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,
#1151
Philip S. Abrams
#22971
Overall Influence
Philip S. Abrams is a computer science researcher who co-authored the first implementation of the programming language APL. APL In 1962, Kenneth E. Iverson published his book A Programming Language, describing a mathematical notation for describing array operations in mathematics. In 1965, Abrams and Lawrence M. Breed produced a compiler that translated expressions in Iverson's APL notation into IBM 7090 machine code. In the 1970s, he was vice president of development for Scientific Time Sharing Corporation , Inc.
Go to Profile#1152
Alex Biryukov
#16179
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alex Biryukov is a cryptographer, currently a full professor at the University of Luxembourg. His notable work includes the design of the stream cipher LEX, as well as the cryptanalysis of numerous cryptographic primitives. In 1998, he developed impossible differential cryptanalysis together with Eli Biham and Adi Shamir. In 1999, he developed the slide attack together with David Wagner. In 2009 he developed, together with Dmitry Khovratovich, the first cryptanalytic attack on full-round AES-192 and AES-256 that is faster than a brute-force attack. In 2015 he developed the Argon2 key derivation function with Daniel Dinu and Dmitry Khovratovich.
Go to Profile#1153
Larry Stockmeyer
#17501
Overall Influence
1948 - 2004 (56 years)
Larry Joseph Stockmeyer was an American computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of computational complexity theory, and he also worked in the field of distributed computing. He died of pancreatic cancer.
Go to Profile#1154
Alberto Ciaramella
#22623
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alberto Ciaramella is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at CSELT and Loquendo, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.
Go to Profile#1155
Matthias Ettrich
#22230
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Matthias Ettrich is a German computer scientist and founder of the KDE and LyX projects. Early life Ettrich was born in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany, and went to school in Beilstein while living with his parents in Oberstenfeld. He passed the Abitur in 1991. Ettrich studied for his MSc in Computer Science at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science at the University of Tübingen.
Go to Profile#1156
Richard Bornat
#24292
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Bornat , is a British author and researcher in the field of computer science. He is also professor of Computer programming at Middlesex University. Previously he was at Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#1157
Hans Dobbertin
#24381
Overall Influence
1952 - 2006 (54 years)
Hans Dobbertin was a German cryptographer who is best known for his work on cryptanalysis of the MD4, MD5, and original RIPEMD hash functions, and for his part in the design of the new version of the RIPEMD hash function. He was a member of the German Federal Office for Information Security and professor at the Ruhr University in Bochum.
Go to Profile#1158
Joseph Nechvatal
#5734
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joseph Nechvatal is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Life and work Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago. He studied fine art and philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Cornell University and Columbia University. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy of Art and Technology at the Planetary Collegium at University of Wales, Newport and has taught art theory and art history at the School of Visual Arts. He has had many solo exhibi...
Go to Profile#1159
Sargur Srihari
#16477
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Sargur Narasimhamurthy Srihari was an Indian and American computer scientist and educator who made contributions to the field of pattern recognition. The principal impact of his work has been in handwritten address reading systems and in computer forensics. He was a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA.
Go to Profile#1160
Douglas W. Jones
#18043
Overall Influence
Douglas W. Jones is an American computer scientist at the University of Iowa. His research focuses primarily on computer security, particularly electronic voting. Jones received a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and 1980 respectively.
Go to Profile#1161
P. J. Narayanan
#25571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
P. J. Narayanan is a professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, and the institute's current director since April 2013. He is known for his work in computer vision , computer graphics , and parallel computing on the GPU .
Go to Profile#1162
Michael M. Richter
#17356
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Michael M. Richter was a German mathematician and computer scientist. Richter is well known for his career in mathematical logic, in particular non-standard analysis, and in artificial intelligence, in particular in knowledge-based systems and case-based reasoning . He is worldwide known as pioneer in case-based reasoning.
