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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#14201
August Dvorak
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
August Dvorak was an American educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He and his brother-in-law, William Dealey, are best known for creating the Dvorak keyboard layout in the 1930s as a replacement for the QWERTY keyboard layout.
Go to Profile#14202
Donald B. Gillies
1929 - 1975 (46 years)
Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments. Early life and education Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to John Zachariah Gillies and Anne Isabelle Douglas MacQueen . He attended the University of Toronto Schools, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the university. Gillies attended the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1950, majoring in mathematics.
Go to Profile#14203
Piet Mondrian
1872 - 1944 (72 years)
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan , after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian , was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
Go to Profile#14204
Edmund Berkeley
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Edmund Callis Berkeley was an American computer scientist who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. His 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think popularized cognitive images of early computers. He was also a social activist who worked to achieve conditions that might minimize the threat of nuclear war.
Go to Profile#14205
Vincent van Gogh
1853 - 1890 (37 years)
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold, symbolic colours, and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Only one of his paintings was known by name to have been sold during his lifetime....
Go to Profile#14206
Hugo Gernsback
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Hugo Gernsback was a Luxembourgish–American editor and magazine publisher, whose publications included the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with the novelists H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, he is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction". In his honor, annual awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention are named the "Hugos".
Go to Profile#14207
William Blake
1757 - 1827 (70 years)
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
Go to Profile#14208
Grigore Moisil
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Grigore Constantin Moisil was a Romanian mathematician, computer pioneer, and titular member of the Romanian Academy. His research was mainly in the fields of mathematical logic , algebraic logic, MV-algebra, and differential equations. He is viewed as the father of computer science in Romania.
Go to Profile#14209
Mario Tchou
1924 - 1961 (37 years)
Mario Tchou , also known as Tchou Wang Li, was an Italian engineer of Chinese descent. He was a pioneer of computer science in Italy, who led a group of scientists from the University of Pisa to invent in 1959 the Olivetti Elea—the world's most powerful computer at the time.
Go to Profile#14210
Marian Rejewski
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Marian Adam Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine, aided by limited documents obtained by French military intelligence. Over the next nearly seven years, Rejewski and fellow mathematician-cryptologists Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski developed and used techniques and equipment to decrypt the German machine ciphers, even as the Germans introduced modifications to their equipment and encryption procedures. Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the Poles shared their te...
Go to Profile#14211
Ruth Teitelbaum
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Ruth Teitelbaum was one of the first computer programmers in the world. Teitelbaum was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
Go to Profile#14212
Raphael
1483 - 1520 (37 years)
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , now generally known in English as Raphael , was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Go to Profile#14213
Ctesibius
284 BC - 221 BC (63 years)
Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius was a Greek inventor and mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps . This, in combination with his work On pneumatics on the elasticity of air, earned him the title of "father of pneumatics." None of his written work has survived, including his Memorabilia, a compilation of his research that was cited by Athenaeus. Ctesibius' most commonly known invention today is a pipe organ , a predecessor of the modern church organ.
Go to Profile#14214
Henri Matisse
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
Go to Profile#14215
Terry Welch
1939 - 1988 (49 years)
Terry Archer Welch was an American computer scientist. Along with Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv, he developed the lossless Lempel–Ziv–Welch compression algorithm, which was published in 1984. Education Welch received a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degree at MIT in electrical engineering. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and worked in computer design at Honeywell in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#14216
Allen B. DuMont
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Allen Balcom DuMont, also spelled Du Mont, was an American electronics engineer, scientist and inventor who improved the cathode ray tube in 1931 for use in television receivers. Seven years later he manufactured and sold the first commercially practical television set to the public. In June 1938, his Model 180 television receiver was the first all-electronic television set sold to the public, a few months prior to RCA's first TV set in April 1939. In 1946, DuMont founded the first television network to be licensed, the DuMont Television Network, by linking station WABD in New York City to station W3XWT, which later became WTTG, in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#14217
Édouard Manet
1832 - 1883 (51 years)
Édouard Manet was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Born into an upper-class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the naval career originally envisioned for him; he became engrossed in the world of painting. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass or Olympia, "premiering" in 1863 and '65, respectively, caused great controversy with both critics and the Academy of Fine Arts, but soon were praised by progressive artists as the breakthrough acts to the new style, Impressionism.
