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,
#14401
John T. Frederick
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
John Towner Frederick , born Corning, Iowa and only child of Oliver Roberts and Mary Elmira Frederick. He was a noted professor and literary editor, scholar, critic, and novelist. Family He married Esther Paulus on June 22, 1915, and had two children, John Joseph and James Oliver. Esther died in 1954 and he married Lucy Gertrude Paulus in the early 1960s. He died January 31, 1975, and is buried in Harrisville, Michigan near his summer home of Glennie, Michigan. An interesting note-his granddaughter currently resides in the house near Glennie with her husband and her two sons.
Go to Profile#14402
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...
Go to Profile#14403
Austin MacCormick
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Austin H. MacCormick was an American criminologist and prison reformer. In 1916 he received the Masters of Arts degree from Columbia University Teachers College. He served in the U.S. Naval reserve from 1917 to 1921. His senior officer at Portsmouth was Thomas Mott Osborne, a penologist who later employed MacCormick. In 1929 he was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Federal Prisons in the Department of Justice. In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Prisons was established and MacCormick was named Assistant Director. From 1934 to 1940 he served as Commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections.
Go to Profile#14404
Lennart Augustsson
Lennart Augustsson is a Swedish computer scientist. He was formerly a lecturer at the Computing Science Department at Chalmers University of Technology. His research field is functional programming and implementations of functional programming languages.
Go to Profile#14405
Eugenio Moggi
Eugenio Moggi is a professor of computer science at the University of Genoa, Italy. He first described the general use of monads to structure programs. Biography Academic qualifications:PhD in Computer Science, University of Edinburgh 1988Laurea in Computer Science, University of Pisa 1983Diploma, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 1983
Go to Profile#14406
Natalie Enright Jerger
Natalie Dana Enright Jerger is an American computer scientist known for research in computer science including computer architecture and interconnection networks. Education and career Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, she attended Kent Place School and received a BS in computer engineering from Purdue University in 2002. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Computer Architecture.
Go to Profile#14407
Joyce Currie Little
Joyce Currie Little was an American computer scientist, engineer, and educator. She was a professor and chairperson in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.
Go to Profile#14408
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.
Go to Profile#14409
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...
Go to Profile#14410
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.
Go to Profile#14411
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...
Go to Profile#14412
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.
Go to Profile#14413
David H. N. Spence
1925 - 1985 (60 years)
David Hugh Neven Spence was a 20th-century Scottish botanist. In authorship he is known as David H. N. Spence or D. H. N. Spence. Life He was born on 2 May 1925 in Sleaford in Lincolnshire the son of Mary Joyce Mallorie Walton and her husband, Dr Thomas Reginald Cardwardine Spence MD. His family moved to Edinburgh and he was educated at Edinburgh Academy 1933 to 1935, then at Clifton Hall School 1935 to 1938 and finally at Glenalmond College in Perthshire 1938 to 1942.
Go to Profile#14414
Reuben Smeed
1909 - 1976 (67 years)
Reuben Jacob Smeed CBE was a British statistician and transport researcher. He proposed Smeed's law which correlated traffic fatalities to traffic density and predicted that the average speed of traffic in central London would always be nine miles per hour without other disincentives, given that this was the minimum speed that people will tolerate.
Go to Profile#14415
Albert Demangeon
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Albert Demangeon was a Professor of social geography at the Sorbonne in Paris for many years. He was an educator, a prolific author, and in the 1930s was the leading French academic in the field of human geography. He was a pioneer in the use of surveys to collect information on social questions.
Go to Profile#14416
L. Thomas Hopkins
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
L. Thomas Hopkins , was a progressive education theorist, consultant, and curriculum leader. He completed all of his major writings while he was a professor and the laboratory school director at the Teachers College, Columbia University. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tufts University in 1910 and 1911 In 1922 he completed the Ed. D degree at Harvard University under the mentorship of professors Alexander Inglis and Walter Dearborn. After he finished at Harvard, he accepted a tenured position at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 1929 Hopkins was invited to join the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University as a professor of education.
Go to Profile#14417
Elliott Organick
1925 - 1985 (60 years)
Elliott Irving Organick was a computer scientist and pioneer in operating systems development and education. He was considered "the foremost expositor writer of computer science", and was instrumental in founding the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education.
Go to Profile#14418
George M. Wishart
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
George MacFeat Wishart FRSE FRCPG was a 20th-century Scottish physiologist. Life He was born in Glasgow on 18 August 1895, the son of George Wishart, a grain merchant. He was educated at Uddingston Grammar School.
Go to Profile#14419
Iwo Lominski
1905 - 1968 (63 years)
Iwo Robert Waclaw Lominski FRSE was a Polish-born microbiologist working in Britain in the 20th century. In articles he is referred to as I. R. W. Lominski. Life He was born in Kraków in Poland in 1905. He studied medicine at the University of Kraków and gained his doctorate in 1931. He obtained a prestigious position in the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Go to Profile#14420
George Hector Percival
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
George Hector Percival FRSE FRCPE was a British dermatologist, academic author and president of the British Association of Dermatologists. Life He was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife the son of E J Percival.
