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,
#11801
Guy Doumeingts
#184211
Overall Influence
#11802
David J Elliott
#184219
Overall Influence
#11803
Suzan Pitt
#76334
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Suzan Pitt Kraning , known professionally as Suzan Pitt, was an American film animator and painter, whose surreal, psychological animated films and paintings have been acclaimed and exhibited worldwide.
Go to Profile#11804
Thomas Martin
#184222
Overall Influence
#11805
Rafael Soriano
#131689
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Rafael Soriano was a Cuban painter who lived in the United States. Biography Soriano was born on November 23, 1920, in Cidra, Matanzas Province, Cuba. He was studied at the San Alejandro Art Academy in Havana. During his studies, he met the critic José Gómez-Sicre and painters Víctor Manuel and Fidelio Ponce. With them he had a close friendship. He has started painting in 1940s, and soon became one of the primary practitioners of concrete art in Cuba and Latin America. In 1943, he became a professor. He left Cuba in 1962 and went to the United States with his wife, Milagros, and their daughter, Hortensia.
Go to Profile#11806
Robert L. Birmingham
#56104
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Robert L. Birmingham is an American academic and legal scholar, who specializes in admiralty law, federal courts, energy law, and law and philosophy. He is a professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He is best known for originating the theory of efficient breach of contract.
Go to Profile#11807
Martin Zenke
#74253
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Martin Zenke born August 7, 1953, in Korbach is a German biochemist, cell biologist, professor for cell biology and scientist, who is conducting research on stem cells and biomedical engineering. Biography Martin Zenke grew up in Korbach/Waldeck, Germany and finished school at Alte Landesschule in Korbach in 1972. He studied chemistry/biochemistry and medicine at Philipps-University, Marburg/Lahn, Germany and graduated in 1978 with a study on “The ribonucleotide reductase in synchronized cultures of Saccharomyces cerevisiae ”.
Go to Profile#11808
Jeff Watson
#178714
Overall Influence
1973 - 2020 (47 years)
Jeff Watson was a Canadian game designer, writer, and educator. His principal topics of interest were pervasive and environmental game design, creative process design, and participatory media. He served as an assistant professor of interactive media and games at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, was an associate faculty member with the USC Game Innovation Lab, and directed the Situation Lab.
Go to Profile#11809
Wei Shi
#184258
Overall Influence
#11810
Muqeem Khan
#134217
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Muqeem Khan Pride of Pakistan is the first Pakistani who started working in the Hollywood visual effects industry in 1996. He is an animator, artist, interaction designer, percussionist, filmmaker, academician, and a herbal physician - Hakim , As a student at National College of Arts , Muqeem developed passion for computer graphics nearly twenty-five years ago in his early student life by doing some compositions and screen credits in BASIC language on IBM XT, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers.
Go to Profile#11811
Elmer Lucille Allen
#54863
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Elmer Lucille Allen is a ceramic artist and chemist who graduated from Nazareth College in 1953. Both her father and brother were named Elmer and the family chose to name her Elmer Lucille. She became the first African-American chemist at Brown-Forman in 1966.
Go to Profile#11812
Hiroshi Saito
#184273
Overall Influence
#11813
Alberto Zanella
#184274
Overall Influence
#11814
Barry Luokkala
#112094
Overall Influence
Barry Luokkala is the Director of Undergraduate Physics Laboratories in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University and Program Director for the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences. Luokkala was the recipient of the MCS Teaching Award.
Go to Profile#11815
Kevin M Spencer
#184288
Overall Influence
#11816
Stephen P Roberts
#184300
Overall Influence
#11817
M. Alessandra Papa
#118216
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Maria Alessandra Papa is an Italian physicist specializing in the observation of gravitational waves. She is a professor of gravitational wave astronomy at Leibniz University Hannover, and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics . At the Max Planck Institute, she heads the Permanent Independent Research Group on Continuous Gravitational Waves; these are waves expected to be emitted continuously from rapidly rotating neutron stars, unlike the waves that have been detected from black hole and neutron star merger events. She also coordinates the use of the Einstein@Hom...
Go to Profile#11818
Hugh McGregor Ross
#180367
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Hugh McGregor Ross was an early pioneer in the history of British computing. He was employed by Ferranti from the mid-1960s, where he worked on the Pegasus thermionic valve computer. He was involved in the standardization of ASCII and ISO 646 and worked closely with Bob Bemer. ASCII was first known in Europe as the Bemer–Ross Code. He was also one of the four main designers of ISO 6937, with Peter Fenwick, Bernard Marti and Loek Zeckendorf. He was one of the principal architects of the Universal Character Set ISO/IEC 10646 when it was first conceived.
Go to Profile#11819
Dai Yongjiu
#169167
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dai Yongjiu is a Chinese meteorologist and professor at Sun Yat-sen University. Education Dai was born in Wugang, Hunan in November 1964. In 1987 he graduated from Jilin University, earning a bachelor's degree in mechanics. In 1995 he obtained his doctor's degree from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences . After graduation, he was a research associate there.