Go to Profile#14218
Auguste Rodin
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell.
Go to Profile#14219
Paul Cézanne
1839 - 1906 (67 years)
Paul Cézanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose work introduced new modes of representation and influenced avant-garde artistic movements of the early 20th century. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and early 20th century Cubism.
Go to Profile#14220
Paul Gauguin
1848 - 1903 (55 years)
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist. Unappreciated until after his death, Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of colour and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism. Toward the end of his life, he spent ten years in French Polynesia. The paintings from this time depict people or landscapes from that region.
Go to Profile#14221
Hieronymus Bosch
1450 - 1516 (66 years)
Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch/Netherlandish painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on oak wood, mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives. Within his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell.
Go to Profile#14222
Alexander Calder
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."
Go to Profile#14223
Jackson Pollock
1912 - 1956 (44 years)
Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In...
Go to Profile#14224
Francisco Goya
1746 - 1828 (82 years)
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. Goya is often referred to as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns.
Go to Profile#14225
Vitello
1230 - 1275 (45 years)
Vitello was a Polish friar, theologian, natural philosopher and an important figure in the history of philosophy in Poland. Name Vitello's name varies with some sources. In earlier publications he was quoted as Erazmus Ciolek Witelo, Erazm Ciołek, Vitellio and Vitulon. Today, he is usually referred to by his Latin name Vitello Thuringopolonis, often shortened to Vitello.
Go to Profile#14226
John Hubley
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
John Kirkham Hubley was an American animated film director, art director, producer, and writer known for his work with the United Productions of America and his own independent studio, Storyboard, Inc. . A pioneer and innovator in the American animation industry, Hubley pushed for more visually and emotionally complex films than those being produced by contemporaries like the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers Animation. He and his second wife, Faith Hubley , who he worked alongside from 1953 onward, were nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning three.
Go to Profile#14227
Mikhail Lomonosov
1711 - 1765 (54 years)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. The founder of modern geology, Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
Go to Profile#14228
Man Ray
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Go to Profile#14229
Henry Moore
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore also produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.
Go to Profile#14230
Hokusai
1760 - 1849 (89 years)
, known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai was instrumental in developing ukiyo-e from a style of portraiture largely focused on courtesans and actors into a much broader style of art that focused on landscapes, plants, and animals. His works are thought to have had a significant influence on Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet during the wave of Japonisme that spread across Europe...
Go to Profile#14231
Georgia O'Keeffe
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Go to Profile#14232
Marc Chagall
1887 - 1985 (98 years)
Marc Chagall was a Russian and French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.
Go to Profile#14233
Andrey Yershov
1931 - 1988 (57 years)
Andrey Petrovich Yershov was a Soviet computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in systems programming and programming language research. Donald Knuth considers him to have independently co-discovered the idea of hashing with linear probing. He also created one of the first algorithms for compiling arithmetic expressions.
Go to Profile#14234
Mário Gerla
#14235
Hugo Hadwiger
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Hugo Hadwiger was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work in geometry, combinatorics, and cryptography. Biography Although born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hadwiger grew up in Bern, Switzerland. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bern, where he majored in mathematics but also studied physics and actuarial science. He continued at Bern for his graduate studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Willy Scherrer. He was for more than forty years a professor of mathematics at Bern.
Go to Profile#14236
Edgar Degas
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Edgar Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings. Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. Although Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist, and did not paint outdoors as many Impressionists did.
