Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#11951

Michael Lee Scott

#185314

Overall Influence

#11952

Richard Deacon

#19297

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Richard Deacon CBE is a British abstract sculptor, and a winner of the Turner Prize. Early life and education Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales and educated at Plymouth College. He then studied at the Somerset College of Art, Taunton, at St Martin's School of Art, London, and at the Royal College of Art, also in London. He left the Royal College in 1977, and went on to study part-time at the Chelsea School of Art. Deacon's first one-person show came in 1978 in Brixton.

#11953

Scott C. James

#185320

Overall Influence

#11954

Christian David

#185321

Overall Influence

#11955

Fokko du Cloux

#65746

Overall Influence

1954 - 2006 (52 years)

Fokko du Cloux was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist. He worked on the Atlas of Lie groups and representations until his death. Career in mathematics Du Cloux was based at the Institut Girard Desargues, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Villeurbanne, in France. One of the founding members of the project, he was responsible for building the Atlas software which was instrumental in the mapping of the structure of the E8 Lie group. Fokko du Cloux was diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2005, but he continued to actively participate in the project until his death from ALS....

#11956

Gladys Maestre

#148947

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Gladys Elena Maestre is a neuroscientist from Venezuela who is a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. She is known for her work on Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

#11957

Ralf Bender

#185358

Overall Influence

#11958

Emmanuel Halperin

Emmanuel Halperin

#111893

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Emmanuel Halperin is an Israeli journalist, television presenter, and editor. Likewise, a Lecturer, and a Theatre and Television Actor. Halperin is best known in Israel for his role as one of the main presenters of the nightly News program MeHayom LeMahar.

#11959

Lihuang Zhu

#185395

Overall Influence

#11960

Israel Schechter

#185397

Overall Influence

#11961

William B. Lawson

#80943

Overall Influence

William B. Lawson is an American professor, psychiatrist and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association . Early life Lawson grew up on a farm in West Point, Virginia. Education Lawson earned his PhD in psychology from the University of New Hampshire. He then went on to earn his medical degree from the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and finished a residency in adult psychiatry at Stanford University. He then finished a fellowship in psychopharmacology at the National Institute of Mental Health.

#11962

Young Ho Kim

#185399

Overall Influence

#11963

Lisa Hopp

#94989

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Hopp is Dean and Professor of nursing at Purdue University Northwest. She founded and directs the Indiana Center for Evidence-Based Nursing Practice: A Center of Excellence of The Joanna Briggs Institute.

#11964

Kermit Scott

#49510

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Theodore Kermit Scott Jr. was an American counselor and professor of philosophy. Scott was a childhood friend of Muppets creator Jim Henson who was incorrectly presumed to be the namesake of Kermit the Frog.

#11965

David Turner

#185408

Overall Influence

#11966

Srinivasan Ramakrishnan

#179005

Overall Influence

Srinivasan Ramakrishnan is a condensed matter physicist working on experimental ultra-low temperature research. He was the director and distinguished professor of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . Recently, he joined IISER Pune as a distinguished professor.

#11967

Marc Tasman

#130769

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Marc Tasman is an American Intermedia artist who works in a variety of media, including interactive art, performance art, video art, and photography. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies.

#11968

Victor Teterin

#66270

Overall Influence

1922 - 1991 (69 years)

Victor Kuzmich Teterin was a Russian painter, watercolorist, and art teacher, who lived and worked in Leningrad. He is regarded as one of the important representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.

#11969

Maya Kopitseva

#60008

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Maya Kuzminichna Kopitseva was a Soviet Russian still-life painter and an Honored Artist of the RSFSR who lived and worked in Leningrad - Saint Petersburg. She was a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, which before 1992 was the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of the Russian Federation, and was regarded as one of the major representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.

#11970

Sarah Cohen-Boulakia

#170390

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Sarah Cohen-Boulakia is a French computer scientist and data scientist known for her research on data provenance in science, and especially in bioinformatics. She is a professor of bioinformatics in the Laboratory for Computer Science of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Paris-Saclay University.

#11971

Peter E. Hildebrand

#72665

Overall Influence

Peter E. Hildebrand earned his PhD from Michigan State University in 1959 in Agricultural Economics. He joined the University of Florida faculty in 1979 and retired on July 1, 2003. During that time, he served as Director and Professor for IFAS International Programs, Agricultural Economics , and as a professor of Food and Resource Economics. Hildebrand's international background encompasses work in over 31 countries over 35 years.

