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).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#13901
Robert Lumiansky
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Robert Mayer Lumiansky was an American scholar of Medieval English and president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Robert Lumiansky received a bachelor's degree from The Citadel, a master's degree from the University of South Carolina, and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina. He was professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1973 and professor of English at New York University from 1975 to 1983. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Clarence Manning
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Clarence Augustus Manning was an American slavicist. He worked for 43 years at the Columbia University in New York, eventually being appointed chairman of the Department of Slavic Studies. He published a number of studies on Slavic languages, countries and people, as well as translations of important Slavic works of literature, and was a pioneer in opening the field of study of Slavic peoples in the U.S. beyond the dominance of Russian studies of the times.
Go to Profile#13903
W. A. Mackintosh
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
William Archibald Mackintosh, was a Canadian economist and political scientist, and was the twelfth principal of Queen's University from 1951 until 1961. He is best known for developing the staple thesis that explains Canadian economic history in terms of a series of exports of staple products – fish, fur, timber, and wheat.
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Heinz Rutishauser
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...
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John Alexander Loraine
1924 - 1988 (64 years)
John Alexander Loraine FRSE FRCPE FIB was a Scottish physician and endocrinologist. He wrote widely on human sexuality. Life Loraine was born in Edinburgh on 14 May 1924, the son of Ruth and Lachlan Dempster Loraine. He was educated at George Watson's College then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MB ChB. He did further postgraduate studies, specialising in sexuality and endocrinology and gained both a PhD and DSc. For the degree of DSc he submitted his previously published work, The clinical application of hormone assay.
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J. C. R. Licklider
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider , known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
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Frank N. Freeman
1880 - 1961 (81 years)
Frank Nugent Freeman was a Canadian-born American educational psychologist. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1909 to 1939, and served as dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education from then until 1948. Among his most notable books are Mental Tests: Their History, Principles and Applications and Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment .
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Pierre Courcelle
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Pierre Paul Courcelle was a French historian who was a specialist of ancient philosophy and of Latin Patristics, especially of St Augustine. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1968.
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Vivek Goel
Vivek Goel is the current President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo. As a physician and public health researcher, he was also a university administrator, and served as a special advisor to the president and provost of the University of Toronto, and as a professor for the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
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Stephen Sik-Sang Yau
Stephen Sik-Sang Yau is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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Emil Truog
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Emil Truog was an American soil scientist. He received his B.S. Degree , University of Wisconsin,1909 and his M.S. in 1912. It was in 1912 when he became an instructor in Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an Assistant Professor in 1916, Associate professor in 1917, Professor in 1921 and Emeritus professor in 1954. He was a chairman for the Department of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1939–1953. Much of his research during his early years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was focused on discovering the processes by which plants obtain nutrients from the soil.
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Wilhelm Magnus
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Hans Heinrich Wilhelm Magnus known as Wilhelm Magnus was a German-American mathematician. He made important contributions in combinatorial group theory, Lie algebras, mathematical physics, elliptic functions, and the study of tessellations.
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Richard Shope
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Richard Edwin Shope was an American virologist who, together with his mentor Paul A. Lewis at the Rockefeller Institute, identified influenzavirus A in pigs in 1931. Using Shope's technique, Smith, Andrewes, and Laidlaw of England's Medical Research Council cultured it from a human in 1933. They and Shope in 1935 and 1936, respectively, identified it as the virus circulating in the 1918 pandemic. In 1933, Shope identified the Shope papilloma virus, which infects rabbits. His discovery later assisted other researchers to link the papilloma virus to warts and cervical cancer. He received the...
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King-Sun Fu
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.
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Dan Willard
Dan Edward Willard was an American computer scientist and logician, and a professor of computer science at the University at Albany. Education and career Willard did his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Stony Brook University, graduating in 1970. He went on to graduate studies in mathematics at Harvard University, earning a master's degree in 1972 and a doctorate in 1978. After leaving Harvard, he worked at Bell Labs for four years before joining the Albany faculty in 1983.
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Norbert Wiener
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
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Jacek Lipkowski
1900 - Present (126 years)
#13918
Alan Smeaton
Alan F. Smeaton MRIA is a researcher and academic at Dublin City University. He was founder of TRECVid, and the Centre for Digital Video Processing, and a winner of the University President's Research Award in Science and Engineering in 2002 and the DCU Educational Trust Leadership Award in 2009. Smeaton is a founding director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University . Prior to that he was a Principal Investigator and Deputy Director of CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies . As of 2013, Smeaton was serving on the editorial board of the ACM Journal on Computers and Cultural Heritage, Information Processing and Management.
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Winfred Trexler Root
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Winfred Trexler Root was an American historian and educator. Root was born in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania and received his undergraduate education at Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908, thereafter joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. In 1925 he accepted a position as head of the history department at the University of Iowa, succeeding Arthur M. Schlesinger, and would remain there until his death. George L. Mosse, who was a history professor at Iowa during Root's tenure, described him as a "benevolent dictator". In 1930 Roo...
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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Alan Perlis
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.
