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,
#14451
Elisabeth Blochmann
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Elisabeth Blochmann was a scholar of education, as well as of philosophy, and a pioneer in and researcher of women's education in Germany. Life Born in 1892 as the first child of the public prosecutor Dr. Heinrich Blochmann and his wife Anna née Sachs into an assimilated German-Jewish upper-middle-class family, Elisabeth grew up in the then Grand Ducal capital of Weimar, where she attended the upper girls' school, was certified as an assistant nurse, and qualified as a teacher. Serving as a nurse at a lazarett in Weimar during the first year of World War I, and then for two years as a teacher...
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Harry Holtzman
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Harry Holtzman was an American artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Early life At the age of fourteen, Holtzman visited the Société Anonyme’s 1926 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” at the Brooklyn Museum and developed an early interest in advanced art with the guidance and encouragement of a high school teacher.
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N. I. Herescu
1903 - 1961 (58 years)
Niculae I. Herescu was a Romanian classical scholar, essayist, translator and poet. Descended from a noble family of Oltenia, he was trained in Latin and became a full professor at the University of Bucharest while still in his twenties. He translated widely from the Roman canon, as well as publishing a series of studies devoted to ancient writers. Meanwhile, Herescu wrote poetry of his own, and was president of the Romanian Writers' Society for several years. He left his native country shortly before a Soviet occupation began, and spent the last part of his life in exile, first in Portugal a...
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Muriel Sibell Wolle
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Muriel Sibell Wolle, née Muriel Vincent Sibell was an American artist best known for her drawings and paintings of mining communities in the western states. Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1920 with diplomas in advertising and costume design. After graduation, she accepted a teaching position at the Texas State College for Women in Denton, Texas, then served as an instructor in Art at the Parsons School of Design from 1923 to 1926. After a trip to Colorado in 1926, Sibell began looking for a teaching position in the West.
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Alexei Zavarzin
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Alexei Alexeivich Zavarzin was a Soviet histologist and biologist. He worked on evolutionary and comparative aspects of histology. He proposed that comparable tissues developed in similar ways across organisms.
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Leo Friedlander
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Leo Friedlander was an American sculptor, who has made several prominent works. Friedlander studied at the Art Students League in New York City, the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Brussels and Paris, and the American Academy in Rome. He was an assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship and taught at the American Academy in Rome and at New York University, where he headed the sculpture department. He was also president of the National Sculpture Society. In 1936, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1949.
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Arthur Wesley Dow
1857 - 1922 (65 years)
Arthur Wesley Dow was an American painter, printmaker, photographer and an arts educator. Early life Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1857. Dow received his first art training in 1880 from Anna K. Freeland of Worcester, Massachusetts. The following year, Dow continued his studies in Boston with James M. Stone, a former student of Frank Duveneck and Gustave Bouguereau. In 1884, he went to Paris for his early art education, studying at the Académie Julian, under the supervision of the academic artists Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre.
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Ralph Leigh
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Ralph Alexander Leigh was a modern languages scholar, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of French in the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1982, later Sandars Reader in Bibliography, in 1986–87. He specialized in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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Charles Leonard Hamblin
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Charles Leonard Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology in Sydney. Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack. This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack. The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. In philosophy, Hamblin is known for his book Fallacies, a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic.
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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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Edgar Goldschmid
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Edgar Goldschmid was a German physician, pathologist and historian of medicine. Career and work Born to a Jewish family, he was a son of the banker and art collector Eduard Goldschmid, and attended the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt. He studied medicine at the University of Freiburg, the University of Kiel and LMU, where he was influenced notably by Otto von Bollinger. In Munich he earned his doctorate in 1905 with a dissertation on tuberculosis in children.
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Bernard Mouat Jones
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Bernard Mouat Jones DSO was a British Chemist, notable for identifying the chemical in Mustard gas and the first scientist to be Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. Early life and education Jones was born in Streatham, London on 27 November 1882, the fourth son of Alexander Moat Jones, a wine merchant, and Martha Eleanor . He attended Queen's College, Streatham and Dulwich College. In 1901 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford where, three years later, he gained a first-class honours degree in chemistry, mineralogy, and crystallography.