Go to Profile#1163
Greg Nelson
#25426
Overall Influence
1953 - 2015 (62 years)
Charles Gregory Nelson was an American computer scientist. Biography Nelson grew up in Honolulu. As a boy he excelled at gymnastics and tennis. He attended the University Laboratory School. He received his B.A. degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1976. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1980 under the supervision of Robert Tarjan. He lived in Juneau, Alaska for a year before settling permanently in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Go to Profile#1164
David Culler
#20113
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
David Ethan Culler is a computer scientist and former chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a principal investigator in the Software Defined Buildings project at the EECS Department at Berkeley and the faculty director of the i4Energy Center. His research addresses networks of small, embedded wireless devices, planetary-scale internet services, parallel computer architecture, parallel programming languages, and high performance communication. This includes TinyOS, Berkeley Motes, PlanetLab, Networks of Worksta...
Go to Profile#1165
Mahadev Satyanarayanan
#19853
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mahadev "Satya" Satyanarayanan is an Indian experimental computer scientist, an ACM and IEEE fellow, and the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University . He is credited with many advances in edge computing, distributed systems, mobile computing, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things. His research focus is around performance, scalability, availability, and trust challenges in computing systems from the cloud to the mobile edge.
Go to Profile#1166
Anthony Oettinger
#15650
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Anthony "Tony" Gervin Oettinger was a German-born American linguist and computer scientist best known for his work on information resources policy. Oettinger coined the term “compunications” in the late 1970s to describe the combination of computer and telecommunications technologies that would take place as digital technologies replaced analog forms. In 1973 he co-founded, with John LeGates, the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University. He served as a consultant to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Security Council and NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program.
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David J. Brown
#17216
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David James Brown is an American computer scientist. He was one of a small group that helped to develop the system at Stanford University that later resulted in Sun Microsystems, and later was a co-founder of Silicon Graphics in 1982.
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Bill Roscoe
#23129
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Andrew William Roscoe is a Scottish computer scientist. He was Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford from 2003 to 2014, and is a Professor of Computer Science. He is also a Fellow of University College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#1169
Olivier Danvy
#26035
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Olivier Danvy is a French computer scientist specializing in programming languages, partial evaluation, and continuations. He is a professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Danvy received his PhD degree from the Université Paris VI in 1986. He is notable for the number of scientific papers which acknowledge his help. Writing in Nature, editor Declan Butler reports on an analysis of acknowledgments on nearly one third of a million scientific papers and reports that Danvy is "the most thanked person in computer science".
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Michael Loren Mauldin
#18428
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is an American retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language processing, autonomous information agents, information retrieval, and expert systems. He is also one of the authors of Rog-O-Matic and Julia, a Turing test competitor in the Loebner Prize.
Go to Profile#1171
James G. Nell
#18201
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
James G. "Jim" Nell is an American engineer. He was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology , and is known for his work on enterprise integration.
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Peter Weill
#14449
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Weill is an Australian computer scientist and organizational theorist, Professor of Information Systems Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and chairman of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research .
Go to Profile#1173
Tony Hey
#14596
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Professor Anthony John Grenville Hey was vice-president of Microsoft Research Connections, a division of Microsoft Research, until his departure in 2014. Education Hey was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and the University of Oxford. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in 1967, and a Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics in 1970 supervised by P. K. Kabir. He was a student of Worcester College, Oxford and St John's College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#1174
Horst Zuse
#14581
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Horst Zuse is a German computer scientist. Life Horst Zuse was born in 1945 as the son of the computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. He first studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and later on completed his PhD on software metrics. Horst Zuse worked as a Privatdozent at the Technical University of Berlin and was professor at the Hochschule Lausitz , University of Applied Sciences. Besides software engineering, he has concentrated on the history of computer science.
Go to Profile#1175
Paul Haeberli
#21478
Overall Influence
Paul E. Haeberli is an American computer graphics programmer and researcher. Biography Paul Haeberli studied for a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, United States.
