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.

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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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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#1351

Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

#34539

Overall Influence

1953 - 1994 (41 years)

Johannes Lambertus Adriana van de Snepscheut was a computer scientist and educator. He was a student of Martin Rem and Edsger Dijkstra. At the time of his death he was the executive officer of the computer science department at the California Institute of Technology. He was also developing an editor for proving theorems called "Proxac".

#1352

Madhavan Mukund

#13262

Overall Influence

Madhavan Mukund is the Director and a professor of computer science at Chennai Mathematical Institute, a research and education institute in Chennai, India. He has served as President of Indian Association for Research in Computing Science from 2011 to 2017 and President of Association for Computing Machinery from 2016 to 2018. He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018. He has been the National Coordinator of the Indian Computing Olympiad since 2001.

#1353

Kang G. Shin

#23947

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kang Geun Shin is a South Korean-born computer scientist and the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. He is also the founding director of the Real-Time Computing Laboratory . He is known for his contributions to the field of real-time fault-tolerant systems. Shin is a recipient of the Korean Ho-Am Prize in Engineering. This prize is awarded for the "outstanding contributions to the development of science and culture and enhancement of the welfare of mankind".

#1354

Anna Lysyanskaya

#29382

Overall Influence

Anna A. Lysyanskaya is an American cryptographer known for her research on digital signatures and anonymous digital credentials. She is a professor of computer science at Brown University. Early life and education Lysyanskaya grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the US in 1993 to attend Smith College, where she graduated in 1997. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2002. Her dissertation, Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design, was supervised by Ron Rivest.

#1355

David Naccache

#17250

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

David Naccache is a cryptographer, currently a professor at the École normale supérieure and a member of its Computer Laboratory. He was previously a professor at Panthéon-Assas University. Biography He received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications. Naccache's most notable work is in public-key cryptography, including the cryptanalysis of digital signature schemes. Together with Jacques Stern he designed the similarly named but very distinct Naccache-Stern cryptosystem and Naccache-Stern knapsack cryptosystem.

#1356

Philip Emeagwali

Philip Emeagwali

#13118

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Philip Emeagwali is a computer scientist originally from Nigeria. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation. He is known for making controversial claims about his achievements that are disputed by the scientific community.

#1357

Robert Fourer

#15829

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Robert Fourer is a scientist working in the area of operations research and management science. He is currently President of AMPL Optimization, Inc and is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. Robert Fourer is recognized as being the designer of the popular modeling language for mathematical programming called AMPL.

#1358

David G. Kirkpatrick

David G. Kirkpatrick

#30764

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Galer Kirkpatrick is a Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of British Columbia. He is known for the Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm and his work on polygon triangulation, and for co-inventing α-shapes and the β-skeleton. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1974.

#1359

Joan Daemen

#10190

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Joan Daemen is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed with Vincent Rijmen the Rijndael cipher, which was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard in 2001. More recently, he co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. He has also designed or co-designed the MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing block ciphers. In 2017 he won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography "for the development of AES and SHA3". He describes his development of encryption algorithms as creating the bricks which are needed to build th...

#1360

Hermann Maurer

#24610

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Hermann Adolf Maurer is an Austrian computer scientist, serving as Professor of Computer Science at the Graz University of Technology. He has supervised over 40 dissertations, written more than 20 books and over 600 scientific articles, and started or been involved with a number of companies.

#1361

Peter Stone

#18000

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Peter Stone is an American computer scientist who is the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar.

#1362

Reinder van de Riet

#27811

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

Reinder Pieter van de Riet was a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus Professor Information Systems at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, known for the development of COLOR-X, a linguistically-based event modeling language for object modeling.

#1363

Robin Popplestone

Robin Popplestone

#27597

Overall Influence

1938 - 2004 (66 years)

Robin John Popplestone was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He is known for developing the COWSEL and POP programming languages, and for his work on Freddy II with Pat Ambler at the University of Edinburgh Artificial Intelligence laboratory.

#1364

Norman Jouppi

#24922

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Norman Paul Jouppi is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. Career Jouppi was one of the computer architects at the MIPS Stanford University Project , an early RISC project. He received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University in 1980 and was awarded a PhD in 1984 from Stanford University. In 1984 he joined Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory. He worked at Compaq and at Hewlett-Packard in 2002, where he ran the Advanced Architecture Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto from 2006 to 2008 and then the Exascale Computing Lab from 2008 to 2010 and the Intelligent Infrastructure Lab from 2010 to 2011.

#1365

Walter Bender

#15203

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Walter Bender is a technologist and researcher who works in the field of electronic publishing, media and technology for learning. From the MIT Media Lab's founding 1985 through 2006, Bender directed the lab's Electronic Publishing Group. Previous to the lab's creation, the group had also existed in the Architecture Machine Group. The research group is one of the Media Lab's oldest and one of a few that predates the creation of the lab. While at the lab, Bender held the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. Bender's research has attempted to build upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extend them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction.

#1366

Ernst Dickmanns

#10259

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Ernst Dieter Dickmanns is a German pioneer of dynamic computer vision and of driverless cars. Dickmanns has been a professor at Bundeswehr University Munich , and visiting professor to Caltech and to MIT, teaching courses on "dynamic vision".

