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,
#1301
Shlomo Moran
#14441
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Shlomo Moran is an Israeli computer scientist, the Bernard Elkin Chair in Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Moran received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the Technion, under the supervision of Azaria Paz; his dissertation was entitled "NP Optimization Problems and their Approximation".
Go to Profile#1302
Maxine D. Brown
#23182
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and retired director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago . Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the field of scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#1303
John Makepeace Bennett
#16764
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
John Makepeace Bennett was an early Australian computer scientist. He was Australia's first professor of computer science and the founding president of the Australian Computer Society. His pioneering career included work on early computers such as EDSAC, Ferranti Mark 1* and SILLIAC, and spreading the word about the use of computers through computing courses and computing associations.
Go to Profile#1304
Thorsten Altenkirch
#20756
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Thorsten Altenkirch is a German Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham known for his research on logic, type theory, and homotopy type theory. Altenkirch was part of the 2012/2013 special year on univalent foundations at the Institute for Advanced Study. At Nottingham he co-chairs the Functional Programming Laboratory with Graham Hutton.
Go to Profile#1305
Sally Shlaer
#19478
Overall Influence
1938 - 1998 (60 years)
Sally hashim Shlaer was an American mathematician, software engineer and methodologist, known as co-developer of the 1980s Shlaer–Mellor method for software development. Biography Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shlaer received a BS in Mathematics in 1960 from Stanford University and started a graduate study at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#1306
Radhika Nagpal
#8121
Overall Influence
Radhika Nagpal is an Indian-American computer scientist and researcher in the fields of self-organising computer systems, biologically-inspired robotics, and biological multi-agent systems. She is the Augustine Professor in Engineering in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science at Princeton University. Formerly, she was the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2017, Nagpal co-founded a robotics company under the name of Root Robotics. This educational company works to c...
Go to Profile#1307
Benjamin Mako Hill
#12455
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.
Go to Profile#1308
Andrei Voronkov
#25302
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Andrei Anatolievič Voronkov is a Professor of Formal methods in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Education Voronkov was educated at Novosibirsk State University, graduating with a PhD in 1987.
Go to Profile#1309
Mona Singh
#24799
Overall Influence
Mona Singh is a Professor of Computer Science in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Education Singh was educated at Indian Springs School, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was awarded a PhD in 1996 for research supervised by Ron Rivest and Bonnie Berger.
Go to Profile#1310
Carla Gomes
#17154
Overall Influence
Carla Pedro Gomes is a Portuguese-American computer scientist and professor at Cornell University. She is the founding Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability and is noted for her pioneering work in developing computational methods to address challenges in sustainability. She has conducted research in a variety of areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including constraint reasoning, mathematical optimization, and randomization techniques for exact search methods, algorithm selection, multi-agent systems, and game theory. Her work in computational sustainabil...
Go to Profile#1311
C. Mohan
#18053
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Chandrasekaran Mohan is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He was born on 3 August 1955 in Tamil Nadu, India. After growing up there and finishing his undergraduate studies in Chennai, he moved to the United States in 1977 for graduate studies, naturalizing in 2007. In June 2020, he retired from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center after working at IBM Research for 38.5 years. Currently, he is a visiting professor at China's Tsinghua University. He is also an Honorary Advisor at the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency in Chennai and an advisor at the Kerala Blockchain A...
Go to Profile#1312
Abigail Sellen
#30637
Overall Influence
Abigail Jane Sellen is a Canadian cognitive scientist, industrial engineer, and computer scientist who works for Microsoft Research in Cambridge. She is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and University College London.
Go to Profile#1313
Hassan Ugail
#10035
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Hassan Ugail is a Maldivian mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of visual computing at the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Bradford. Early life Hassan Ugail was born in Hithadhoo, Maldives. He completed his primary education at Nooranee School in Hithadhoo.
Go to Profile#1314
Armin B. Cremers
#21014
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Armin Bernd Cremers is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor in the computer science institute at the University of Bonn, Germany. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields of discrete mathematics including formal languages and automata theory. In more recent years he has been recognized for his work in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics as well as in geoinformatics and deductive databases.
Go to Profile#1315
Subhash Khot
#13613
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
#1316
Claes Oldenburg
#541
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Claes Oldenburg was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.
Go to Profile#1317
Casey Reas
#19582
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Casey Edwin Barker Reas , also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language.
Go to Profile#1318
John Halamka
#15932
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., is an American business executive and physician. He is president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, a group of digital and long-distance health care initiatives. Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics, Halamka has been developing and implementing health care information strategy and policy for more than 25 years. He specializes in artificial intelligence, the adoption of electronic health records and the secure sharing of healthcare data for care coordination, population health, and quality improvement.