#11972

Li Gong

#179905

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gong Li , also known in English as Li Gong, is a Chinese businessman and computer scientist. He currently serves as CEO of Linaro Ltd, a British software company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., developing systems software for the Arm ecosystem. He was previously the Founder and CEO of Acadine Technologies, a systems software company specializing in mobile operating systems for mobile, wearable, and IoT devices. Acadine’s core product H5OS was a web-centric operating system that was primarily based on the open web standard HTML5. It was derived from Firefox OS, whose development Li had overse...

#11973

Kerala J. Snyder

#128800

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Kerala Johnson Snyder is an American musicologist and educator. She is Professor Emerita of Musicology and Affiliate Faculty of Organ, Sacred Music and Historical Keyboards at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. She previously taught at Yale University.

#11974

Koert van Mensvoort

Koert van Mensvoort

#158167

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Koert van Mensvoort is an artist, philosopher and scientist best known for his work on the philosophical concept of Next Nature. Academic Van Mensvoort was the head of the Next Nature Lab at the Industrial Design Department of the Eindhoven University of Technology, a position he has held from 2003 until 2015. In 1997 Van Mensvoort received a Master of Science degree in computer science, specializing in computer graphics from the Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2000 he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. In 2008 he was Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

#11975

Klaas Wynne

#151439

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Klaas Wynne is a Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and chair of Chemical Physics. He was previously a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde .

#11976

Lev Levitin

#185460

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Lev B. Levitin is a Russian-American engineer currently a Distinguished Professor at Boston University and a Life Fellow of the IEEE. His current research interests include information theory, physical aspects of computation, complex systems and quantum measurement. He is known for the Margolus–Levitin theorem.

#11977

Rohit Khare

#168894

Overall Influence

Rohit Khare is an Indian American computer scientist and entrepreneur who has been active in many aspects of the development of the World Wide Web. He is the founder of Ångströ, the co-founder of KnowNow, a former director of CommerceNet Labs and a key player in the microformats community. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine and bachelor's degree from Caltech, both in Computer Science. He previously worked on Internet security for the W3C. He is active in the Representational State Transfer community, and in August 2007 wrote the ARRESTED paper on syndication-oriente...

#11978

Karim Ouazzane

#180693

Overall Influence

Professor Karim Ouazzane is a computer scientist and Professor of Computing and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Computing within the Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing at London Metropolitan University in London.

#11979

Gang Sun

#185480

Overall Influence

#11980

Ke Zhao

#18561

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Ke Zhao or Chao Ko was a Chinese mathematician born in Wenling, Taizhou, Zhejiang. Biography Ke graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933 and obtained his doctorate from the University of Manchester under Louis Mordell in 1937. His main fields of study were algebra, number theory and combinatorics. Some of his major contributions included his work on quadratic forms, the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem and his theorem on Catalan's conjecture. In 1955, he was one of the founding members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was later a professor at Sichuan University and became the president of the un...

#11981

Donald Read

#113227

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Donald Read was a British historian. He was emeritus Professor of Modern English History at the University of Kent and in 1988 was appointed to write the authorised history of Reuters. Read died in 2018 at the age of 88 in Blackpool.

#11982

Ludwig Wilding

#123415

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Ludwig Wilding was a German artist whose work is associated with Op art and Kinetic art. Wilding was born in Grünstadt, Germany. He studied at the University of Mainz Art School. Wilding's works are three-dimensional structures that create shifting patterns through their black and white designs. He has shown at the Museum Leverkusen , Zimmergallery, Frankfurt and Studio F, Ulm . His work was included in The Responsive Eye , Eyes, Lies, and Illusions and Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s . Ludwig Wilding lived in Westheim, Germany.

#11983

Eric Rhenman

#52473

Overall Influence

1932 - 1993 (61 years)

Eric Rhenman was a business professor at Stockholm School of Economics and Lund University in Sweden, and a guest professor at Harvard . He was named a Professor of Business Administration at Lund in 1967. He was offered a chair at Harvard, which he declined in order to focus on consulting at the Scandinavian Institutes of Administrative Research .

#11984

Senam Okudzeto

#135109

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Senam Okudzeto is an American and British artist and educator who lives and works in Basel, London, Ghana and New York City. Life and work Okudzeto was born in Chicago, to an American mother and Ghanaian father and grew up between London, Chicago and Lagos. She received a bachelor's degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1995 and a master's degree from the Royal College of Art in 1997. Okudzeto continued with post-graduate studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and earned a doctorate in the field of Humanities and Cultural Studies from th...