Go to Profile#1176
Alain Fournier
#25026
Overall Influence
1943 - 2000 (57 years)
Alain Fournier was a computer graphics researcher. Biography Alain Fournier was born on November 5, 1943, in Lyon, France. He was married twice, first to Beverly Bickle and later to Adrienne Drobnies, with whom he had one daughter, Ariel.
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Henry Kautz
#25081
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Henry A. Kautz is a computer scientist, Founding Director of Institute for Data Science and Professor at University of Rochester. He is interested in knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, data science and pervasive computing.
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Mathai Joseph
#22752
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mathai Joseph is an Indian computer scientist and author. Early life and education Joseph studied for a BSc in physics at Wilson College and an MSc in the same subject at the University of Mumbai in 1964. He later studied for a Postgraduate Diploma in electronics at the Welsh College of Advanced Technology and then undertook a PhD in computing at Churchill College, Cambridge under the supervision of David Wheeler .
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Peter Gutmann
#14719
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Claus Gutmann is a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Auckland. His Ph.D. thesis and a book based on the thesis were about a cryptographic security architecture. He is interested in computer security issues, including security architecture, security usability , and hardware security; he has discovered several flaws in publicly released cryptosystems and protocolss. He is the developer of the cryptlib open source software security library and contributed to PGP version 2.
Go to Profile#1180
Les Hatton
#19310
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Les Hatton is a British-born computer scientist and mathematician most notable for his work on failures and vulnerabilities in software controlled systems. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge 1967–1970 and the University of Manchester where he received a Master of Science degree in electrostatic waves in relativistic plasma and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1973 for his work on computational fluid dynamics in tornadoes.
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Ken Robinson
#22101
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Kenneth Arthur Robinson was an Australian computer scientist. He has been called "The Father of Formal Methods in Australia". Early life and education Ken Robinson was born in 1938. He received his BE degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and a BSc degree in physics and mathematics in 1961, both from the University of Sydney.
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Steven Rudich
#17899
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Steven Rudich is a professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science. In 1994, he and Alexander Razborov proved that a large class of combinatorial arguments, dubbed natural proofs, was unlikely to answer many of the important problems in computational complexity theory. For this work, they were awarded the Gödel Prize in 2007. He also co-authored a paper demonstrating that all currently known NP-complete problems remain NP-complete even under AC0 or NC0 reductions.
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Stuart Haber
#14140
Overall Influence
Stuart Haber is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his contributions in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies and widely recognized as the co-inventor of the blockchain. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with W. Scott Stornetta, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.
Go to Profile#1184
Richard Fikes
#19452
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard Earl Fikes is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science department of Stanford University. He is professionally active as a consultant and expert witness. He led Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory from 1991 to 2006, and has held appointments at Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Xerox PARC, and SRI International.
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Jun'ichi Tsujii
#17791
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and text mining, particularly in the field of biology and bioinformatics. Education Tsujii received his Bachelor of Engineering, Master of Engineering and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Kyoto University in 1971, 1973, and 1978 respectively. He was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at Kyoto University, before accepting a position as Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1988. He was President of the Association for Computatio...
Go to Profile#1186
Rebecca Bace
#19676
Overall Influence
1955 - 2017 (62 years)
Rebecca "Becky" Gurley Bace was an American computer security expert and pioneer in intrusion detection. She spent 12 years at the US National Security Agency where she created the Computer Misuse and Anomaly Detection research program. She was known as the "den mother of computer security". She was also influential in the early stages of intelligence community venture capital and was a major player in Silicon Valley investments in cyber security technology.
Go to Profile#1187
Ramesh Raskar
#8739
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Ramesh Raskar is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor and head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group. Previously he worked as a senior research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories during 2002 to 2008. He holds 132 patents in computer vision, computational health, sensors and imaging. He received the $500K Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2016. The prize money will be used for launching REDX.io, a group platform for co-innovation in Artificial Intelligence. He is well known for inventing EyeNetra , EyeCatra and EyeSelfie , Femto-photography and h...