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Howard Liddell
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Howard Scott Liddell was an American professor of psychology who was involved in the Macy Conferences. Liddell graduated from the University of Michigan in 1917. After completing his MA, he moved to Cornell University as an instructor, completing his Ph.D. in 1923 and becoming an assistant professor in 1926. In 1930 he was appointed Chairman of Department of Physiology in the Medical College He became professor of Psychology in 1939 and then professor of Psychobiology in 1947. The Behavior Farm Laboratory which he founded at Cornell University was renamed the Liddell Laboratory of Comparati...
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Thornton Carle Fry
1892 - 1991 (99 years)
Thornton Carle Fry was an applied mathematician, known for his two widely-used textbooks, Probability and its engineering uses and Elementary differential equations . Career Thornton C. Fry received his bachelor's degree from Findlay College in 1912 and then pursued graduate study in Wisconsin in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. He received his M.A. in 1913 and his Ph.D. in 1920 in applied mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with thesis under the supervision of Charles S. Slichter.
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Kyūichirō Washizu
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Kyūichirō Washizu was a Japanese aircraft engineer and academic. He served as professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Tokyo and professor of engineering science at the Osaka University. He led the performance-related design of the kamikaze attack aircraft Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka during World War II.
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Raymond F. Boyce
1947 - 1974 (27 years)
Raymond F. Boyce was an American computer scientist who was known for his research in relational databases. He is best known for his work co-developing the SQL database language and Boyce-Codd normal form.
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Harry H. Goode
1909 - 1960 (51 years)
Harry H. Goode was an American computer engineer and systems engineer and professor at the University of Michigan. He is known as co-author of the book Systems Engineering from 1957, which is one of the earliest significant books directly related to systems engineering.
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Alexandra Illmer Forsythe
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Alexandra Winifred Illmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist best known for co-authoring a series of computer science textbooks during the 1960s and 1970s, including the first ever computer science textbook, Computer Science: A First Course, in 1969.
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Richard V. Andree
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Richard Vernon Andree was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Andree taught at the University of Oklahoma for 37 years, and served as a professor emeritus there until his death. He and his wife, Josephine, founded the Mu Alpha Theta mathematics honor society. Andree wrote a book on abstract algebra entitled Selections From Modern Abstract Algebra which was first published in 1958. He also wrote and published at his own expense numerous puzzle books and enjoyed cryptography. Andree and his students developed the ALPS programming language for the Bendix G-15 computer.
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Oscar Jacobson
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Oscar Brousse Jacobson was a Swedish-born American painter and museum curator. From 1915 to 1945, he was the director of the University of Oklahoma's School of Art, later known as the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. He curated exhibitions and wrote books about Native American art.
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Peter Noble
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Sir Peter Scott Noble was a British academic who was principal of King's College London from 1952 to 1968 and later vice-chancellor of the University of London from 1961 to 1964. Education Noble was educated at Fraserburgh Academy, Scotland, followed by University of Aberdeen and then St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first in classics and Oriental language. He was made a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.
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Soheil Afnan
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Soheil Muhsin Afnan was a scholar of Philosophy, Arabic, Persian, and Greek whose intellectual works included translations of Greek texts into Persian as well as the publication of philosophical lexicons.
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Ben Mark Cherrington
1885 - 1980 (95 years)
Ben Mark Cherrington was Acting Chancellor at the University of Denver from October 1943 to February 1946. During his term of office as chancellor he added the School of Speech and the Hotel and Restaurant Management School to the University's programs. He was the Director of the Social Science Foundation which later evolved into the Graduate School of International Studies at the University for 25 years. Cherrington was also an author of the Charter of the United Nations and a co-founder of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization . He was honored by Queen Elizabe...
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Winfred G. Leutner
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Winfred George Leutner was the ninth President of Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve University. Leutner was born March 1, 1879, in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1901, he graduated from Western Reserve's Adelbert College, now Case Western Reserve University. Leutner continued his education at Johns Hopkins University, earning his master's degree in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1905. From 1907 to 1908 he studied overseas at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and Rome. Leutner was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Theta Pi. He married Emily Payne Smith in 1910, together hav...
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Jan Cybis
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Jan Cybis was a prominent Polish painter and art teacher. Biography Cybis was born in Fröbel and studied at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, settling in that city from 1934. The German Expressionist Otto Mueller was his mentor. He studied under Józef Pankiewicz among others, developing a reputation for a post-impressionist style using rich, saturated color influenced by the French.
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Hezekiah Oluwasanmi
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Hezekiah Adedunmola Oluwasanmi was a Nigerian academic and professor who served as the vice chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University from 1966 to 1975. He was instrumental in founding the university. He was a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Ibadan prior to his appointment at Obafemi Awolowo University as vice chancellor.
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Leonard Bahr
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Leonard Marion Bahr was an American portrait painter, muralist, illustrator and educator. He worked for many years as a painting professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art . Personal life Leonard Marion Bahr was born on May 12, 1905, in Maryland.
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Birinchi Kumar Barua
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Birinchi Kumar Barua was a folklorist, scholar, novelist, playwright, historian, linguist, educationist, administrator and eminent 20th century littérateur of Assam, with both scholarly and creative pursuits. He was the pioneer in the study of folklore in North East India, and was one of the many founders of Gauhati University. Barua's contributions to Assamese literature are significant, both as a novelist and as an early literary critic.