#1367

Adam D. Smith

#20735

Overall Influence

Adam D. Smith is a computer scientist at Boston University, where he is a founding member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. His areas of research include cryptography and information privacy. He is known, along with Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, and Kobbi Nissim, as one of the co-inventors of differential privacy, for which he won the 2017 Gödel Prize.

#1368

Vladik Kreinovich

Vladik Kreinovich

#28644

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Vladik Kreinovich is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He was educated at Leningrad State University and received a doctorate in mathematics from the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, affiliated with Novosibirsk State University in Novosibirsk.

#1369

Hannah Bast

#32593

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Hannah Bast is a German computer scientist known for her work on routing in transportation networks and search engines. She works as a professor at the University of Freiburg, where she holds the chair in algorithms and data structures and is dean of the faculty of engineering. She is one of the members of the Enquete Commission on Artificial Intelligence of the German federal parliament.

#1370

Yael Moses

#27280

Overall Influence

Yael Moses is a professor in the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel. Education and career Moses received her Ph.D. in computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the Robotics group at the University of Oxford from 1993 to 1994 and at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1994 to 1997. Moses has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence since 2013.

#1371

Keiji Inafune

#7445

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Keiji Inafune is a Japanese video game producer, illustrator and businessman. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. Starting his career at Capcom in the late 1980s, his job was as an artist and illustrator. The first two games he worked on were the original Street Fighter and Mega Man in 1987. He was then an illustrator and artist of the Mega Man series during the NES and Super NES era. For Mega Man X, he created and designed the character Zero.

#1372

Jill Zimmerman

#22735

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Jill Loraine Zimmerman is an American computer scientist and the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College. Since 2006, she has been the head of the Goucher Robotics Lab.

#1373

Kevin C. Dittman

#12089

Overall Influence

Kevin C. Dittman is an American computer scientist, IT consultant and Professor of Information Technology at the Purdue University, especially known for his textbook Systems analysis and design methods written with Lonnie D. Bentley and Jeffrey L. Whitten, which is in its 7th edition.

#1374

J. Michael Brady

J. Michael Brady

#18121

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sir John Michael Brady is an emeritus professor of oncological imaging at the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 1985 and was elected a foreign associate member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2015. He was formerly BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford from 1985 to 2010 and a senior research scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 1985.

#1375

Mark Handley

#23300

Overall Influence

Mark James Handley is Professor of Networked Systems in the Department of Computer Science of University College London since 2003, where he leads the Networks Research Group. Education Handley received his PhD from UCL in 1997, under the supervision of Jon Crowcroft.

#1376

Rolf Drechsler

#27153

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Rolf Drechsler is an electrical engineer at the University of Bremen, Germany. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions in testing and verification of electronic circuits and systems.

#1377

Jaap van den Herik

#26682

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Hendrik Jacob van den Herik is a Dutch computer scientist, and professor at the University of Leiden, known for his contribution in the fields of computer chess and artificial intelligence. Biography Van den Herik studied mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he obtained his MA in 1974, cum laude. In 1983 he obtained his PhD with the thesis, entitled "Computer Chess, chess and artificial intelligence", under supervision of Henk Lombaers, Adriaan de Groot and Joop Doorman.

#1378

Sílvio Meira

#33072

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Sílvio Romero de Lemos Meira is a Brazilian computer scientist, professor and entrepreneur in the area of software engineering and innovation. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at the Centre of Informatics of the Federal University of Pernambuco. Additionally, he also is the chairman of the Porto Digital - the biggest Brazilian tech park - and is member of the board of directors in several companies. Meira is also founder and chief scientist at tds.company.

#1379

David Watt

#32308

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

David Anthony Watt is a British computer scientist. Watt is a professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. With Peter Mosses he developed action semantics, a combination of denotational semantics, operational and algebraic semantics. He currently teaches a third year programming languages course, and a postgraduate course on algorithms and data structures. He is recognisable around campus for his more formal attire compared to the department's normally casual dress code.

#1380

George Logemann

#18282

Overall Influence

1938 - 2012 (74 years)

George Wahl Logemann was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He became well known for the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland algorithm to solve Boolean satisfiability problems. He also contributed to the field of computer music.

#1381

Jon Michael Dunn

#18593

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

J. Michael Dunn was Oscar Ewing Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Professor Emeritus of Informatics and Computer Science, was twice chair of the Philosophy Department, was Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and was founding dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University.

#1382

Ronald Loui

#16927

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Ronald Prescott Loui is an American computer scientist, currently working as a professor of computer science at Case Western Reserve University. He is known for having supplied first-hand biographical information on Barack Obama about his time in Hawaii. Previously, he has been a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and University of Illinois Springfield.

#1383

Michael Kohlhase

Michael Kohlhase

#24078

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Michael Kohlhase is a German computer scientist and professor at University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, where he is head of the KWARC research group . Academic Positions Michael Kohlhase is president of the OpenMath Society and a trustee of the Interest Group for Mathematical Knowledge Management . He was a trustee of the Conference on Automated Deduction and the CALCULEMUS Interest Group. He has been Conference Chair of CADE-21 and Program Chair of the KI-2006, MKM-2005, and CALCULEMUS-2000 conferences and has served on the Programme Committees of more than three dozen international conferences. ...