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Margaret Burnett
#20046
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Margaret M. Burnett is a computer scientist specializing in work at the intersection of human computer interaction and software engineering, and known for her pioneering work in visual programming languages, end-user software engineering, and gender-inclusive software. She is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University,, a member of the CHI Academy, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
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Matthew D. Green
#6255
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Matthew Daniel Green is an American cryptographer and security technologist. Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He specializes in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve crypto-systems, and satellite television piracy. He is a member of the teams that developed the Zerocoin anonymous cryptocurrency and Zerocash. He has also been influential in the development of the Zcash system. He has been involved in the groups that exposed vulnerabilities in RSA BSAFE, Speedpass and E-ZPass.
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Jasper Johns
#376
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art movements. Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He graduated as valedictorian from Edmunds High School in 1947 and briefly studied art at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York City and enrolling at Parsons School of Design. His education was interrupted by military service during the Korean War. After returning to New...
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Selmer Bringsjord
#12056
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Selmer Bringsjord is the chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He also holds an appointment in the Lally School of Management & Technology and teaches artificial Intelligence , formal logic, human and machine reasoning, and philosophy of AI.
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Donald Shell
#7746
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Donald L. Shell was an American computer scientist who designed the Shellsort sorting algorithm. He acquired his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati in 1959, and published the Shellsort algorithm in the Communications of the ACM in July that same year.
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Peter Schröder
#17861
Overall Influence
Peter Schröder is an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at California Institute of Technology. Schröder is known for his contributions to discrete differential geometry and digital geometry processing. He is also a world expert in the area of wavelet based methods for computer graphics. In 2015, Schröder was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to computer graphics and geometry processing.".
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Farouk Kamoun
#15096
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Farouk Kamoun is a Tunisian computer scientist and professor of computer science at the National School of Computer Sciences of Manouba University, Tunisia. He contributed in the late 1970s to significant research in the field of computer networking in relation with the first ARPANET network. He is also one of the pioneers of the development of the Internet in Tunisia in the early 1990s.
Go to Profile#1195
Pat Hayes
#14867
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Patrick John Hayes FAAAI is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. , he is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida.
Go to Profile#1196
Paul Viola
#23135
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Paul Viola is a computer vision researcher, and Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. He is a former MIT professor, and a former vice president of science for Amazon Air. He is best known for his seminal work in facial recognition and machine learning. He is the co-inventor of the Viola–Jones object detection framework along with Michael Jones. He won the Marr Prize in 2003 and the Helmholtz Prize from the International Conference on Computer Vision in 2013. He is the holder of at least 57 patents in the areas of advanced machine learning, web search, data mining, and image processing. He i...
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Edward M. McCreight
#25672
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Edward Meyers McCreight is an American computer scientist. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1969, advised by Albert R. Meyer. He co-invented the B-tree with Rudolf Bayer while at Boeing, and improved Weiner's algorithm to compute the suffix tree of a string. He also co-designed the Xerox Alto workstation, and, with Severo Ornstein, co-led the design and construction of the Xerox Dorado computer while at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He also worked at Adobe Systems.
Go to Profile#1198
Larry L. Peterson
#23236
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Larry L. Peterson is an American computer scientist, known primarily as the Director of the PlanetLab Consortium, co-author of the networking textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach," and for his research on the TCP Vegas congestion control algorithm and the x-kernel operating system.
Go to Profile#1199
Robert P. Goldberg
#22138
Overall Influence
2000 - 1994 (-6 years)
Robert P. Goldberg was an American computer scientist, known for his research on operating systems and virtualization. With Gerald J. Popek he proposed the Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements, a set of conditions necessary for a computer architecture to support system virtualization. In his Ph.D. thesis "Architectural Principles for Virtual Computer Systems" he also invented the classification for Hypervisors which is now widely adopted in the area of virtual computer systems and computer science in general.
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Tadao Kasami
#10901
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Tadao Kasami was a noted Japanese information theorist who made significant contributions to error correcting codes. He was the earliest to publish the key ideas for the CYK algorithm, separately discovered by Daniel Younger and John Cocke .
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