Go to Profile#1319
Dinesh Manocha
#27574
Overall Influence
Dinesh Manocha is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland College Park, formerly at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in scientific computation, robotics, self-driving cars, affective computing, virtual and augmented reality and 3D computer graphics.
Go to Profile#1320
Joseph O'Rourke
#24040
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry.
Go to Profile#1321
Erez Petrank
#31508
Overall Influence
Erez Petrank is a computer scientist whose notable research contributions are in the fields of programming languages and computer systems , cryptography , computational complexity, and parallel computing. Petrank is currently a professor at the computer science department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1322
Greg Morrisett
#28384
Overall Influence
John Gregory Morrisett is the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. He previously was Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Morrisett was the Allen B. Cutting Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences prior to his position at Cornell.
Go to Profile#1323
Jessica Hodgins
#21336
Overall Influence
Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and School of Computer Science. Hodgins is currently also Research Director at the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh next to Carnegie Mellon. She was elected the president of ACM SIGGRAPH in 2017. Until 2016, she was Vice President of Research at Disney Research and was the Director of the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1324
Marsha Berger
#16152
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Marsha J. Berger is an American computer scientist. Her areas of research include numerical analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and high-performance parallel computing. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. She is Group Leader of Modeling and Simulation in the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute.
Go to Profile#1325
Michael Genesereth
#22743
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael Genesereth is an American logician and computer scientist, who is most known for his work on computational logic and applications of that work in enterprise management, computational law, and general game playing. Genesereth is professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and a professor by courtesy in the Stanford Law School. His 1987 textbook on Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence remains one of the key references on symbolic artificial intelligence. He is the author of the influential Game Description Language and Knowledge Interchange Format , th...
Go to Profile#1326
Gerald J. Popek
#23044
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Gerald John "Jerry" Popek was an American computer scientist, known for his research on operating systems and virtualization. With Robert P. Goldberg he proposed the Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements, a set of conditions necessary for a computer architecture to support system virtualization.
Go to Profile#1327
Nicola Guarino
#14257
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Nicola Guarino is an Italian computer scientist and researcher in the area of Formal Ontology for Information Systems, and the head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology , part of the Italian National Research Council in Trento.
Go to Profile#1328
Dan Suciu
#29208
Overall Influence
Dan Suciu is a full professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 under the supervision of Val Tannen. After graduation, he was a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs until he joined the University of Washington in 2000. Suciu does research in data management, with an emphasis on Web data management and managing uncertain data. He is a co-author of an influential book on managing semistructured data.
Go to Profile#1329
Richard T. Snodgrass
#28935
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Richard Thomas Snodgrass is an American computer scientist and writer and is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. He is best known for his work on temporal databases, query language design, query optimization and evaluation, storage structures, database design, and ergalics .
Go to Profile#1330
Jan Vanthienen
#15951
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jan Vanthienen is a Belgian Information systems scientist and Professor of Information systems engineering at Leuven University , known for his contributions to Business Process Modeling, Process mining and Business Engineering.
Go to Profile#1331
Irfan Essa
#25271
Overall Influence
Irfan Aziz Essa is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing, and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology . He is an associate dean in Georgia Tech's College of Computing and the director of the new Interdisciplinary Research Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech .
Go to Profile#1332
Matt Pharr
#25658
Overall Influence
Matt Pharr is an American computer graphics researcher and writer, and one of the primary originators of the physically based rendering process. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization.
Go to Profile#1333
Peter Druschel
#25724
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Druschel is a German computer scientist and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken. Education and career Druschel studied electrical engineering specializing on data technology at the Munich University of Applied Sciences and completed his studies as a graduate engineer. He graduated in 1994 from the University of Arizona under Larry L. Peterson. In the same year he became Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. In 2000 he became Associate Professor, followed in 2002 by a full professorship.
Go to Profile#1334
Amos Storkey
#26100
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Amos James Storkey is Professor of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Storkey studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and obtained his doctorate from Imperial College, London. In 1997 during his PhD, he worked on the Hopfield Network a form of recurrent artificial neural network popularized by John Hopfield in 1982. Hopfield nets serve as content-addressable memory systems with binary threshold nodes and Storkey developed what became known as the "Storkey Learning Rule".
Go to Profile#1335
Michael A. Harrison
#24011
Overall Influence
Michael A. Harrison is a computer scientist, in particular a pioneer in the area of formal languages. Biography Michael A. Harrison studied electrical engineering and computing for BS and MS at the Case Institute of Technology, and then received a PhD from the University of Michigan in Communication Sciences. He was assistant professor from 1963 to 1966 at the University of Michigan, and then joined the faculty of the E.E. Dept at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an associate professor from 1966 to 1971, and a full professor from 1971 to 1994.