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Frederick S. Wight
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Frederick S. Wight was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center. An influential educator at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented museum-quality exhibitions at the campus gallery later named the Wight Art Gallery, Wight was also a highly accomplished painter and writer. In his final years he concentrated on his painting, producing radiant landscapes that appear to be animated by mysterious, spiritual forces.
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James Anderson Scott Watson
1889 - 1966 (77 years)
Sir James Anderson Scott Watson CBE, FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish agriculturalist. Education and early life Watson was born on 16 November 1889 in Forfar, the son of William Watson a farmer at Downieken near Dundee. He studied science at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1908. He then went to the United States to study agriculture at the University of Iowa, gaining an MSc in 1910.
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Annette Smith Burgess
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Annette Smith Burgess was an American medical illustrator and instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life Annette Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1899 to Richard Henry Smith and his wife. She attended public schools in Baltimore. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under Max Brödel. She attended Johns Hopkins University from 1923 to 1926.
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Henry Rankin Poore
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Henry Rankin Poore was an American painter and illustrator, known for incorporating human and animal figures into his landscape and genre paintings. He was also a lecturer and critic, and a prolific author on art and composition.
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Friedrich Karrenberg
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Friedrich Karrenberg was a German Evangelical-reformed social ethicist and professor. He was a leading member of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland. Life Karrenberg was born in Velbert, a manufacturing town a short distance to the east of Düsseldorf. He came from an entrepreneurial family. Hugo Karrenberg, his father, owned a factory making barrels and rivets, in which Friedrich served an apprenticeship. He would take over the business when his father died in 1940. Early on he also involved himself in youth movement activities, one effect of which was to awaken an interest in socio-ethical questions.
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Carl Holty
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Carl Robert Holty was a German-born American abstract painter. Raised in Wisconsin, he was the first major abstract painter to gain notoriety from the state. Harold Rosenberg described Holty as "a figure of our art history," known for his use of color, shape and form.
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Richard Koppe
1916 - 1973 (57 years)
Richard Koppe was an American artist whose work has been exhibited in many museums in America including the MOMA and the Whitney. Koppe was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and moved to Chicago in 1937 to study at the New Bauhaus . In 1950, his work was exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition "American Painting Today." He headed the Department of Visual Design at the Institute of Design until 1963. In 2015, 70 of his paintings, prints and drawings were exhibited at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Koppe was married to Catherine Hinkle, also an artist.
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Chang Hsin-hai
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Chang Hsin-hai , also known as H. H. Chang, was an early 20th century Chinese scholar and writer. Early life and academic training Chang Hsin‐hai was born June 25, 1898, in Shanghai, China. After studying at Songhua College in Peking from 1916 to 1918, he relocated to the United States to complete his higher education. He received an A.B. from Johns Hopkins University in 1919, an A.M., and a Ph. D. in English literature from Harvard University in 1920 and 1923, respectively. While completing his doctoral work, Chang served as an attache to the Chinese Delegation at the Washington Disarmament ...
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Cecilia Hennel Hendricks
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Cecilia Hennel Hendricks was a faculty member at Indiana University Bloomington, Wyoming homesteaderer, and ran for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wyoming in 1926. Biography Cecilia Hennel was born in Evansville, Indiana, on March 2, 1883, to parents Joseph H. Thuman Hennel and Anna Marie Thuman Hennel. The Hennels moved from Evansville to Bloomington in 1905 so that their daughters Cora, Cecillia, and Edith could attend Indiana University.
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Ichiro Fukuzawa
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early 1930s. While Surrealist artists are known for their distinct focus on the human subconsciousness and dreams, Fukuzawa's Western-style paintings depart from such conventions by instead providing sharply satirical commentaries on human behavior and systemic social issues in Japan, including the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the adverse impacts of the 1973 Oil Crisis on the Japanese economy. Since he was associated with Surrealism's progressive i...
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Hassan Suhrawardy
1884 - 1946 (62 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy CStJ, FRCS was a Bengali surgeon, military officer in the British Indian Army, politician, and a public official. He was the former chairman of the executive committee of the East London Mosque. Knighted in 1932, he renounced his British honours a month before his death.
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Petros Kokkalis
1896 - 1962 (66 years)
Professor Petros Kokkalis , a distinguished professor of Medicine in the University of Athens has been one of the leading figures of Medicine in pre WWII Greece, introducing pioneering methods in thoracic surgery and neurosurgery. His main medical achievements include the introduction of thoracoplasty in Greece and removal of the phrenic nerve for the treatment of tuberculosis, as well as the first pneumonectomy with the Tourniquet method and the first pericardiectomy for the release of compressive pericarditis.
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James Melvin Rhodes
1916 - 1976 (60 years)
James Melvin Rhodes was an American educational scientist, assistant professor of education and creativity researcher who was the originator of the pioneering concept of the 4 "P"s of creativity. Biography Mel Rhodes was born on June 14, 1916, to Waldo and Grace Rhodes in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as the second eldest of 7 siblings.
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