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,
#10451
Lawrence Rinder
#76597
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lawrence R. Rinder is a contemporary art curator and museum director. He directed the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 2008 to 2020. Education Rinder received a B.A. in art from Reed College and an M.A. in art history from Hunter College. He has held teaching positions at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and Deep Springs College.
Go to Profile#10452
Robin Reid
#101290
Overall Influence
Robin S. Reid is an American environmental scientist who is a professor at Colorado State University. She led research activity at the International Livestock Research Institute, Kenya, for almost twenty years. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
Go to Profile#10453
Yiu Tong Chan
#170822
Overall Influence
Yiu Tong Chan is an electrical engineer at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. Chan was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for his contributions to the development of efficient localization and tracking algorithms.
Go to Profile#10454
Piyush Kumar Gupta
#170828
Overall Influence
#10455
Bissan Al-Lazikani
#108266
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Professor Bissan Al-Lazikani PhD FRSB MBCS is a data scientist and drug discoverer. She applies computational techniques to help solve critical bottlenecks in cancer drug discovery and development. Since 2021 she has been professor of genomic medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Go to Profile#10456
Salam Fayyad
#38631
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Salam Fayyad is a Jordanian-Palestinian politician, who served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and the finance minister. He was Finance Minister from June 2002 to November 2005 and from March 2007 to May 2012. Fayyad was Prime Minister between June 2007 and June 2013.
Go to Profile#10457
Judy Fierstein
#86031
Overall Influence
Judith Ellen Fierstein is a geologist and researcher employed by the U.S. Geological Survey . She is affiliated with the USGS California Volcano Observatory. Fierstein is a member and fellow of the Geological Society of America , having been nominated by Charles R. Bacon.
Go to Profile#10458
Delwyn Clark
#81106
Overall Influence
Delwyn N Clark is a New Zealand strategic management academic. She is a life member and past president of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management. Academic career After an undergraduate at the University of Auckland, Clark moved to the University of Waikato for a PhD thesis entitled 'The role of MS/OR in strategic management : a NZ/UK comparative evaluation' on management systems and operations research.
Go to Profile#10459
Edward T. Yu
#160662
Overall Influence
Edward T. Yu is an American physicist and engineer. Yu earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at Harvard University in 1986, then pursued doctoral studies in applied physics at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1991. Upon completing postdoctoral research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, he joined the University of California, San Diego faculty. Yu began his career at UCSD as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1996, then was promoted to a full professorship in 1998. In 2009, Yu moved to the University of Texas at Austin as Judson S.
Go to Profile#10460
Ganesan Venkatasubramanian
#23767
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ganesan Venkatasubramanian is an Indian psychiatrist and clinician-scientist who works as a professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore . His overarching research interest to learn the science that will facilitate a personalized approach to understand and treat severe mental disorders like schizophrenia. Venkatasubramanian is known for his studies in the fields of schizophrenia, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation , brain imaging, neuroimmunology, neurometabolism and several other areas of biological psychiatry. The Council of Scientifi...
Go to Profile#10461
Hatice Gunes
#147012
Overall Influence
Hatice Gunes is a Turkish computer scientist who is Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics at the University of Cambridge. Gunes leads the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Lab. Her research considers human robot interactions and the development of sophisticated technologies with emotional intelligence.
Go to Profile#10462
Mona Zaghloul
#156364
Overall Influence
Mona Elwakkad Zaghloul is an Egyptian-American electronics engineer known for her work in integrated circuits, neural networks, and CMOS-based microelectromechanical systems. She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science, where she directs the Institute of MEMS and VLSI Technologies.
Go to Profile#10463
Jasmine R. Marcelin
#70404
Overall Influence
Jasmine R. Marcelin is a Caribbean-American infectious disease physician and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center . Marcelin is also the Associate Medical Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program and as well as the Co-Director of Digital Innovation and Social Media Strategy at UNMC. Marcelin is dedicated to advancing diversity, inclusion, and equity in her communities and is a founding member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Inclusion, Diversity, Access & Equity Taskforce. Marcelin uses social media to ...
Go to Profile#10464
Theodore Raphan
#165396
Overall Influence
Theodore Raphan is an American neuroscientist. He is Broeklundian Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. and also a published author.
Go to Profile#10465
Hong Qian
#170881
Overall Influence
#10466
Patricia Lago
#169718
Overall Influence
Patricia Lago is an Italian computer scientist. She is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she leads the Software and Sustainability Research Group S2, which she established and has led since 2011. Her research interests are software engineering, software architecture and software sustainability.
