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,
#1101
Derek H. Sleeman
#20404
Overall Influence
Derek H. Sleeman is Emeritus Professor of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland , and Visiting Professor, in the School of Medicine and the University of Glasgow . He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , the British Computer Society , and the European AI Society .
Go to Profile#1102
Niels Ferguson
#13602
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Niels T. Ferguson is a Dutch cryptographer and consultant who currently works for Microsoft. He has worked with others, including Bruce Schneier, designing cryptographic algorithms, testing algorithms and protocols, and writing papers and books. Among the designs Ferguson has contributed to is the AES finalist block cipher algorithm Twofish as well as the stream cipher Helix and the Skein hash function.
Go to Profile#1103
Cicely Popplewell
#21628
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Cicely Mary Williams was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer. Early life and education Popplewell was born on 29October 1920 in Bramhall, Stockport, England. Her parents were Bessie and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire.
Go to Profile#1104
Dick Grune
#19670
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dick Grune is a Dutch computer scientist and university lecturer best known for inventing and developing the first version of the Concurrent Versions System . Grune was involved in the construction of Algol 68 compilers in the 1970s and the Amsterdam Compiler Kit in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#1105
Alexander L. Wolf
#18114
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alexander L. Wolf is an American computer scientist known for his research in software engineering, distributed systems, and computer networking. He is credited, along with his collaborators, with introducing the modern study of software architecture, content-based publish/subscribe messaging, content-based networking, automated process discovery, and the software deployment lifecycle. Wolf's 1985 Ph.D. dissertation developed language features for expressing a module's import/export specifications and the notion of multiple interfaces for a type, both of which are now common in modern compute...
Go to Profile#1106
Jim Kurose
#23836
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jim Kurose is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, USA. He received his B.A. degree from Wesleyan University and, in 1984, his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University . Kurose's main area of teaching is computer networking. He is a coauthor of the well-known textbook Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach.
Go to Profile#1107
David Maier
#17556
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Maier is the Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in the Department of Computer Science at Portland State University. Born in Eugene, OR, he has also been a computer science faculty member at the State University of New York at Stony Brook , Oregon Graduate Center , University of Wisconsin , Oregon Health & Science University and National University of Singapore . He holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University .
Go to Profile#1108
Austin Tate
#21847
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Austin Tate is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2019 he was Director of AIAI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#1109
Dragomir R. Radev
#19904
Overall Influence
1968 - 2023 (55 years)
Dragomir R. Radev was an American computer scientist who was a professor at Yale University, working on natural language processing and information retrieval. He also served as a University of Michigan computer science professor and Columbia University computer science adjunct professor, as well as a Member of the Advisory Board of Lawyaw.
Go to Profile#1110
Robert Calderbank
#10488
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert Calderbank is a professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics and director of the Information Initiative at Duke University. He received a BSc from Warwick University in 1975, an MSc from Oxford in 1976, and a PhD from Caltech in 1980, all in mathematics. He joined Bell Labs in 1980, and retired from AT&T Labs in 2003 as Vice President for Research and Internet and network systems. He then went to Princeton as a professor of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics, before moving to Duke in 2010 to become Dean of Natural S...
Go to Profile#1111
Carlo H. Séquin
#13838
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Carlo Heinrich Séquin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Séquin is recognized as one of the pioneers in processor design. Séquin has worked with computer graphics, geometric modelling, and on the development of computer-aided design tools for circuit designers. He was born in Zurich, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#1112
Edward Reingold
#12937
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Edward M. Reingold is a computer scientist active in the fields of algorithms, data structures, graph drawing, and calendrical calculations. In 1996 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#1113
Brian Moriarty
#15645
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Brian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer , Trinity , and Beyond Zork , as well as Loom for LucasArts. Career Prior to joining Infocom, Moriarty was a Technical Editor for the Atari 8-bit computer magazine ANALOG Computing. He wrote two text adventures for ANALOG: Adventure in the 5th Dimension and Crash Dive! . He also worked on Tachyon , an adaptation of Atari's Quantum arcade game, which was previewed but never published.
Go to Profile#1114
Ronald Baecker
#21733
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ronald Baecker is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto , and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He was the co-founder of the Dynamic Graphics Project , and the founder of the Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab at UofT. He was the founder of Canada's research network on collaboration technologies , a founding researcher of AGE-WELL, Canada's Technology and Agine research network, the founder of Springer Nature's Synthesis Lectures on Technology and Health, and the founder of computers-society.org.
Go to Profile#1115
Dexter Kozen
#15125
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dexter Campbell Kozen is an American theoretical computer scientist. He is Joseph Newton Pew, Jr. Professor in Engineering at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1974 and his PhD in computer science in 1977 from Cornell University, where he was advised by Juris Hartmanis. He advised numerous Ph.D. students.
Go to Profile#1116
Alan Mycroft
#20375
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Alan Mycroft is a professor at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, where he is also director of studies for computer science. Education Mycroft read mathematics at Cambridge then moved to Edinburgh where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree with a thesis on Abstract interpretation and optimising transformations for applicative programs supervised by Rod Burstall and Robin Milner.