Go to Profile#11820
Sandra Ramos
#72336
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Sandra Ramos is a Cuban contemporary painter, printmaker, collagist, video and installation artist who explores nationality, gender, and identity in her work. She is known for works featuring her character of the Cuban Pioneer girl, who is composed of a self-portrait and an appropriated portion of an old illustration from 1895' L' illustration French magazine. Ramos currently lives in Miami, Florida, and serves as an artist in residence at Bakehouse Art Complex. Previously, she was a resident artist at The Foutain Head Art Studios. She is also a renowned curator in Cuba, and she won a nationa...
Go to Profile#11821
David Petrarca
#123085
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David Petrarca is an American director and producer of theatre, television and film. He was a director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago from 1988 until 2005. His work as a director includes HBO's Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Big Love, Hung, and True Blood as well as Marco Polo, Jessica Jones and numerous other projects for Netflix. Other recent projects include The Alienist and Warrior. He worked as an executive producer on Those Who Kill, ABC series Eli Stone and Drop Dead Diva.
Go to Profile#11822
Shelley Anna
#172654
Overall Influence
Shelley Lynn Anna is an American chemical engineer and experimental fluid dynamics researcher who studies droplets, multiphase flow, and the effects of surfactants in microfluidics, the rheology of extensional and interfacial flows, and microscale transport. She is a professor of chemical engineering and associate dean for faculty and graduate affairs and strategic initiatives in the Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#11823
Kim Beck
#106907
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Kim Beck is an American artist living and working in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Beck works in drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking and multimedia, focusing her attention on subjects that might otherwise be overlooked. She is especially known for her artist's books and public artworks dealing with the subject of landscape.
Go to Profile#11824
Anandaraj
#34010
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Anandaraj is an Indian actor. He has acted in villain roles in several Tamil films and has appeared in over a three hundred films in different languages including Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi.
Go to Profile#11825
David Siegel
#177451
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Mark Siegel is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He co-founded Two Sigma, where he currently serves as co-chairman. Siegel has written for Business Insider, The New York Times, Financial Times and similar publications on topics including machine learning, the future of work, and the impact of algorithms used by search and social media companies.
Go to Profile#11826
Jurgen Del-Favero
#101814
Overall Influence
Jurgen Del-Favero is a Belgian scientist working at the VIB Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Antwerp. His research is directed towards the identification of susceptibility genes for psychiatric disorders and tools for DNA sequence research. His research, in collaboration with the Swedish research group under the direction of Rolf Adolfsson, indicated that the TPH2 protein is involved in the development of depression and manic depression.
Go to Profile#11827
Swami Manohar
#176246
Overall Influence
Swami Manohar, otherwise known as Manohar Swaminathan, is a co-founder and the CEO of PicoPeta Simputers Pvt. Ltd. He completed his undergraduate program in Electronics and Communication Engineering in Government College of Technology, Coimbatore during which he was a part of a campus team that designed an Electronic Voting machine in the year 1981, which was actually the first designed in India. After obtaining his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University he was a faculty at the University of North Carolina for two years and then was at the Indian Institute of Science , Bangalore, between 1990 and 2005.
Go to Profile#11828
Conrad Marca-Relli
#43007
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris. New York School Abstract Expressionism, represented by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Marca-Relli and others became a leading art movement of the postwar era.
Go to Profile#11829
Sally Morgan
#14820
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Her works are on display in numerous private and public collections in Australia and around the world. Early life, education, and personal life Morgan was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1951 as the eldest of five children. She was raised by her mother Gladys and her maternal grandmother Daisy. Her mother, a member of the Bailgu people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, grew up in the Parkerville Children's Home as part of the Stolen Generations. Her father, William, a plumber by trade, died after a long-term battle with post-war experience post-traumatic stress disorder.
Go to Profile#11830
M Schulz
#184382
Overall Influence
#11831
Rebecca Sitsapesan
#168521
Overall Influence
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Rebecca Sitsapesan was a professor and cardiac pharmacologist known for her work on single channel recording, ryanodine receptors and TRIC proteins. She was Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2019, and Emeritus Professor from 2019 until her death in 2022.
Go to Profile#11832
Matthias Kohl
#177546
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Matthias Kohl is a German mathematician and statistician who is known for his contributions to the asymptotic theory of robustness and robust statistics. Kohl studied mathematics at the University of Bayreuth and earned his PhD in mathematics there, in 2005. His dissertation was entitled 'Numerical Contributions to the Asymptotic Theory of Robustness'.
Go to Profile#11833
Nikisha Jariwala
#182209
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Nikisha B. Jariwala is an Indian professor and computer science researcher known for her work in devising a computer model for converting Indian text into Braille. She is a Professor of Computer Science at Smt. Tanuben & Dr. Manubhai Trivedi College of Information Science.