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Denman Ross
1853 - 1935 (82 years)
Denman Waldo Ross was an American painter, art collector, and scholar of art history and theory. He was a lecturer on art and design at Harvard University and a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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Georg Hüsing
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Georg Hüsing was an Austrian historian and philologist who specialized in Germanic studies and mythography. Biography Georg Hüsing was born in Liegnitz, Kingdom of Prussia on 4 June 1869. He studied ancient history, Indo-European, Semitic, Iranian and German at the universities of Breslau, Berlin and Königsberg. Upon receiving his Ph.D. at Königsberg, Hüsing worked as a private lecturer.
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Christopher Strachey
1916 - 1975 (59 years)
Christopher S. Strachey was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing. He has also been credited as possibly being the first developer of a video game. He was a member of the Strachey family, prominent in government, arts, administration, and academia.
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Ada Lovelace
1815 - 1852 (37 years)
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
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Bui Tuong Phong
1942 - 1975 (33 years)
Bui Tuong Phong was a Vietnamese-born computer graphics researcher and pioneer. He invented the widely used Phong shading algorithm and Phong reflection model. Life Phong was born in Hanoi, then French Indochina. After attending the Lycée Albert Sarraut there, he moved with his family to Saigon in 1954, where he attended the Lycée Jean Jacques Rousseau. He went to France in 1964 and was admitted to the Grenoble Institute of Technology. He received his licence ès sciences from Grenoble in 1966 and his Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, in 1968. In 1968, he joined the as a resea...
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Walter Pitts
1923 - 1969 (46 years)
Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. was an American logician who worked in the field of computational neuroscience. He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and generative processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science, artificial neural networks, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, together with what has come to be known as the generative sciences. He is best remembered for having written along with Warren McCulloch, a seminal paper in scientific history, titled "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" .
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Arthur Samuel
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Arthur Lee Samuel was an American pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. He popularized the term "machine learning" in 1959. The Samuel Checkers-playing Program was among the world's first successful self-learning programs, and as such a very early demonstration of the fundamental concept of artificial intelligence . He was also a senior member in the TeX community who devoted much time giving personal attention to the needs of users and wrote an early TeX manual in 1983.
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Ralph Hartley
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley was an American electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory. Biography Hartley was born in Sprucemont, Nevada, and attended the University of Utah, receiving an A.B. degree in 1909. He became a Rhodes Scholar at St Johns, Oxford University, in 1910 and received a B.A. degree in 1912 and a B.Sc. degree in 1913. He married Florence Vail of Brooklyn on March 21, 1916. The Hartleys had no children.
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Mary Kenneth Keller
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M. was an American Catholic religious sister, educator and pioneer in computer science. She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in the United States. Keller and Irving C. Tang were the first two recipients of computer science doctorates .
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Samuel Morse
1791 - 1872 (81 years)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code in 1837 and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
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Henry J. Kelley
1926 - 1988 (62 years)
Henry J. Kelley was Christopher C. Kraft Professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He produced major contributions to control theory, especially in aeronautical engineering and flight optimization.
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M. C. Escher
1898 - 1972 (74 years)
Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.
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Pablo Picasso
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the anti-war painting Guernica , a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish...
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Stanley Gill
1926 - 1975 (49 years)
Professor Stanley J. Gill was a British computer scientist credited, along with Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler, with the invention of the first computer subroutine. Early life, education and career Stanley Gill was born 26 March 1926 in Worthing, West Sussex, England. He was educated at Worthing High School for Boys and was, during his schooldays, a member of an amateur dramatic society.
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Clifford Berry
1918 - 1963 (45 years)
Clifford Edward Berry helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff–Berry computer . Biography Clifford Berry was born April 19, 1918, in Gladbrook, Iowa, to Fred and Grace Berry. His father owned an appliance repair shop, where he was able to learn about radios. He graduated from Marengo High School in Marengo, Iowa, in 1934 as the class valedictorian at age 16. He went on to study at Iowa State College , eventually earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and followed by his master's degree in physics in 1941.
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Salvador Dalí
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol , known as Salvador Dalí , was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.
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Joe Ossanna
1928 - 1977 (49 years)
Joseph Frank Ossanna, Jr. was an electrical engineer and computer programmer who worked as a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became actively engaged in the software design of Multics , a general-purpose operating system used at Bell.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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....
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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