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).

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#12001

Steve Howard

#185606

Overall Influence

1961 - 2013 (52 years)

#12002

Nathan W. Hill

#168209

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Nathan Wayne Hill is an American historical linguist and Tibetologist specializing in languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, in particular Tibetic languages. He is Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies and director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He was previously reader in Tibetan and historical linguistics at SOAS, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and served as head of department from 2017 to 2019.

#12003

Alper Demir

#110301

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Alper Demir is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for his contributions to stochastic modeling and analysis of phase noise.

#12004

Jingming Xu

#162624

Overall Influence

Jingming "Jimmy" Xu is an engineer, currently the Charles C. Tillinghast '32 University Professor at Brown University and Chang-Jiang Chair in Physics at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, also having been the James Ham Chair in Optoelectronics and Nortel Professor of Emerging Technology at University of Toronto . He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, IEEE, American Physical Society and Institute of Physics.

#12005

Jan Anuszczyk

#153700

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jan Anuszczyk is a Polish scientist and professor working in the technical disciplines of electrical engineering and power engineering and transport. He has been head of the Transport and Energy Conversion Department at the Institute of Electrical Power Engineering at Lodz University of Technology since 2007.

#12006

Linda Threadgill

#168167

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Linda Threadgill is an American artist whose primary emphasis is metalsmithing. Her metal work is inspired by forms of nature and the interpretations she gleans from the intricate patterns it presents. She explores the foundation of nature to allude to nature and transform it into re-imagined, stylized plants forms.

#12007

Chris Doyle

#96034

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Chris Doyle is a multi-media artist who was born in Pennsylvania, in 1959. He is currently working and living in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico. In his animation-based practice, he explores aspiration and progress, his main goal is to question “the foundation of a culture consumed by striving.” Through his work, he seeks to depict a world anxious in the shadow of a looming apocalypse, where environmental disaster and social inequities continue with increasing prevalence and complexity. To further drive his focus of restoration and conservation, his work often features industrial r...

#12008

David Grove

#185662

Overall Influence

#12009

Peter Nichols

#63358

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Peter Richard Nichols was an English playwright, screenwriter, director and journalist. Life and career Born in Bristol, England, he was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and served his compulsory National Service as a clerk in Calcutta and later in the British Army's Combined Services Entertainment Unit in Singapore where he entertained the troops alongside John Schlesinger, Stanley Baxter, Peter Vaughan and Kenneth Williams, before going on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. He later claimed to have studied acting because there were no dedicated courses for playwrights.

#12010

Barbara Jayne Orser

#172807

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Barbara Jayne Orser is a Professor of Management in the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa where she teaches Entrepreneurship. Her research focuses on gender influences in the venture creation process.

#12011

Ernest Kurnow

#95394

Overall Influence

1912 - 2014 (102 years)

Ernest Kurnow was a professor at New York University. Early life Kurnow was born in 1912 in Brooklyn, New York and attended The City College of New York and New York University. He was featured in a 2009 The New York Times interview on his experience growing up during the Great Depression.

#12012

Colin Fox

#185668

Overall Influence

#12013

Natalie Munro

#118320

Overall Influence

Natalie Munro is an American anthropologist and professor, specializing in zooarchaeology, the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. She is known for her research on the critical transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, which took place between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago. Munro's work primarily focuses on early human communities in southwest Asia, particularly in Israel, Turkey, and Greece.

#12014

Larry Zox

#18872

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work.

#12015

Ian Bryant

#178626

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Ian Bryant is a British academic, engaged in promoting Trustworthy Software and Systems, and in Standardisation. Current roles Ian Bryant is currently known for several roles:Information and Cyber Protection Policy for both Governmental and Industrial domains, in the latter capacity acting as one of the UK Designated Security Authorities Promoting Trustworthy Software and Systems Standards Coherence, predominantly with the British Standards Institution and its international linked SDO As Adjunct and Visiting Faculty in Academia

#12016

Vishal Monga

#145147

Overall Influence

Vishal Monga is an Indian American electrical engineer, researcher and academic. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. Monga's research and educational activity lies in the area of optimization-based methods for computational imaging, image analysis and radar signal processing. He has published over 100 research papers and holds 45 patents. He is the author of the edited volume: Handbook of Convex Optimization Methods in Imaging Science.