Go to Profile#1117
Ivan Damgård
#16163
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ivan Bjerre Damgård is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. Academic background In 1983, he obtained a master's degree in mathematics at Aarhus University. He began his PhD studies in 1985 at the same university, and was for a period a guest researcher at CWI in Amsterdam in 1987. He earned his PhD degree in May, 1988, with the thesis Ubetinget beskyttelse i kryptografiske protokoller and has been employed at Aarhus University ever since. Damgård became full professor in 2005.
Go to Profile#1118
Dileep George
#9572
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Dileep George is an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher. Career George received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2006 and was a visiting fellow at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1119
Jeffrey Heer
#26988
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Jeffrey Michael Heer is an American computer scientist best known for his work on information visualization and interactive data analysis. He is a professor of computer science & engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the UW Interactive Data Lab. He co-founded Trifacta with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel in 2012.
Go to Profile#1120
Igor Hawryszkiewycz
#19805
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Igor Titus Hawryszkiewycz is an American computer scientist, organizational theorist, and Professor at the School of Systems, Management and Leadership of the University of Technology, Sydney, known for his work in the field of database systems, systems analysis, and knowledge management.
Go to Profile#1121
Mitchell Wand
#20816
Overall Influence
Mitchell Wand is a computer science professor at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has centred on programming languages and he is a member of the Northeastern Programming Research Lab. He is also the co-author, with Daniel P. Friedman and Christopher T. Haynes, of Essentials of Programming Languages.
Go to Profile#1122
Santosh Vempala
#18896
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Santosh Vempala is a prominent computer scientist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main work has been in the area of Theoretical Computer Science.
Go to Profile#1123
Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder
#21946
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Monika Ann-Mari Eklund Löwinder , born 26 September 1957 in Stockholm, is a Swedish Internet expert. Biography She is the Chief Information Security Officer at IIS, The Internet Foundation in Sweden. She also serves on the boards of internet-related organisations including the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries and the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute.
Go to Profile#1124
Thomas N. Hibbard
#26909
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Thomas Nathaniel Hibbard was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Thomas N. Hibbard received the B.S. degree in physics from Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR, in 1951, the M.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1954, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1966.
Go to Profile#1125
Robert Dewar
#19801
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar was an American computer scientist and educator. He helped to develop programming languages and compilers and was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open-source software. He was a cofounder, CEO, and president of the AdaCore software company. He was also an enthusiastic amateur performer and musician, especially with the Village Light Opera Group in New York City.
Go to Profile#1126
Terence Parr
#19299
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Terence John Parr is a professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco. He is best known for his ANTLR parser generator and contributions to parsing theory. He also developed the StringTemplate engine for Java and other programming languages.
Go to Profile#1127
Peter Bernus
#13226
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Bernus is a Hungarian Australian scientist and Associate Professor of Enterprise Architecture at the School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
Go to Profile#1128
Arne Sølvberg
#19971
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arne Sølvberg is a Norwegian computer scientist, professor in computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and an expert in the field of information modelling.
Go to Profile#1129
Eric Bach
#22224
Overall Influence
Eric Bach is an American computer scientist who has made contributions to computational number theory. Bach completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and got his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984 under the supervision of Manuel Blum. He is currently a professor at the Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#1130
Tim Finin
#22018
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Timothy Wilking Finin is the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair in Engineering and is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County . His research has focused on the applications of artificial intelligence to problems in information systems and has included contributions to natural language processing, expert systems, the theory and applications of multiagent systems, the semantic web, and mobile computing.
Go to Profile#1131
Amit Sahai
#19011
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Amit Sahai is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities. Biography Amit Sahai was born in 1974 in Thousand Oaks, California, to parents who had immigrated from India. He received a B.A. in mathematics with a computer science minor from the University of California, Berkeley, summa cum laude, in 1996. At Berkeley, Sahai was named Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate of the Year, North America, and was a member of the three-person team that won first place in the 1996 ACM Interna...
Go to Profile#1132
Bob Fabry
#23370
Overall Influence
Robert Samuel Fabry, as a student at the University of Chicago worked on COMIT II and MADBUG, an interactive debugger for MAD both on CTSS. Later while a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, conceived of the idea of obtaining DARPA funding for a radically improved version of AT&T Unix and started the Computer Systems Research Group.
Go to Profile#1133
Ken Kennedy
#24203
Overall Influence
1945 - 2007 (62 years)
Ken Kennedy was an American computer scientist and professor at Rice University. He was the founding chairman of Rice's Computer Science Department. Kennedy directed the construction of several substantial software systems for programming parallel computers, including an automatic vectorizer for Fortran 77, an integrated scientific programming environment, compilers for Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran, and a compilation system for domain languages based on the numerical computing environment MATLAB.