Go to Profile#10467
Sanjeev Krishna
#150097
Overall Influence
Sanjeev Krishna, , is a British physician and parasitologist whose research focuses on affordable diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as COVID-19, malaria, Ebola, African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, and colorectal cancer. Krishna is Professor of Medicine and Molecular Parasitology at St George's, University of London and St George's Hospital.
Go to Profile#10468
Sean Scully
#10359
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sean Scully is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Moving from London to New York in 1975, Scully helped lead the transition from Minimalism to Emotional abstraction in painting, abandoning the reduced vocabulary of Minimalism in favor of a return to metaphor and spirituality in art.
Go to Profile#10469
Damon L. Smith
#171014
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#10470
Shabbir Ahmed
#171016
Overall Influence
#10471
Nurul Mustafa
#76074
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Nurul Mustafa was the Vice-Chancellor of Southern University, Bangladesh from Chittagong, Bangladesh and BGC Trust University, Chadanaish. He was professor of the Department of Physics and Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He died on 18 July 2021 in Chattagram.
Go to Profile#10472
Viliam Geffert
#137911
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Viliam Geffert is a Slovak theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to the computational complexity theory in sublogarithmic space and to the state complexity of two-way finite automata. He has also developed new in-place sorting algorithms. He is a professor and the head of the computer science department at the P. J. Šafárik University in Košice.
Go to Profile#10473
Timothy M. Pinkston
#148622
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Timothy M. Pinkston is an American computer engineer, researcher, educator and administrator whose work is focused in the area of computer architecture. He holds the George Pfleger Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Southern California . He also serves in an administrative role as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#10474
Steve Evans
#171064
Overall Influence
#10475
K.P. Brehmer
#132806
Overall Influence
1938 - 1997 (59 years)
Klaus Peter Brehmer , was a German painter, graphic artist and filmmaker. From 1971 to 1997 he was professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Most of his works can be considered as political art or the visualization of political trends.
Go to Profile#10476
Abu Bakar Salleh
#109875
Overall Influence
Abu Bakar bin Salleh is a scientist in enzyme and microbial technology at Universiti Putra Malaysia. He is a professor at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Science, Universiti Putra Malaysia. He is one of the Members of the Committee for the Setting up of Malaysian Citation Centre.
Go to Profile#10477
Robert Jacobsen
#25959
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Robert Julius Tommy Jacobsen was a Danish sculptor and painter. The Danish Robert Award is named in his honor. Biography Jacobsen was born in Copenhagen. He was self-taught as a sculptor. During World War I, he worked with Danish modernist artists such as Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen and Egill Jacobsen. They participated in the circle around the journal Helhesten and would later come to make up the COBRA-movement. Although Jacobsen had a connection with the CoBrA artists, but he never was a member of their group.
Go to Profile#10478
Barbara Rossi
#29891
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Barbara Rossi was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group that in the 1960s and 1970s turned to representational art. She first exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1969. She is known for meticulously rendered drawings and cartoonish paintings, as well as a personal vernacular. She worked primarily by making reverse paintings on plexiglass that reference lowbrow and outsider art.
Go to Profile#10479
Gene Reynolds
#77557
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Eugene Reynolds Blumenthal was an American screenwriter, director, producer, and actor. He was one of the developers and producers of the TV series M*A*S*H. Early life Reynolds was born on April 4, 1923, to Frank Eugene Blumenthal, a businessman and entrepreneur, and Maude Evelyn Blumenthal, a model, in Cleveland, Ohio. Reynolds initially was raised in Detroit, before the family relocated to Los Angeles in 1934.
Go to Profile#10480
Arne Halaas
#126871
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Arne Halaas is a Norwegian profiled Professor emeritus in computer technology and telematics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . Halaas was central in the development of the technology that led to Fast Search & Transfer ASA , which was later acquired by Microsoft for NOK 6.6 billion on April 24, 2008.
Go to Profile#10481
Ruth M. Davis
#82294
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Ruth Margaret Davis was an American computer scientist and civil servant who was associated with several major US government research projects. She served as deputy undersecretary of defense for research and advance technology, as assistant secretary of energy for resource applications, and as chair of The Aerospace Corporation.
Go to Profile#10482
Aaron Flint Jamison
#144939
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Aaron Flint Jamison is an American conceptual artist and associate professor in the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design. He works with various media including sculpture, publication, video, and performance.
Go to Profile#10483
Frederick Hammersley
#45135
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Frederick Hammersley was an American abstract painter. His participation in the 1959 Four Abstract Classicists exhibit secured his place in art history. Early years Frederick Hammersley was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His father, a Department of the Interior employee, moved the family to Blackfoot, Idaho and eventually to San Francisco, where the young Hammersley first took art lessons. His studies later took him back to Idaho, at Idaho State University in Pocatello from 1936 to 1938 and then to Los Angeles for the Chouinard Art Institute starting in 1940. There he studied everything from figure painting to lettering and his instructors included Rico Lebrun.