#1384

Roman Yampolskiy

#25992

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Roman Vladimirovich Yampolskiy is a Russian computer scientist at the University of Louisville, known for his work on behavioral biometrics, security of cyberworlds, and artificial intelligence safety. He holds a PhD from the University at Buffalo . He is currently the director of Cyber Security Laboratory in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering.

#1385

Doina Precup

#26006

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Doina Precup is a Romanian researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada. She specializes in artificial intelligence . Precup is associate dean of research at the faculty of science at McGill University, Canada research chair in machine learning and a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She also heads the Montreal office of Deepmind.

#1386

Valerie Taylor

#22382

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Valerie Elaine Taylor is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on "Prophesy," described as "a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems."

#1387

Faron Moller

#28755

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Faron George Moller is a Canadian-born British computer scientist and expert on theoretical computer science, particularly infinite-state automata theory and temporal logic. His work has focussed on structural decomposition techniques for analysing abstract models of computing systems. He is founding Director of the Swansea Railway Verification Group; Director of Technocamps; and Head of the Institute of Coding in Wales. In 2023, he was elected General Secretary of the Learned Society of Wales.

#1388

Reinhard Wilhelm

Reinhard Wilhelm

#25678

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Reinhard Wilhelm is a German computer scientist. Life and work Wilhelm was born in , today part of the municipality of Finnentrop, Westphalia. He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at University of Münster and computer science at Technical University Munich and Stanford University. He finished his PhD at TU Munich in 1977. In 1978, he obtained a professorship at Saarland University, where he led the chair for programming languages and compiler construction until his retirement in 2014. In addition, Wilhelm has held the post of scientific director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl from its inception in 1990 until 2014.

#1389

Klaus Knopper

#19306

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Klaus Knopper is a German electrical engineer and free software developer. Knopper is the creator of Knoppix, a well-known live CD Linux distribution. He received his degree in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology , co-founded LinuxTag in 1996 and has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998. He also teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences.

#1390

Richard Fateman

Richard Fateman

#15757

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Richard J Fateman is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Union College in June, 1966, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in June, 1971. He was a major contributor to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT and later to the Franz Lisp system. His current interests include scientific programming environments; computer algebra systems; distributed computing; analysis of algorithms; programming and measurement of large systems; design and implementation of programming languages; and optical character recognition.

#1391

Damian Conway

#23896

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Damian Conway is a computer scientist, a member of the Perl and Raku communities, a public speaker, and the author of several books. Until 2010, he was also an adjunct associate professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.

#1392

Schahram Dustdar

#32156

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Schahram Dustdar is an Austrian computer scientist known for his work on distributed systems and elastic computing. Dustdar is a professor of computer science and head of the Distributed Systems Group at TU Wien. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to elastic computing for cloud applications.

#1393

Kenneth A De Jong

#30528

Overall Influence

Kenneth Alan De Jong is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at George Mason University. He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation. Education and career De Jong was a student of John Henry Holland at the University of Michigan, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1975 with a dissertation on genetic algorithms. He became a faculty member at George Mason University in 1984.

#1394

Reynold Xin

#11826

Overall Influence

Reynold Xin is a computer scientist and engineer specializing in big data, distributed systems, and cloud computing. He is a co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks. He is best known for his work on Apache Spark, a leading open-source Big Data project. He was designer and lead developer of the GraphX, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming components and he co-designed DataFrames, all of which are part of the core Apache Spark distribution; he also served as the release manager for Spark's 2.0 release.

#1395

Murray Shanahan

#18370

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Murray Patrick Shanahan is a professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, in the Department of Computing, and a senior scientist at DeepMind. He researches artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science.

#1396

Charles Arthur Willard

#3366

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Charles Arthur Willard is an American argumentation and rhetorical theorist. He is a retired Professor and University Scholar at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Education He received his undergraduate degree at the Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia, Kansas. He received his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana.

#1397

Samuel J. Leffler

#32216

Overall Influence

Samuel J Leffler is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. Among other projects, he created HylaFAX , LibTIFF, and the FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers.

#1398

John Chambers

#19272

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S. Early life Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.

#1399

John Knoll

#13204

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

John Knoll is an American visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic . One of the original creators of Adobe Photoshop , he has also worked as visual effects supervisor on the Star Wars prequels and the 1997 special editions of the original trilogy. He also served as ILM's visual effects supervisor for Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact, as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Along with Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall, Knoll and the trio's work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest earned them the Academy Awa...

#1400

Santiago Calatrava

Santiago Calatrava

#445

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Santiago Calatrava Valls is a Spanish architect, structural engineer, sculptor and painter, particularly known for his bridges supported by single leaning pylons, and his railway stations, stadiums, and museums, whose sculptural forms often resemble living organisms. His best-known works include the Olympic Sports Complex of Athens, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, Sweden, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City, the Auditorio de Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas, Texas, and his largest project, the City of Arts and Sciences and Opera House in his birthplace, Valencia.

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