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,
#1251
Jennifer Rexford
#19977
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer Rexford is an American computer scientist who is currently the Provost, Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research focuses on analysis of computer networks, and in particular network routing, performance measurement, and network management.
Go to Profile#1252
Lonnie D. Bentley
#11163
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Lonnie D. Bentley is an American computer scientist, and Professor and former Department Head of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University, known with Kevin C. Dittman and Jeffrey L. Whitten as co-author of the textbook Systems Analysis and Design Methods, which is now in its 7th edition.
Go to Profile#1253
Kenneth Steiglitz
#22417
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Kenneth Steiglitz is a Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He was born in Weehawken, New Jersey on January 30, 1939. He received his Doctor of Engineering Science from New York University in 1963. In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#1254
Roland Carl Backhouse
#24409
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Roland Carl Backhouse is a British computer scientist and mathematician. , he is Emeritus Professor of Computing Science at the University of Nottingham. Early life and education Backhouse was born and raised in the Thorntree district of Middlesbrough, an industrial town in the north-east of England. In 1959, he won a place at the then all-male Acklam Hall Grammar School before going on to Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1966. His doctorate was completed under the supervision of Jim Cunningham at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#1255
Greg Turk
#28029
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Greg Turk is an American-born researcher in the field of computer graphics and a professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology . His paper "Zippered polygon meshes from range images", concerning the reconstruction of surfaces from point data, brought the "Stanford bunny", a frequently used example object in computer graphics research, into the CGI lexicon. Turk actually purchased the original Stanford Bunny and performed the initial scans on it. He is also known for his work on simplification of surfaces, and on reaction–diffusion-based texture synthesis.
Go to Profile#1256
Thomas E. Anderson
#22480
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Thomas E. Anderson is an American computer scientist noted for his research on distributed computing, networking and operating systems. Biography Anderson received a B.A. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1983. He received a M.S. in computer science from University of Washington in 1989 and a Ph.D in computer science from University of Washington in 1991.
Go to Profile#1257
Soumitra Dutta
#8493
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Soumitra Dutta is an Indian academic, author and entrepreneur. He is the dean of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, having taken up the post from 1 June 2022. He was previously a professor of management, as well as the former Founding Dean, at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University in New York. He was dean of SC Johnson College of Business from 2012 to 2018. Before his appointment to Cornell, he was the Roland Berger professor of business and technology at INSEAD.
Go to Profile#1258
Alan Mackworth
#29789
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alan Mackworth is a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is known as "The Founding Father" of RoboCup. He is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence from 2001–2014.
Go to Profile#1259
Werner Dilger
#27046
Overall Influence
1942 - 2007 (65 years)
Werner Dilger was a German professor of computer science and held the chair for artificial intelligences at the Chemnitz. His last major area of research was the study of artificial immune systems.
Go to Profile#1260
Jennifer Tour Chayes
#12510
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jennifer Tour Chayes is dean of the college of computing, data science, and society at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley, she was a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012.
Go to Profile#1261
Victor Allis
#19239
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Louis Victor Allis is a Dutch computer scientist working in the artificial intelligence field. In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four, Qubic, and Gomoku. His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search. Proof-number search has seen further successful application in computer Go tactical search and many other games.
Go to Profile#1262
Roger S. Pressman
#22119
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Roger S. Pressman is an American software engineer, author and consultant, and President of R.S. Pressman & Associates. He is also Founder and Director of Engineering for EVANNEX, a company that sells parts and accessories for electric vehicles.
Go to Profile#1263
Nadim Kobeissi
#9744
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
Nadim Kobeissi is a French-Lebanese computer science researcher specialized in applied cryptography. He is the author of Cryptocat, an open-source encrypted web chat client. Kobeissi is also known for speaking publicly against Internet censorship and Internet surveillance.
Go to Profile#1264
Raffi Krikorian
#12975
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Raffi Krikorian is an Armenian-American technology executive, and the CTO of the Emerson Collective. He was the CTO of the Democratic National Committee, Head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, and the former VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter where he was in charge of infrastructure for all of Twitter up to August 2014. He is credited with leading the charge to improve the reliability of Twitter as well as the move from Ruby to the JVM. He currently also serves on the board of directors of the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan, Armenia.
Go to Profile#1265
Claus P. Schnorr
#15605
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Claus-Peter Schnorr is a German mathematician and cryptographer. Life He received his Ph.D. from the University of Saarbrücken in 1966, and his habilitation in 1970. Schnorr's contributions to cryptography include his study of Schnorr groups, which are used in the digital signature algorithm bearing his name. Besides this, Schnorr is known for his contributions to algorithmic information theory and for creating an approach to the definition of an algorithmically random sequence which is alternative to the concept of Martin-Löf randomness.