Go to Profile#11834
Risa Horowitz
#174203
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Risa Horowitz is a Canadian visual and media artist. Her works have been exhibited across Canada and internationally. Her work has been shown at Canada House in London, England, and is included in its permanent collection. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Go to Profile#11835
Geoffrey Slaney
#100572
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Sir Geoffrey Slaney, was a British surgeon and academic, specialising in vascular and gastrointestinal surgery. He held the Barling Chair of Surgery at the University of Birmingham from 1971 to 1986, and was the President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England from 1982 to 1986.
Go to Profile#11836
Paul Simon
#184422
Overall Influence
#11837
Kip Fulbeck
#102827
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lawrence Keith "Kip" Fulbeck is an American artist, spoken word performer, filmmaker and author. Fulbeck's work explores identity politics. His mixed race ethnic background is English, Welsh, Irish and Cantonese. He is best known for his work addressing Hapa and multiracial identity and as the creator of The Hapa Project.
Go to Profile#11838
Carla Gannis
#41343
Overall Influence
Carla Gannis is an American transmedia artist based in New York and professor at the Pratt Institute in the Department of Digital Arts until 2019 when she joined New York University. Her works combine digital imagery with well-known works of art such as paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She received widespread attention in 2013 for her emoji version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Go to Profile#11839
Trenton Holliday
#177733
Overall Influence
Trenton Holliday is a paleoanthropologist who was involved in the discovery of Homo naledi, found in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa in 2015. Holliday, along with his team, analyzed the body size and proportions of the fossil.
Go to Profile#11840
Inga Berre
#86640
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Inga Berre is a Norwegian applied mathematician who studies numerical methods for the partial differential equations used to model fractured geothermal systems and porous media more generally. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Bergen, a scientific advisor to the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, and a leading researcher on geothermal energy in Norway.
Go to Profile#11841
Robert Karlsson
#184474
Overall Influence
#11842
James Bonk
#82169
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
James Frederick Bonk was an American university professor noted for eschewing a research career in favor of teaching introductory chemistry courses for over 50 years, primarily at Duke University. He did, however, also teach advanced and graduate courses, and wrote his own textbooks and laboratory manuals. His students fondly labeled his main chemistry class Bonkistry.
Go to Profile#11843
Yun Fu
#184515
Overall Influence
#11844
Tullio DeSantis
#81904
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Tullio Francesco DeSantis , also known as Tullio, is an American contemporary artist, writer, technologist, and teacher. His work is informed by ancient and contemporary philosophy, science, and the relationship between art and life.
Go to Profile#11845
Chandra Mohan Kumar
#97123
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Chandra Mohan Kumar is an ophthalmic anaesthetist. In 2010, he was named Britain's Top Doctor under the anesthesia category by The Times newspaper. He has done work on fasting guidelines, ophthalmic anaesthesia, elderly anaesthesia, local anaesthesia, endocrine anaesthesia, oral anesthesia, airway management.
Go to Profile#11846
Brigitte Fontaine
#45649
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Brigitte Fontaine, is a singer of avant-garde music. She has employed numerous unusual musical styles, melding rock and roll, folk, jazz, electronica, spoken word poetry, and world. She has collaborated with Stereolab, Michel Colombier, Jean-Claude Vannier, Areski Belkacem, Gotan Project, Sonic Youth, Antoine Duhamel, Grace Jones, Noir Désir, Archie Shepp, Arno, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. She is also a novelist, playwright, poet, and actress.
Go to Profile#11847
Parham Aarabi
#179783
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Parham Aarabi is a professor and entrepreneur from Toronto, Canada. Career Aarabi is a professor at University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Internet Video, Audio, and Image Search. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is the inventor of numerous patents and author of over 80 publications most of which focus on audio, image and video processing. His recent work has focused on new image processing techniques that detect faces and facial features, as well as new video search technologies for online video-sharing websites. He is the founder and CEO of ModiFace, a leading provider of Augmented Reality technology which was acquired in 2018 by L'Oreal.
Go to Profile#11848
James T. Linnemann
#161681
Overall Influence
James T. Linnemann is an American physicist. From Michigan State University, Linnemann was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after he was nominated by the Division of Particles and Fields in 2009, for original research in high energy physics and particle astrophysics through electronics and software applications, seminal contributions to the discoveries of the top quark and TeV gamma-ray sources, searches for supersymmetry, and applications of statistics.
Go to Profile#11849
Cristina G. Fernandes
#180321
Overall Influence
Cristina Gomes Fernandes is Professor of Computer Science at the University of São Paulo. Fernandes has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo , a MSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of São Paulo and a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology , the title of her thesis was Approximation Algorithms for Planar and Highly Connected Subgraphs.
Go to Profile#11850
Feng Peng
#184553
Overall Influence
