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,
#1051
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
#16061
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates is a Chilean-Catalan-American computer scientist that currently is the Director of Research of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University in the Silicon Valley campus. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He is an expert member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee as well as IEEE's Ethics Committee.
Go to Profile#1052
William T. Freeman
#17262
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to computer vision.
Go to Profile#1053
Tracy Chou
#18463
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Tracy Chou is a software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Rocket Fuel, Google, and Facebook.
Go to Profile#1054
Susanne Bødker
#7780
Overall Influence
Susanne Bødker is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to human–computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and participatory design, including the introduction of activity theory to human–computer interaction. She is a professor of computer science at Aarhus University, and a member of the CHI Academy.
Go to Profile#1055
Rajkumar Buyya
#25000
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Rajkumar Buyya is an Indian born Australian academic. As of 2022, he is distinguished professor and director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne. He was made a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to cloud computing.
Go to Profile#1056
Jerry Saltzer
#15628
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer is an American computer scientist. Career Jerry Saltzer received an ScD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1966. His dissertation 'Traffic Control in a Multiplexed System was advised by Fernando Corbató. In 1966, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Go to Profile#1057
Michael Wooldridge
#24990
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Michael John Wooldridge is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. His main research interests is in multi-agent systems, and in particular, in the computational theory aspects of rational action in systems composed of multiple self-interested agents. His work is characterised by the use of techniques from computational logic, game theory, and social choice theory.
Go to Profile#1058
Peter Eades
#16977
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter D. Eades is an Australian computer scientist, an emeritus professor in the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney, known for his expertise in graph drawing. Eades received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Australian National University in 1974, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the same university in 1977 under the supervision of Jennifer Seberry. He then did postdoctoral studies at the University of Waterloo before taking an academic position at the University of Queensland, where he remained until 1991. He was a professor of computer science at the University of Newcastle from 1992 to 1999, and joined the University of Sydney faculty in 2000.
Go to Profile#1059
Lior Pachter
#5704
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Lior Samuel Pachter is a computational biologist. He works at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology. He has widely varied research interests including genomics, combinatorics, computational geometry, machine learning, scientific computing, and statistics.
Go to Profile#1060
James B. Saxe
#18447
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
James Benjamin Saxe is an American computer scientist who has worked for many years at the DEC Systems Research Center and its successors, the Compaq Systems Research Center and the Systems Research Center of HP Labs.
Go to Profile#1061
Daniel A. Keim
#28348
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Daniel A. Keim is a German computer scientist and full professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Munich in 1994. He has been assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Munich, and associate professor in the Computer Science department of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. Keim has also worked as a senior researcher at AT&T's Shannon Research Labs, Florham Park, NJ, USA.
Go to Profile#1062
Christophe Bisciglia
#22507
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Christophe Bisciglia is an American entrepreneur known for his work with big data and cloud computing. Known for helping to popularize the programming model MapReduce while working at Google, and in addition he co-founded Cloudera and WibiData.
Go to Profile#1063
Donna Cox
#14438
Overall Influence
Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications ; and Director, edream . She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#1064
Tim Roughgarden
#17486
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Timothy Avelin Roughgarden is an American computer scientist and a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Roughgarden's work deals primarily with game theoretic questions in computer science.
Go to Profile#1065
Lydia Kavraki
#14323
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.
Go to Profile#1066
Webb Miller
#15481
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Webb Colby Miller is an American bioinformatician who is professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. Education Miller attended Whitman College, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1969.
Go to Profile#1067
William Gasarch
#16383
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
William Ian Gasarch is an American computer scientist known for his work in computational complexity theory, computability theory, computational learning theory, and Ramsey theory. He is currently a professor at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science with an affiliate appointment in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1068
Richard Zemel
#25287
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Richard Stanley Zemel is a Canadian-American computer scientist and professor at Columbia University, Department of Computer Science, and a leading figure in the field of Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
Go to Profile#1069
Atul Butte
#5944
Overall Influence
Atul J. Butte is a biomedical informatics researcher and biotechnology entrepreneur. He is currently the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Since April 2015, Butte has serves as inaugural director of UCSF's Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
Go to Profile#1070
Herbert Edelsbrunner
#16627
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Herbert Edelsbrunner is a computer scientist working in the field of computational geometry, the Arts & Science Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University, Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria , and the co-founder of Geomagic, Inc. He was the first of only three computer scientists to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award.