Go to Profile#14237
John Singer Sargent
1856 - 1925 (69 years)
John Singer Sargent was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, Spain, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.
Go to Profile#14238
Conrad Gessner
1516 - 1565 (49 years)
Conrad Gessner was a Swiss physician, naturalist, bibliographer, and philologist. Born into a poor family in Zürich, Switzerland, his father and teachers quickly realised his talents and supported him through university, where he studied classical languages, theology and medicine. He became Zürich's city physician, but was able to spend much of his time on collecting, research and writing. Gessner compiled monumental works on bibliography and zoology and was working on a major botanical text at the time of his death from plague at the age of 49. He is regarded as the father of modern scientific bibliography, zoology and botany.
Go to Profile#14239
Yaqut al-Hamawi
1178 - 1229 (51 years)
Yāqūt Shihāb al-Dīn ibn-ʿAbdullāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī was a Muslim scholar of Byzantine Greek ancestry active during the late Abbasid period . He is known for his , an influential work on geography containing valuable information pertaining to biography, history and literature as well as geography.
Go to Profile#14240
Witold Lipski
1949 - 1985 (36 years)
Witold Lipski Jr. was a Polish computer scientist , and an author of two books: Combinatorics for Programmers and Life Lipski graduated from the Program of Fundamental Problems of Technology, at the Warsaw Technical University. He received a Ph.D. in computer science at the Computational Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences, under supervision of Prof. Wiktor Marek. Lipski's dissertation was on the topic of information storage and retrieval systems and titled 'Combinatorial Aspects of Information Retrieval'. His habilitation was granted by the Institute of Computer Science of Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#14241
Giambologna
1529 - 1608 (79 years)
Giambologna , also known as Jean de Boulogne , Jehan Boulongne and Giovanni da Bologna , was the last significant Italian Renaissance sculptor, with a large workshop producing large and small works in bronze and marble in a late Mannerist style.
Go to Profile#14242
Caravaggio
1571 - 1610 (39 years)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio , was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Go to Profile#14243
Norman Lindsay
1879 - 1969 (90 years)
Norman Alfred William Lindsay was an Australian artist, etcher, sculptor, writer, art critic, novelist, cartoonist and amateur boxer. One of the most prolific and popular Australian artists of his generation, Lindsay attracted both acclaim and controversy for his works, many of which infused the Australian landscape with erotic pagan elements and were deemed by his critics to be "anti-Christian, anti-social and degenerate". A vocal nationalist, he became a regular artist for The Bulletin at the height of its cultural influence, and advanced staunchly anti-modernist views as a leading writer on Australian art.
Go to Profile#14244
Gustav Klimt
1862 - 1918 (56 years)
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.
Go to Profile#14245
László Moholy-Nagy
1895 - 1946 (51 years)
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called him "relentlessly experimental" because of his pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film, theater, and writing.
Go to Profile#14246
Paul Klee
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory , published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany.
Go to Profile#14247
Giorgio de Chirico
1888 - 1978 (90 years)
Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His best-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.
Go to Profile#14248
Bhoja
1000 - 1100 (100 years)
Bhoja was an Indian king from the Paramara dynasty. His kingdom was centered around the Malwa region in central India, where his capital Dhara-nagara was located. Bhoja fought wars with nearly all his neighbours in attempts to extend his kingdom, with varying degrees of success. At its zenith, his empire extended from Chittor in the north to upper Konkan in the south, and from the Sabarmati River in the west to Vidisha in the east.
Go to Profile#14249
Andy Warhol
1928 - 1987 (59 years)
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych , the experimental films Empire and Chelsea Girls , and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable .
Go to Profile#14250
Michael S. Montalbano
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Michael S. Montalbano was a computer scientist most noted for authoring "APL Blossom Time", a poem about the early days of the APL programming language, performed to the tune of The Battle of New Orleans. He published this poem and a few other articles under the pseudonym "J. C. L. Guest".
Go to Profile