Go to Profile#1134
Samarendra Kumar Mitra
#4802
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Samarendra Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist and mathematician. He designed, developed and constructed, in 1953-54, India's first computer at the Indian Statistical Institute , Calcutta . He began his career as a research physicist at the Palit Laboratory of Physics, Rajabazar Science College . In 1950, he joined the Indian Statistical Institute , Calcutta, an Institute of National importance, where he worked in various capacities such as professor, research professor and director.
Go to Profile#1135
Wolfgang Bibel
#14770
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leonhard Wolfgang Bibel is a German computer scientist, mathematician and Professor emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He was one of the founders of the research area of artificial intelligence in Germany and Europe and has been named as one of the ten most important researchers in German artificial intelligence history by the Gesellschaft für Informatik. Bibel established the necessary institutions, conferences and scientific journals and promoted the necessary research programs to establish the field of artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#1136
Jose Meseguer
#21060
Overall Influence
José Meseguer is a Spanish computer scientist, and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He leads the university's Formal Methods and Declarative Languages Laboratory. Career José Meseguer obtained his PhD in mathematics in 1975 with a thesis titled Primitive recursion in model categories under Michael Pfender at the University of Zaragoza, after which he did post-doctoral work at the University of Santiago de Compostela and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1980 he joined the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International, eventually becoming a Principal Scientist and Head of the Logic and Declarative Languages Group.
Go to Profile#1137
John Langford
#21416
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
John Langford is a computer scientist working in machine learning and learning theory, a field that he says, "is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool". He is well known for work on the Isomap embedding algorithm, CAPTCHA challenges, Cover Trees for nearest neighbor search, Contextual Bandits for reinforcement learning applications, and learning reductions.
Go to Profile#1138
Héctor García-Molina
#11834
Overall Influence
1954 - 2019 (65 years)
Héctor García-Molina was a Mexican-American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was the advisor to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 1993 to 1997 when Brin was a computer science student at Stanford.
Go to Profile#1139
Wei Chen And Kewei Liu
#32351
Overall Influence
#1140
Ken Birman
#28984
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Kenneth P. Birman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He currently holds the N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science. Education Birman received his B.S. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1141
Hadley Wickham
#17381
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit, PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Go to Profile#1142
Shimon Ullman
#12223
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Shimon Ullman is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Ullman's main research area is the study of vision processing by both humans and machines. Specifically, he focuses on object and facial recognition, and has made a number of key insights in this field, including with Christof Koch the idea of a visual saliency map in the mammalian visual system to regulate selective spatial attention.
Go to Profile#1143
John V. Tucker
#21774
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
John Vivian Tucker is a British computer scientist and expert on computability theory, also known as recursion theory. Computability theory is about what can and cannot be computed by people and machines. His work has focused on generalising the classical theory to deal with all forms of discrete/digital and continuous/analogue data; and on using the generalisations as formal methods for system design; based on abstract data types and on the interface between algorithms and physical equipment.
Go to Profile#1144
Tavis Ormandy
#15342
Overall Influence
Tavis Ormandy is an English computer security white hat hacker. He is currently employed by Google and was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team. Notable discoveries Ormandy is credited with discovering severe vulnerabilities in LibTIFF, Sophos' antivirus software and Microsoft Windows. With Natalie Silvanovich he discovered a severe vulnerability in FireEye products in 2015.
Go to Profile#1145
Hans Zantema
#22685
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Hans Zantema is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, and professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, known for his work on termination analysis. Biography Born in Goingarijp, The Netherlands, Zantema received his PhD in algebraic number theory in 1983 at the University of Amsterdam under supervision of Hendrik Lenstra Jr. for the thesis, entitled "Integer Valued Polynomials in Algebraic Number Theory."
Go to Profile#1146
Joëlle Pineau
#23022
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Joëlle Pineau is a Canadian computer scientist and associate professor at McGill University. She is the lead of Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research lab in Montreal, Quebec. Early life and education Pineau was born in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario. She played the viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. She eventually studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. She completed her postgraduate education in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. A chapter of Pineau's Masters thesis, Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs, has been published and cited almost 1,000 times.
Go to Profile#1147
Audrey Tang
#8293
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Audrey Tang Feng is a Taiwanese free software programmer and the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of China , who has been described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities". In August 2016, Tang was invited to join Taiwan's Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio, making her the first transgender person and the first non-binary official in the top executive cabinet. Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online." Tang is a community leader of Haskell and Perl and the core member of g0...
Go to Profile#1148
Jacob Appelbaum
#4673
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. Appelbaum studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity, until he stepped down from his position over sexual abuse allegations which surfaced in 2016. He was among several people to work with NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013. His journalistic work has been published in Der Spiegel and elsewhere. Appelbaum is also known for representing WikiLeaks. H...
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David Garlan
#17201
Overall Influence
David Garlan from the Carnegie Mellon University was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to software architecture.
Go to Profile#1150
Enid Mumford
#7364
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Enid Mumford was a British social scientist, computer scientist and Professor Emerita of Manchester University and a visiting fellow at Manchester Business School, largely known for her work on human factors and socio-technical systems.
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