Go to Profile#1071
Olga Russakovsky
#22146
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Olga Russakovsky is an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University. Her research investigates computer vision and machine learning. She was one of the leaders of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition challenge and has been recognised by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's top young innovators.
Go to Profile#1072
James Duncan Davidson
#21501
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
James Duncan Davidson is an American software developer and photographer. He's currently the Technology Advisor to Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems , Davidson created Tomcat, a Java-based webserver application and the Ant Java-based build tool. Davidson is the author or co-author of several books on both using and writing software, including Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Cocoa in a Nutshell, Running Mac OS X Panther, and Mac OS X Panther Hacks, all published by O’Reilly Media. He also contributed to Agile Web Development with Rails, published by Th...
Go to Profile#1073
Steven Salzberg
#4560
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.
Go to Profile#1074
W. Bruce Croft
#22733
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval. He is the founder of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and served as the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems from 1995 to 2002. He was also a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board from 2000 to 2003. Since 2015, he is the Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the UMass Amherst Compu...
Go to Profile#1075
Dan Klein
#20596
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Daniel Klein is an American computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#1076
Daniel D. McCracken
#20323
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Daniel D. McCracken was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming, with an emphasis on guides to programming in widely used languages such as Fortran and COBOL. His A Guide to Fortran Programming and its successors were the standard textbooks on that language for over two decades. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.
Go to Profile#1077
David May
#15078
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael David May FRS FREng is a British computer scientist. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and founder of XMOS Semiconductor, serving until February 2014 as the chief technology officer.
Go to Profile#1078
Ralph Griswold
#19351
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Ralph E. Griswold was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon.
Go to Profile#1079
Eric Hehner
#21651
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eric "Rick" C. R. Hehner is a Canadian computer scientist. He was born in Ottawa. He studied mathematics and physics at Carleton University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1969. He studied computer science at the University of Toronto, graduating with a Master of Science in 1970, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1974. He then joined the faculty there, becoming a full professor in 1983. He became the Bell University Chair in software engineering in 2001, and retired in 2012.
Go to Profile#1080
Joe Celko
#22478
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Joe Celko is an American relational database expert from Austin, Texas. He has participated on the ANSI X3H2 Database Standards Committee, and helped write the SQL-89 and SQL-92 standards. He is the author of a Morgan-Kaufmann series of books on SQL, and over 1200 published articles on SQL and other database topics. He had been a full-time statistician for several years.
Go to Profile#1081
Richard E. Pattis
#17281
Overall Influence
Richard Eric Pattis is an American professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, where he taught introductory programming and data structures.
Go to Profile#1082
Gul Agha
#13740
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Gul Agha is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and director of the Open Systems Laboratory. He is known for his work on the actor model of concurrent computation, and was also Editor-in-Chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 1999 to 2007. Agha was born and completed his early schooling in Sindh, Pakistan. Agha completed his B.S. with honors at the California Institute of Technology in the year 1977. He received his Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Science from the University of Michigan in 1986 under the supervision of John Holland. However, muc...
Go to Profile#1083
Paul Hudak
#16956
Overall Influence
1952 - 2015 (63 years)
Paul Raymond Hudak was an American musician and professor of computer science at Yale University who was best known for his involvement in the design of the programming language Haskell, and for several textbooks on Haskell and computer music. He was a chair of the department, and was also master of Saybrook College. He died on April 29, 2015, of leukemia.
Go to Profile#1084
Andrei Broder
#8984
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Andrei Zary Broder is a distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he was a research fellow and vice president of computational advertising for Yahoo!, and before that, the vice president of research for AltaVista. He has also worked for IBM Research as a distinguished engineer and was CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.
Go to Profile#1085
Anima Anandkumar
#18962
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Animashree Anandkumar is the Bren Professor of Computing at California Institute of Technology. She is a director of Machine Learning research at NVIDIA. Her research considers tensor-algebraic methods, deep learning and non-convex problems.
Go to Profile#1086
Uzi Vishkin
#22835
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Uzi Vishkin is a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies . Uzi Vishkin is known for his work in the field of parallel computing. In 1996, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, with the following citation: "One of the pioneers of parallel algorithms research, Dr. Vishkin's seminal contributions played a leading role in forming and shaping what thinking in parallel has come to mean in the fundamental theory ...