Go to Profile#1266
Fabrice Bellard
#19507
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Fabrice Bellard is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunications company, with Franck Spinelli.
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Emo Welzl
#17666
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Emmerich Welzl is a computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. He is a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Biography Welzl was born on 4 August 1958 in Linz, Austria. He studied at the Graz University of Technology receiving a Diplom in Applied Mathematics in 1981 and a doctorate in 1983 under the supervision of Hermann Maurer. Following postdoctoral studies at Leiden University, he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin in 1987 at age 28 and was the youngest professor in Germany. Since 1996 he has b...
Go to Profile#1268
Martin M. Wattenberg
#16229
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. He is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Go to Profile#1269
Dorit Aharonov
#14786
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dorit Aharonov is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. Aharonov was born in Washington and grew up in Haifa, the daughter of the mathematician Dov Aharonov and the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov.
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Richard O'Keefe
#21078
Overall Influence
Richard A. O'Keefe is a computer scientist best known for writing the influential 1990 book on Prolog programming, The Craft of Prolog. He was a lecturer and researcher at the department of computer science at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and concentrates on programming languages for logic programming and functional programming, including Prolog, Haskell, and Erlang.
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Ivan Bratko
#21647
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ivan Bratko is a Slovene computer scientist working as a D. Sc. Professor of Computer and Information Science at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana. Early life and education Bratko was born in Ljubljana in 1946. He earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, Master of Science in mechanical engineering, and PhD in computer science from the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#1272
Yanhong Annie Liu
#27515
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Yanhong Annie Liu is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at Stony Brook University where she works on new programming languages, software systems, algorithms, program design, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems, distributed computing systems, and computer security.
Go to Profile#1273
Hans Meuer
#19412
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Hans Meuer was a professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim, managing director of Prometeus GmbH and general chair of the International Supercomputing Conference. In 1986, he became co-founder and organizer of the first Mannheim Supercomputer Conference, which has been held annually but known as the International Supercomputing Conference since 2001.
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John Walker
#12444
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Walker is a computer programmer, author and co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk. He has more recently been recognized for his writing on his website Fourmilab. Early projects In 1974/1975, Walker wrote the ANIMAL software, which self-replicated on UNIVAC 1100 machines. It is considered one of the first computer viruses.
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Mark P. McCahill
#11176
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mark Perry McCahill is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He has developed and popularized a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, Uniform Resource Locators , and POPmail.
Go to Profile#1276
Robert Kleinberg
#21924
Overall Influence
Robert David Kleinberg is an American theoretical computer scientist and professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Early life Robert Kleinberg was one of the finalists at the 1989 Mathcounts. He was a member of the 1991 and 1992 USA teams in the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning a silver medal and a gold medal, respectively. He was also a Putnam Fellow in 1996.
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Eugene Wong
#16305
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Eugene Wong is a Chinese-American computer scientist and mathematician. Wong's career has spanned academia, university administration, government and the private sector. Together with Michael Stonebraker and a group of scientists at IBM, Wong is credited with pioneering database research in the 1970s from which software developed by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle descends. Wong retired in 1994, since then holding the title of Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley.
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Damien Hirst
#372
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Go to Profile#1279
Kira Radinsky
#29841
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Kira Radinsky is a Ukraine-born Israeli computer scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, specializing in predictive data mining. She gained recognition after being selected by the MIT Technology Review to the "35 Innovators Under 35" list. Her work was described in the popular press as predicting the first in 130 years outbreak of cholera in Cuba, based on the pattern identified by mining of 150 years of data from various sources: in poor countries, floods within a year after a drought often follow by a cholera outbreak.
Go to Profile#1280
Joseph M. Hellerstein
#29982
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Joseph M. Hellerstein is an American professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on database systems and computer networks. He co-founded Trifacta with Jeffrey Heer and Sean Kandel in 2012, which stemmed from their research project, Wrangler.
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Henry Lieberman
#30055
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Henry Lieberman is an American computer scientist at the MIT CSAIL in the fields of programming languages, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. He received the 2018 ACM Impact Award Intelligent User Interaction for work on mining affect from text and has been applied to the problem of prevention of cyberbullying. He has been a principal research scientist at the Media Lab and Director of the Software Agents Research group.
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Peter Flach
#13507
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Pieter Adriaan Flach is a Dutch computer scientist and a Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. He is author of the acclaimed Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data .
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Mark Crispin
#18643
Overall Influence
1956 - 2012 (56 years)
Mark Reed Crispin is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol , having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCss and was the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the MIX mail storage format.