Go to Profile#10484
Owsei Temkin
#25260
Overall Influence
1902 - 2002 (100 years)
Owsei Temkin was William H. Welch Professor Emeritus of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He was a Russian-born, German-educated, American medical historian. After receiving his M.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1927, he moved to the United States in 1932 and became director of the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins in 1958. He became known as one of the world's foremost experts on the interaction of medicine and culture throughout history. During his academic career and retirement, he published hundreds of articles and a dozen books on the history of medicine.
Go to Profile#10485
Kumar Biradha
#102734
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Kumar Biradha is a researcher in the field of crystal engineering. He was born on 15 June 1968 in Relangi, Andhra Pradesh. He is a professor at the Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a member of Editorial Advisory board of Crystal Growth & Design, an American Chemical Society Journal.
Go to Profile#10486
Akira Yamaguchi
#171160
Overall Influence
#10487
Pablo Rodriguez
#156370
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Pablo Rodriguez is a Spanish computer scientist and researcher, who is best known for his research in the mid-2000s on peer-to-peer file sharing and user-generated content. After working for technology and communications companies AT&T and Microsoft Research, Rodriguez returned to Spain in 2006 to become the research director for telecommunications provider Telefónica. In 2010 took a position as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York.
Go to Profile#10488
Dana Frankfort
#140270
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Dana Frankfort is an artist based in Houston and a painting professor at University of Houston. Her work often engages with the history of abstract art and features bright colors, gestural brushwork, and text.
Go to Profile#10489
Diana Maynard
#125315
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Diana Maynard is a British computer scientist and computational linguist who works as a senior research fellow in the Natural Language Processing Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#10490
Hiroshi Kimura
#171219
Overall Influence
#10491
Ji Hyun Kim
#171244
Overall Influence
#10492
Joan Greenbaum
#138397
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joan Greenbaum is an American political economist, labor activist, and Professor Emerita at the CUNY Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College . She also taught and conducted research at Aarhus University , and the University of Oslo . Her numerous books and articles focus on participatory design of technology information systems, technology and workplace organization, and gender and technology.
Go to Profile#10493
Roberto Poljak
#150882
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Roberto Juan Poljak was an Argentine biophysicist and immunologist. Biography Poljak graduated in 1949 with a bachelor's degree from the Colegio Nacional de Quilmes and in 1954 with a master's degree from the Facultad de Ciencias Naturales of the University of Buenos Aires. In 1956 he received his doctoral degree from the National University of La Plata and married Mabel Amelia Iglesias . As a postdoc, he was from 1958 to 1960 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1960 to 1962 at the Royal Institution's Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory. Poljak was a biophysics professor from 1962 to 1981 at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#10494
Galip Tekin
#52703
Overall Influence
1958 - 2017 (59 years)
Galip Tekin was a Turkish comic book artist, cartoonist and screenwriter. He was known for his works in the fantasy and science fiction genres. His style is often compared to that of Jean "Mœbius" Giraud.
Go to Profile#10495
April Carter
#30411
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
April Carter was a British peace activist. She was a political lecturer at the universities of Lancaster, Somerville College, Oxford and Queensland, and was a Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute from 1985 to 1987. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies, Coventry University, and a 'senior editor' on the international editorial board for the International Encyclopedia of Peace to be published by Oxford University Press .
Go to Profile#10496
Yoshiko Wakabayashi
#104011
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Yoshiko Wakabayashi is a Brazilian computer scientist and applied mathematician whose research interests include combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, packing problems, and graph algorithms. She is a professor in the department of computer science and institute of mathematics and statistics at the University of São Paulo.
Go to Profile#10497
Visakan Kadirkamanathan
#95673
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Visakan Kadirkamanathan is a professor of Signal and Information Processing at the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is director of the Rolls-Royce supported University Technology Centre in Control, Monitoring and Systems Engineering and is a founding member of the University Centre for Signal Processing and Complex Systems. From April 2009 to August 2014, he was Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. He is known for his contribution to the field of statistical signal processing applied to system identification, signal estimation, and fault detection.
Go to Profile#10498
John Mitchell
#171287
Overall Influence
#10499
Charles Ray
#28737
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years."
Go to Profile#10500
Kumar Rupesinghe
#81655
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Kumar Rupesinghe was a Sri Lankan academic and activist involved in social issues, particularly human rights, development issues, processes of globalisation, conflict prevention/resolution, and conflict transformation in the light of peacekeeping and peacebuilding for a harmonious coexistence among all peoples in the world.
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