Go to Profile#1087
Robert Wilensky
#17958
Overall Influence
1951 - 2013 (62 years)
Robert Wilensky was an American computer scientist and emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, with his main focus of research in artificial intelligence. Academic career In 1971, Wilensky received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University, and in 1978, a Ph.D. in computer science from the same institution. After finishing his thesis, "Understanding Goal-Based Stories", Wilensky joined the faculty from the EECS Department of UC Berkeley. In 1986, he worked as the doctoral advisor of Peter Norvig, who then later published the standard textbook of the field:...
Go to Profile#1088
Charlie Brooker
#1534
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Charlton Brooker is an English writer, television presenter, producer and satirist. He is the creator and co-showrunner of the sci-fi drama anthology series Black Mirror, and has written for comedy series such as Brass Eye, The 11 O'Clock Show, and Nathan Barley.
Go to Profile#1089
Hiroshi Ishii
#12715
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Hiroshi Ishii is a Japanese computer scientist. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ishii pioneered the Tangible User Interface in the field of Human-computer interaction with the paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms", co-authored with his then PhD student Brygg Ullmer.
Go to Profile#1090
R. Kent Dybvig
#21757
Overall Influence
R. Kent Dybvig is a professor emeritus of computer science at Indiana University Bloomington, in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is the principal developer of the optimizing Chez Scheme compiler and runtime system which were initially released in 1985. Together with Daniel P. Friedman, he has long advocated the use of the Scheme language in teaching computer science. He retired from Indiana University to join Cisco in 2011.
Go to Profile#1091
Amos Fiat
#15035
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Amos Fiat is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in cryptography, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory. Biography Fiat earned his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Adi Shamir. After postdoctoral studies with Richard Karp and Manuel Blum at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Israel, taking a faculty position at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#1092
Bing Liu
#18400
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Bing Liu is a Chinese-American professor of computer science who specializes in data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. In 2002, he became a scholar at University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh . His PhD advisors were Austin Tate and Kenneth Williamson Currie, and his PhD thesis was titled Reinforcement Planning for Resource Allocation and Constraint Satisfaction.
Go to Profile#1093
Martha E. Pollack
#8743
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Martha Elizabeth Pollack is an American computer scientist who has served as the 14th president of Cornell University since April 2017. Previously, she served as the 14th provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of the University of Michigan from 2013 to 2017.
Go to Profile#1094
Günter Hotz
#11073
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Günter Hotz is a German pioneer of computer science. His work includes formal languages, digital circuits and computational complexity theory. In 1987, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. In 1999 he was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal of the Gesellschaft für Informatik.
Go to Profile#1095
Cristian S. Calude
#17726
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Cristian Sorin Calude is a Romanian-New Zealander mathematician and computer scientist. Biography After graduating from the Vasile Alecsandri National College in Galați, he studied at the University of Bucharest, where he was student of Grigore C. Moisil and Solomon Marcus. Calude received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest under the direction of Solomon Marcus in 1977.
Go to Profile#1096
Leslie P. Kaelbling
#20795
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision processes from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics. Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation. In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial I...
Go to Profile#1097
Rediet Abebe
#13873
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (33 years)
Rediet Abebe is an Ethiopian computer scientist working in algorithms and artificial intelligence. She is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.
Go to Profile#1098
Cal Newport
#17848
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Calvin C. Newport is an American nonfiction author and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Background and education Newport completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 2004 and received a Ph.D. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 under Nancy Lynch. He was a post-doctoral associate in the MIT computer science department from 2009-2011. His grandfather, John Newport, was a Baptist minister and theologian.
Go to Profile#1099
Adrian Farrel
#25929
Overall Influence
Adrian Farrel is a British engineer and author, specialising in developing computer network protocols for the Internet. He is active in the Internet Engineering Task Force. He was a founder of Aria Networks Ltd, who manufacture sophisticated, next-generation network modelling, path computation, and optimisation tools for MPLS, GMPLS, and IP networks, and served as their Chief Technology Officer for two years. He also runs a consulting company specialising in MPLS and GMPLS. Previously he was an MPLS architect and development manager at software house Data Connection Ltd., and director of protocol development for Movaz Networks Inc.
Go to Profile#1100
François Vernadat
#15410
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
François B. Vernadat is a French and Canadian computer scientist, who has contributed to Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Integration and Networking over the last 40 years specialising in Enterprise Architectures, business process modelling, information systems design and analysis, systems integration and interoperability and systems analysis using Petri nets.
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