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Simon Colton
#19994
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Simon Colton is an English computer scientist, currently working as Professor of Computational Creativity in the Game AI Research Group at Queen Mary University of London and in the Sensilab at Monash University, Australia.
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Alon Halevy
#24335
Overall Influence
Alon Yitzchack Halevy is an Israeli-American computer scientist and a leading researcher in the area of data integration. He was a research scientist at Google from 2005 to 2015, when he left to become head of Recruit Institute of Technology. He left Recruit in 2018 and joined Facebook AI in 2019. Until 2006, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1993.
Go to Profile#1286
Paul Justin Compton
#27245
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Compton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales . He was also the former Head of the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering. He is known for proposing "ripple-down rules".
Go to Profile#1287
Jeremy Gibbons
#25223
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jeremy Gibbons is a computer scientist and professor of computing at the University of Oxford. He serves as Deputy Director of the Software Engineering Programme in the Department of Computer Science, Governing Body Fellow at Kellogg College and Pro-Proctor of the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#1288
John E. Savage
#23189
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Edmund Savage is an American computer scientist and An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Brown University. At his retirement in 2019, Savage was one of the longest-serving faculty members in Brown's history.
Go to Profile#1289
Louis Hodes
#26759
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Louis Hodes was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and cancer researcher. Early life and computer science work Louis Hodes got his Bachelor of Science from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He got his Doctor of Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, under Hartley Rogers with a thesis on computability. With John McCarthy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he helped produce the earliest implementations of the programming language Lisp, and under Marvin Minsky he did early research on visual pattern recognition in Lisp. He is also credited by some...
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Raph Levien
#15566
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Raphael Linus Levien is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. From 2007 until 2018, and from 2021 onwards, he was employed at Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He also made a computer-assisted proof system similar to Metamath: Ghilbert. In April 2016, Levien announced a text editor made as a "20% Project" : Xi.
Go to Profile#1291
Russell Impagliazzo
#16823
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Russell Graham Impagliazzo is a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in computational complexity theory. Education Impagliazzo received a BA in mathematics from Wesleyan University. He obtained a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. His advisor was Manuel Blum. He joined the faculty of UCSD in 1989, having been a postdoc there from 1989 to 1991.
Go to Profile#1292
Elgar Fleisch
#21449
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Elgar Fleisch is an Austrian/Swiss Professor of Information and Technology Management at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen. Besides his academic career, Elgar Fleisch is also locally known as a singer, songwriter and musician. He is part of the duo Fleisch & Fleisch and has recorded nine albums together with his brother Gerald.
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Nathaniel Borenstein
#19044
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nathaniel S. Borenstein is an American computer scientist. He is one of the original designers of the MIME protocol for formatting multimedia Internet electronic mail and sent the first e-mail attachment.
Go to Profile#1294
Seinosuke Toda
#15347
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Seinosuke Toda is a computer scientist working at the Nihon University in Tokyo. Toda earned his Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1992, under the supervision of Kojiro Kobayashi. He was a recipient of the 1998 Gödel Prize for proving Toda's theorem in computational complexity theory, which states that every problem in the polynomial hierarchy has a polynomial-time Turing reduction to a counting problem.
Go to Profile#1295
Jan Peters
#24760
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Jan Peters is a German computer scientist. He is Professor of Intelligent Autonomous Systems at Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Peters is renowned for his research in machine learning and robotics.
Go to Profile#1296
Brian A. Barsky
#23249
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Brian A. Barsky is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, working in computer graphics and geometric modeling as well as in optometry and vision science. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Vision Science and an Affiliate Professor of Optometry. He is also a member of the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, an inter-campus program, between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.
Go to Profile#1297
Oscar Nierstrasz
#26487
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Oscar Marius Nierstrasz is a professor at the Computer Science Institute at the University of Berne, and a specialist in software engineering and programming languages. He is active in the field ofprogramming languages and mechanisms to support the flexible composition of high-level, component-based abstractions,tools and environments to support the understanding, analysis and transformation of software systems to more flexible, component-based designs,secure software engineering to understand the challenges current software systems face in terms of security and privacy, andrequirement engi...
Go to Profile#1298
Robert Watson
#29014
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Robert Nicholas Maxwell Watson is a FreeBSD developer, and founder of the TrustedBSD Project. He is currently employed as a Professor of Systems, Security, and Architecture in the Security Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
Go to Profile#1299
Jacques Pitrat
#21374
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Jacques Pitrat was one of the French symbolic artificial intelligence pioneers. He developed knowledge based systems, expert systems, and theorem proverss, and was a strong advocate of meta-knowledge based systems.
Go to Profile#1300
David G. Lowe
#31640
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David G. Lowe is a Canadian computer scientist working for Google as a senior research scientist. He was a former professor in the computer science department at the University of British Columbia and New York University.
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