#12017

Ebony Patterson

Ebony Patterson

#85837

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Ebony Grace Patterson is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created out of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. Her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.

#12018

Amalie Frischknecht

#181703

Overall Influence

Amalie L. Frischknecht is an American theoretical polymer physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for "her outstanding contributions to the theory of ionomers and nanocomposites including the development and application of density functional theory to polymers". Her research focuses on understanding the structure, phase behavior, and self-assembly of polymer systems, such as complex fluids polymer nanocomposites, lipid bilayer assemblies, and ionomers.

#12019

Marco Prado

#170399

Overall Influence

Marco Antonio Maximo Prado is a Brazilian/Canadian neuroscientist. He is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Neurochemistry of Dementia and Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Neurochemistry. Early life and education Prado was born and raised in Brazil. He earned his Bachelor of Pharmacy from the Fluminense Federal University and his Master of Science and PhD in biochemistry from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. While conducting his doctorate degree, Prado spent three years at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

#12020

Helmuth Orthner

#182860

Overall Influence

1941 - 2009 (68 years)

Helmuth F. "Helly" Orthner was a pioneering American scientist in the field of medical informatics. He was one of the founders of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care , which later grew into the American Medical Informatics Association. He was a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

#12021

Ed Rossbach

#136598

Overall Influence

1914 - 2002 (88 years)

Ed Rossbach was an American fiber artist. He earned a BA in Painting and Design at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1940, an MA in art education from Columbia University in New York City in 1941, and an MFA in ceramics and weaving from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1947.

#12022

Ioan-Iovitz Popescu

Ioan-Iovitz Popescu

#133189

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Ioan-Iovitz "Iovitzu" Popescu is a Romanian physicist and linguist, emeritus professor at University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, and member of the Romanian Academy. In the field of physics, he is best known for his work on gas discharges and plasma physics, as well as his collaborations with Denisa Popescu in laser spectroscopy. He also had pioneering contributions in the field of gamma-ray lasers with Carl B. Collins and Silviu Olariu.

#12023

Shekhar Bhansali

#172221

Overall Influence

Shekhar Bhansali is the division director in Electrical, Communication and Cyber Systems at the National Science Foundation. He also serves as an Alcatel-Lucent Professor and Distinguished University Professor in the Florida International University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Bhansali’s main research interests are in nanotechnology, biosensors, and microfluidics. He holds 40 patents, has published over 300 publications, and has advised more than 40 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows in research. He was elevated to a Fellow of the IEEE in 2023.

#12024

Don Dixon

#72550

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Don Dixon is an American astronomical artist practicing space art in the tradition of Chesley Bonestell. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, Dixon has created cover art for Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Astronomy Magazine, and many other publications. Dixon's paintings have been used to illustrate the covers of several science fiction books, such as the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson and the Galactic Center Saga by Gregory Benford. He directed and co-wrote the immersive animated film Centered in the Universe, which premiered in 2006 ...

#12025

Andrew Wood Wilkinson

Andrew Wood Wilkinson

#136118

Overall Influence

1914 - 1995 (81 years)

Andrew Wood Wilkinson was a British paediatrician of Scottish extraction and the first Professor of Paediatric Surgery in the UK. Life Wilkinson took his early primary education at his local school, before being sent to Weymouth College public school. Wilkinson then attended University of Edinburgh Medical School, graduating MB, ChB with first class honours in 1937 and winning the Pattison prize in clinical surgery. Wilkinson remained in Edinburgh until 1949, taking several surgical posts, including a position at Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh. In 1940 he became a Fellow of the ...

