
#48681
Overall Influence
Kevin R. Johnson is the Dean of the UC Davis School of Law . Before becoming a professor, he was a student at Harvard Law School where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, served as a clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked for law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe. Johnson joined the faculty at the UC Davis School of Law in 1989, was named Associate Dean in 1998, and the Dean in 2008. Of Mexican American ancestry, he is the first Latino to head a law school in the UC system.
Go to Profile#10444
Jamal Nassar
#69343
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jamal R. Nassar is Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, San Bernardino. He was born in Jerusalem, received a B.A. from Jacksonville University in 1972, a M.A. from the University of South Florida in 1974 and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1978. Afterwards, he joined the faculty at Illinois State University, where he served as chair of the Department of Politics and Government until accepting the post at CSUSB in 2007. His specialty is Middle Eastern politics.
Go to Profile#10445
James D. Wright
#170739
Overall Influence
#10446
James D. Brenton
#107792
Overall Influence
Professor James D Brenton is a clinician scientist and Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Professor of Ovarian Cancer Medicine in the Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge. He is an Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals, Ovarian Cancer Domain Lead for the 100,000 Genomes Project by Genomics England, and co-founder and Clinical Advisor to Inivata Ltd, a clinical cancer genomics company.
Go to Profile#10447
Xiao-Fan Wang
#75379
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Xiao-Fan Wang is a Chinese-American oncologist. He is the Donald and Elizabeth Cooke Professor of Cancer Research at Duke University School of Medicine. Biography Wang was born in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, China in 1955. His family moved to a village in Henan province in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, his mother was imprisoned by local government for "historical questions". Wang was raised by his paternal grandmother. Before graduating from primary school, he was assigned to work as a worker in a factory for 8 years. After resuming the college entrance examination, he entered Wuhan University, majoring in biochemistry, where he graduated in 1982.
Go to Profile#10448
Weiping Wu
#62965
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Weiping Wu is a China urban specialist and Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she directs the Urban Planning program. In January 2022, she was appointed interim dean and served until August. She became the Vice Provost for Academic Programs at Columbia in September 2023.
Go to Profile#10449
Sean M. Burke
#84820
Overall Influence
Sean Michael Burke is a Perl programmer, author, and linguist. He was a columnist for The Perl Journal from 1998 and has written several dozen Perl modules for CPAN, as well as books for O'Reilly Media.
Go to Profile#10450
Sharon Grace
#36646
Overall Influence
Sharon Grace is an American artist, currently a Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, who is known for initiating the use of many forms of electronic media based in audiovisual technology. Since 1970, Grace has worked with telecommunications as art, embedding interactive video and speech recognition in her work including video installation, electronic synthesis, interactive digital systems, and sculpture in stone and steel.
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