Go to Profile#14421
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.
Go to Profile#14422
Erik Husfeldt
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Erik Husfeldt, also spelled Erik Huusfeldt , was a Danish physician who developed groundbreaking practices for the treatment of heart and lung conditions and the development of anesthesia. During World War II, he was a resistance fighter, rescuer, and member of the Danish Freedom Council. He was also the second in command in Frode Jakobsen's Ringen.
Go to Profile#14423
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.
Go to Profile#14424
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.
Go to Profile#14425
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.
Go to Profile#14426
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 ...
Go to Profile#14427
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.
Go to Profile#14428
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...
Go to Profile#14429
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.
Go to Profile#14430
John Singleton Copley
1738 - 1815 (77 years)
John Singleton Copley was an Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. After becoming well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England, he moved to London in 1774, never returning to America. In London, he met considerable success as a portraitist for the next two decades, and also painted a number of large history paintings, which were innovative in their readiness to depict modern subjects and modern dress. His later years were less successful, and he died heavily in debt.
Go to Profile#14431
Maxfield Parrish
1870 - 1966 (96 years)
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#14432
Canaletto
1697 - 1768 (71 years)
Giovanni Antonio Canal , commonly known as Canaletto , was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school. Painter of cityscapes or vedute, of Venice, Rome, and London, he also painted imaginary views , although the demarcation in his works between the real and the imaginary is never quite clearcut. He was further an important printmaker using the etching technique. In the period from 1746 to 1756, he worked in England, where he painted many views of London and other sites, including Warwick Castle and Alnwick Castle. He was h...
Go to Profile#14433
Blake Cady
#14434
Kazimir Malevich
1879 - 1935 (56 years)
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is also sometimes considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and l...
Go to Profile#14435
Edward Ardizzone
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone, , who sometimes signed his work "DIZ", was a British painter, printmaker and war artist, and the author and illustrator of books, many of them for children. For Tim All Alone , which he wrote and illustrated, Ardizzone won the inaugural Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. For the 50th anniversary of the Medal in 2005, the book was named one of the top ten winning titles, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for public election of an all-time favourite.
Go to Profile#14436
Violet Oakley
1874 - 1961 (87 years)
Violet Oakley was an American artist. She was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.
Go to Profile#14437
Nenghaif Yu
#14438
Robert Delaunay
1885 - 1941 (56 years)
Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
Go to Profile#14439
Hyacinthe Rigaud
1659 - 1743 (84 years)
Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra , known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud , was a Catalan-French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility. Biography Rigaud was born in Perpignan, then part of the Crown of Aragon, a few months before Spain ceded the city to France under the Treaty of the Pyrenees . His family, the Rigau, were Catalan; he was the son of a tailor, the grandson of painter-gilders from Roussillon, and the elder brother of another painter .
Go to Profile#14440
Thomas Ender
1793 - 1875 (82 years)
Thomas Ender was an Austrian landscape painter and watercolorist. Life and work He was born to Johann Ender, a junk dealer, and was the twin brother of Johann Nepomuk Ender, a history painter. He and his brother were both enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he began by studying history painting with Hubert Maurer, but switched to landscape painting with Laurenz Janscha then, after Janscha's death in 1812, with Joseph Mössmer. He was awarded the Academy's first prize for landscape drawing.
Go to Profile#14441
Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi
766 - 874 (108 years)
Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah Habash Hasib Marwazi was a Persian astronomer, geographer, and mathematician from Merv in Khorasan, who was the first to describe the trigonometric ratios sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent.
Go to Profile#14442
David W. Dunstan
#14443
Barbara Hepworth
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#14444
Leslie Richard Foulds
#14445
Alexandre Cabanel
1823 - 1889 (66 years)
Alexandre Cabanel was a French painter. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well known as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of L'art pompier, and was Napoleon III's preferred painter.
Go to Profile#14446
Thomas Rowlandson
1756 - 1827 (71 years)
Thomas Rowlandson was an English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era, noted for his political satire and social observation. A prolific artist and printmaker, Rowlandson produced both individual social and political satires, as well as a large number of illustrations for novels, humorous books, and topographical works. Like other caricaturists of his age such as James Gillray, his caricatures are often robust or bawdy. Rowlandson also produced highly explicit erotica for a private clientele; this was never published publicly at the time and is now only found in a small number of collections.
Go to Profile#14447
Charles Willson Peale
1741 - 1827 (86 years)
Charles Willson Peale was an American painter, soldier, scientist, inventor, politician, and naturalist. In 1775, inspired by the American Revolution, Peale moved from his native Maryland to Philadelphia, where he set up a painting studio and joined the Sons of Liberty. During the American Revolutionary War, Peale served in the Pennsylvania Militia and the Continental Army, participating in several military campaigns. In addition to his military service, Peale also served in the Pennsylvania State Assembly from 1779 to 1780.
Go to Profile#14448
Alexander Rodchenko
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
Go to Profile#14449
Kate Greenaway
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evan...
Go to Profile#14450
Antonio Canova
1757 - 1822 (65 years)
Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.
Go to Profile