Go to Profile#1336
Darrell Long
#23357
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Darrell Don Earl Long is an American computer scientist and computer engineer who is the inaugural holder of the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Letters of the Computer Society and was editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Storage . In 2002, he was the founder of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies .
Go to Profile#1337
Arto Salomaa
#22967
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Arto K. Salomaa is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. His research career, which spans over forty years, is focused on formal languages and automata theory. Early life and education Salomaa was born in Turku, Finland on June 6, 1934. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Turku in 1954 and a PhD from the same university in 1960. Salomaa's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Turku. Salomaa was introduced to the theory of automata and formal languages during seminars at Berkeley given by John Myhill in 1957.
Go to Profile#1338
Srinivas Aluru
#11417
Overall Influence
Srinivas Aluru is a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and co-Executive Director for the Georgia Tech Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Data Engineering and Science. His main areas of research are high performance computing, data science, bioinformatics and systems biology, combinatorial methods in scientific computing, and string algorithms. Aluru is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers . He is best known for his research contributi...
Go to Profile#1339
Yaser Abu-Mostafa
#26384
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Yaser Said Abu-Mostafa is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, Chairman of Paraconic Technologies Ltd, and Chairman of Machine Learning Consultants LLC. He is known for his research and educational activities in the area of machine learning.
Go to Profile#1340
Sarita Adve
#22427
Overall Influence
Sarita Vikram Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in computer architecture and systems, parallel computing, and power and reliability-aware systems.
Go to Profile#1341
Richard M. Durbin
#24056
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.
Go to Profile#1342
Volker Markl
#26082
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Volker Markl is a German computer scientist and database systems researcher. Career In 1999, Markl received his PhD in computer science under the direction of Rudolf Bayer at the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral research led to the development of the UB-Tree. From 1997 to 2000, he was research group leader at FORWISS, the Bavarian research center for knowledge-based systems. From 2001 to 2008, he was project leader at the IBM Almaden Research Center, Silicon Valley. Since 2008, he has been full professor and Chair of the Database Systems and Information Management Group at the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#1343
Alexia Massalin
#28606
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Alexia Massalin is an American computer scientist and programmer. She pioneered the concept of superoptimization, and designed the Synthesis kernel, a small kernel with a Unix compatibility layer that makes heavy use of self-modifying code for efficiency.
Go to Profile#1344
Vincent Rijmen
#10208
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Vincent Rijmen is a Belgian cryptographer and one of the two designers of the Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard. Rijmen is also the co-designer of the WHIRLPOOL cryptographic hash function, and the block ciphers Anubis, KHAZAD, Square, NOEKEON and SHARK.
Go to Profile#1345
Victor Bahl
#27107
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Victor Bahl is an Indian Technical Fellow and CTO of Azure for Operators at Microsoft. He started networking research at Microsoft. He is known for his research contributions to white space radio data networks, radio signal-strength based indoor positioning systems, multi-radio wireless systems, wireless network virtualization, edge computing, and for bringing wireless links into the datacenter. He is also known for his leadership of the mobile computing community as the co-founder of the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing . He is the founder of inter...
Go to Profile#1346
Neil Lawrence
#23916
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Neil David Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, senior AI fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and visiting professor at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#1347
Dana H. Ballard
#29125
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Dana Harry Ballard was a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin and formerly with the University of Rochester. Ballard attended MIT and graduated in 1967 with his bachelor's degree in aeronautics and astronautics. He then attended the University of Michigan for his masters in information and control engineering in 1970. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in information engineering in 1974. He did research in artificial intelligence and human cognition and perception with a focus on the human visual system. In 1982, with Christopher M.
Go to Profile#1348
Agner Fog
#23759
Overall Influence
Agner Fog is a Danish evolutionary anthropologist and computer scientist. He is currently an associate professor of computer science at the Technical University of Denmark , and has been present at DTU since 1995. He is best known for coining the term "Regality Theory" and for writing extensive optimization manuals for machines running the x86 architecture.
Go to Profile#1349
Carroll Morgan
#27797
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Charles Carroll Morgan is an American computer scientist who moved to Australia in his early teens. He completed his education there , including a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Sydney, and then moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. In 2000, he returned to Australia.
Go to Profile#1350
Antoine Joux
#26686
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Antoine Joux is a French cryptographer, one of the three 2013 Gödel Prize laureates., specifically cited for his paper A one round protocol for tripartite Diffie-Hellman. He was at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and researcher in the CRYPT team of the laboratory of computer science PRISM of CNRS, currently he is Chair of Cryptology of the Fondation partenariale of UPMC, professeur associé at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Paris 6, and Senior Crypto-Security Expert at CryptoExperts.
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