#12026

Deane Terrell

#92367

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Richard Deane Terrell is an Australian econometrician and vigneron, was a Rhodes scholar and Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University . Terrell's other positions, affiliations, and interests are diverse and numerous.

#12027

Thomas Kelly

#185762

Overall Influence

#12028

Tsou Tang

#34497

Overall Influence

1918 - 1999 (81 years)

Tsou Tang was a China-born American political scientist, best known for his book America's Failure in China and studies of contemporary Chinese politics. He was on the faculty of University of Chicago from 1959 until his retirement in 1988.

#12029

Chunyang Hu

#125044

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Chunyang Hu is a professor at the Fudan University in China. She is nationally known for her research and writing on interpersonal communication, discourse analysis applied in communication. Chunyang Hu has also done research and published books on discourse analysis, mobile communication and interpersonal interaction, and textbook on Interpersonal Communication. She translated the Sage Handbook of Interpersonal Communication from English into Chinese. She developed the course on interpersonal communication on Fudan campus. .

#12030

Cecilia Vicuña

#124685

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and artist based in New York and Santiago, Chile. Her work is noted for themes of language, memory, dissolution, extinction and exile. Critics also note the relevance of her work to the politics of ecological destruction, cultural homogenization, and economic disparity, particularly the way in which such phenomena disenfranchise the already powerless. Her commitment to feminist forms and methodologies is considered to be a unifying theme across her diverse body of work, among which her fibre art quipus, knotted or unknotted strings, palabrarmas and precarios, made from natural, delicate materials, stand out.

#12031

Maurice F. Neufeld

#98436

Overall Influence

1910 - 2003 (93 years)

Professor Maurice Frank Neufeld was an American academic, author, union organizer and Army officer. He was born to immigrant parents in the District of Columbia on October 27, 1910. He was educated at the Webster School and Central High School in the District and subsequently enrolled at George Washington University and, a year later, in Alexander Meiklejohn's University of Wisconsin Experimental College. Neufeld earned the BA and MA degrees in American history there by 1932, and his PhD in 1935.

#12032

David McClure

#96070

Overall Influence

1926 - 1998 (72 years)

David McClure RSA RSW was a Scottish artist and lecturer. He is most well known for his paintings of still lifes, interiors, figures and family portraits as well as his landscape and townscape paintings of Scotland, Italy, Sicily and Spain where he lived and travelled throughout his life.

#12033

Guy Bloch

#180873

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Guy Bloch is an Israeli scientist. He is a professor at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the evolution and the molecular and physiological basis of social behavior and sociality in bees.

#12034

Kamil Ozerk

#152145

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kamil Ozerk is a Norwegian-Turkish Cypriot educator and professor of pedagogy at the University of Oslo. Publications Ozerk's published works include: English Curtin, Alicia; Cahill, Kevin; O`Sullivan, Dan & Øzerk, Kamil . Assessment in Practice: Explorations in Identity, Culture, Policy and Inclusion. Routledge. . 166 s.Øzerk, Kamil . Prevalence of Autism/ASD Among Preschool and School-age Children in Norway. Contemporary School Psychology. . 24, s 419- 428 . Fulltekst i vitenarkiv.Øzerk, Kamil & Ringereide, Hans Otto . A New Approach to Vocational Teacher Training -A Norwegian Innovative Experience.

#12035

Jim Aparo

#88473

Overall Influence

1932 - 2005 (73 years)

James N. Aparo was an American comic book artist, best known for his DC Comics work from the late 1960s through the 1990s, including on the characters Batman, Aquaman, and the Spectre, along with famous stories such as The Brave and the Bold, "A Death in the Family", and "KnightFall".