#11985

Richard J Martin

#185518

Overall Influence

#11986

Michael Hawley

#172478

Overall Influence

1961 - 2020 (59 years)

Michael Jerome Hawley was an American academic and artist working in the field of digital media. Previously at MIT’s Media Laboratory where he was a professor and held the Alexander W. Dreyfoos, Jr. endowed chair, Hawley was the founder or co-founder of several major research programs and projects including MIT's GO Expeditions program, Things That Think, Toys of Tomorrow, Counter Intelligence , and founder of the nonprofit organization Friendly Planet. He notably was the scientific director of the American Expedition on Mount Everest in 1998, one of the first major scientific expeditions on Everest.

#11987

Caroline Nevejan

#88314

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Caroline Irma Maria Nevejan is Chief Science Officer with the City of Amsterdam and professor by special appointment of Designing Urban Experience at the University of Amsterdam. She is responsible for research, science and knowledge development in Amsterdam. She is known as a Dutch internet pioneer.

#11988

Stacy Jo Scott

#170746

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Stacy Jo Scott is an American artist, art educator, curator, and writer based in Eugene, Oregon, who works in ceramics and digital fabrication. Early life and education Scott earned a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Oregon in 2010, and an MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012. Scott resided in Nottingham Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin from 2000 to 2003

#11989

Roger Dingledine

#185539

Overall Influence

#11990

Yuli Rudyak

#82062

Overall Influence

Yuli B. Rudyak is a professor of mathematics at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He obtained his doctorate from Moscow State University under the supervision of M. M. Postnikov. His main research interests are geometry and topology and symplectic topology.

#11991

Jane Skok

#155757

Overall Influence

Jane Skok is the Sandra and Edward H. Meyer Professor of Radiation Oncology at New York University. Biography Skok was born in Johannesburg. She earned a PhD at University College London in immunology and genetics. After completing her PhD, she left science to care for her two children, one of whom was chronically ill.

#11992

Fortunate Mafeta Phaka

#134388

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Fortunate Phaka is a South African environmental scientist, author, environmental television producer and science communicator. He is best known for research focused on herptiles, studying the relationship between biodiversity and people's cultural diversity, and writing South Africa's first comprehensive wildlife guide for frogs to be jointly published in an Indigenous language and English. His academic affiliations for postdoctoral research are with South Africa's North-West University and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, as well as Belgium's Hasselt University. Phaka ...

#11993

Allison Randal

#175065

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Allison Randal is a software developer and author. She was the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, a member of the board of directors for The Perl Foundation, a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2010 to 2012, and the chairman of the Parrot Foundation. She is also the lead developer of Punie, the port of Perl 1 to Parrot. She is co-author of Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and the Synopses of Perl 6. She was employed by O'Reilly Media. From August 2010 till February 2012, Randal was the Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical.

#11994

Donald E. Gibson

#88509

Overall Influence

Donald E. Gibson is an American academic administrator and author. He is a professor of management and marketing as well as the dean of the O'Malley School of Business at Manhattan College. Previously he was a dean of the Fairfield University Dolan School of Business and former executive director of the International Association for Conflict Management.

#11995

James Butler

#41693

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

James Walter Butler MBE RA was a British sculptor most famous for his 1980 statue of Richard III in Leicester. Butler was educated at Maidstone Grammar School and studied art at Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art. For ten years he was a professional stone carver. He taught sculpture and drawing at the City and Guilds of London Art School and was visiting professor to the Royal Academy Schools. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1964 and was a member of the Royal West of England Academy and fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors.

#11996

Bob Ross

#82083

Overall Influence

1934 - 2003 (69 years)

Bob Ross was the co-founder and former publisher of the Bay Area Reporter and a key gay rights and AIDS activist in San Francisco. For his lifetime work he was inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame for creating two of the "most well-respected and enduring LGBT publications in the country".

#11997

Jonathan D. Cohen

#185566

Overall Influence

#11998

Stephanie Cole

#61175

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Patricia Stephanie Cole is an English stage, television, radio and film actress, known for high-profile roles in shows such as Tenko , Open All Hours , A Bit of a Do , Waiting for God , Keeping Mum , Doc Martin , Cabin Pressure , Still Open All Hours , Man Down and as Sylvia Goodwin in ITV soap opera Coronation Street .

#11999

Lea McGee

#125639

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lea M. McGee, a professor emeritus of early literacy at Ohio State University, was the Marie Clay Chair of Reading Recovery and Early Literacy. Her research interests include alphabet learning, the role of fingerpoint reading in making the transition from emergent to conventional reading, and young children's responses to literature.

#12000

Heiko Pult

#169955

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Heiko Pult is a German research optometrist, specialising in research in dry eye, contact lenses, tear film and visual acuity. He is the CEO of Horst Riede GmbH in Weinheim, Germany, and also heads a research group, Dr Heiko Pult - Optometry and Vision Research, also based in Weinheim. He is also a lecturer and author of numerous papers, articles and books.

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