#12036

Lauren Fensterstock

#141709

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Lauren Fensterstock is an American artist, writer, curator, critic, and educator living and working in Portland, Maine. Fensterstock’s work has been widely shown nationally at venues such as the John Michael Kohler Art Center , the Bowdoin College Museum of Art , the Portland Museum of Art , and is held in public and private collections throughout the U.S, Europe, and Asia.

#12037

Charlie Wilson

#185866

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

#12038

Takahiro Tanaka

#185887

Overall Influence

#12039

Xiangyu Zhang

#185890

Overall Influence

#12040

David G. Goodman

#58396

Overall Influence

1946 - 2011 (65 years)

David G. Goodman was an American academic, author, editor and Japanologist. Career Goodman was a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He translated works by Sakae Kubo, Hideo Oguma, and Kunio Kishida.

#12041

Forbes Lipschitz

#170834

Overall Influence

Forbes Lipschitz is an academic who studies the role of design in making industrial farming ecologically and socially productive. She is an associate professor and at Ohio State University in the landscape architecture section of the Knowlton School of Architecture and founder of The Working Landscapes Lab.

#12042

William Robertson

#185921

Overall Influence

#12043

Wei Bao

#185923

Overall Influence

#12044

Charles Kiesler

#72033

Overall Influence

1934 - 2002 (68 years)

Charles Adolphus Kiesler was an American educator, psychologist and university administrator. He served as chancellor and 19th chief executive officer of the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri. He was also the founding president of the American Psychological Society and elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Before becoming chancellor at the University of Missouri he was provost at Vanderbilt University and dean of the Carnegie Mellon University College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Kiesler was born in St. Louis, Missouri and held degrees from Michigan State University and Stanford University.

#12045

Amir-Hossein Aryanpour

#23856

Overall Influence

1925 - 2001 (76 years)

Amir-Hossein Aryanpour was an Iranian lexicographer, writer, translator, philosopher, sociologist, and literary figure. Aryanpour was an expert in western philosophy and Persian culture. Education He studied social sciences at the American University of Beirut, graduating in 1944. He later studied philosophy and social sciences at the University of Tehran and received his doctorate in 1951 in Princeton University. He was one of the students of Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, one of the most prominent figures in the history of Persian literature.

#12046

John Dehner

#66336

Overall Influence

1915 - 1992 (77 years)

John Dehner was an American stage, radio, film, and television actor. From the late 1930s to the late 1980s, he amassed a long list of performance credits, often in roles as sophisticated con men, shady authority figures, and other smooth-talking villains. His credits just in feature films, televised series, and in made-for-TV movies number almost 300 productions. Dehner worked extensively as a radio actor during the latter half of that medium's "golden age,” accumulating hundreds of additional credits on nationally broadcast series. His most notable starring role was as Paladin on the radi...

#12047

Helen Hastie

#181753

Overall Influence

Helen Hastie is the Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction and Multimodal interfaces. Hastie has undertaken projects such as AI personal assistants for remote robots, autonomous systems and spoken dialogue systems for sectors in defence and energy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

#12048

Jörundur Svavarsson

#119272

Overall Influence

Jörundur Svavarsson is a professor in marine biology at the University of Iceland. His fields of research are marine invertebrates, marine biodiversity and ecotoxicology. According to Web of Science Prof. Svavarsson has published 49 papers in peer-reviewed journals, with 13 or them being cited more than 11 times. He is currently the head of the department of Biology at University of Iceland.

#12049

Harald Schmidt

#185945

Overall Influence

#12050

John Ssebuwufu

#36286

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

John Pancras Mukasa Lubowa Ssebuwufu, commonly known as John Ssebuwufu is a Ugandan chemist, academic and administrator. He is a former chancellor of Kyambogo University, Uganda's second-largest public university serving between 2014-2022 having served for 2 terms. He was installed as chancellor on 19 February 2014, replacing Eric Tiyo Adriko, who had completed his two term tenure. The correct spelling of his last name is Ssebuwufu. However the literature contains many instances where the name is spelled with a single "s".

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