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 …
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#1451
Toby Berger
#20732
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Toby Berger was an American information theorist. Early life and education Berger was born in New York City, to a Jewish family. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1962, and doctoral degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1968.
Go to Profile#1452
Derick Wood
#31551
Overall Influence
1940 - 2010 (70 years)
Derick Wood was an English computer scientist who worked for many years as a professor of computer science in Canada and Hong Kong. He was known for his research in automata theory and formal languages, much of which he published in collaboration with Hermann Maurer and Arto Salomaa, and also for his work in computational geometry.
Go to Profile#1453
Avi Rubin
#23741
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Aviel David "Avi" Rubin is an expert in systems and networking security. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, Director of ACCURATE, and President and co-founder of Independent Security Evaluators. In 2002, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association for a two-year term.
Go to Profile#1454
Herbert Freeman
#22731
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Dr. Herbert Freeman was an American computer scientist who made important contributions to the field of automatic label placement, computer graphics, including spatial anti-aliasing, and machine vision.
Go to Profile#1455
Josh Bongard
#27704
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Josh Bongard is a professor at the University of Vermont and a 2010 PECASE awardee. He attended Northern Secondary School in Toronto, and received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from McMaster University , Canada, his master's degree from the University of Sussex, UK, and his PhD from the University of Zurich , Switzerland. He served as a postdoctoral associate under Hod Lipson in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University in the United States from 2003 to 2006.
Go to Profile#1456
Dmitry Sklyarov
#12403
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
#1457
Lixia Zhang
#24742
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Lixia Zhang is the Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her expertise is in computer networks; she helped found the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed the Resource Reservation Protocol, coined the term "middlebox", and pioneered the development of named data networking.
Go to Profile#1458
Alan M. Davis
#20712
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alan Mark Davis is president and CEO of Offtoa, Inc. in Westminster, Colorado. He is a retired Professor of Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and in the Executive MBA program at the University of Colorado at Denver. Davis earned his master's degree in Computer Science under Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and Ph.D. in Computer Science under Thomas R. Wilcox at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. He has held academic positions at George Mason University and the University of Tennessee.
Go to Profile#1459
Charles Forgy
#17588
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Charles L. Forgy is an American computer scientist, known for developing the Rete algorithm used in his OPS5 and other production system languages used to build expert systems. Early life and education Forgy attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, and then advanced to Arlington State College graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1972. From there he went to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, a renowned center for study of artificial intelligence. While studying at Carnegie he met his future wife, Diana, whom he married in 1977.
Go to Profile#1460
Nick Jennings
#25245
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Nicholas Robert Jennings is a British computer scientist and the current Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University. He was previously the Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London, the UK's first Regius Professor of Computer Science, and the inaugural Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government on National Security. His research covers the areas of AI, autonomous systems, agent-based computing and cybersecurity. He is involved in a number of startups including Aerogility, Contact Engine, Crossword Cyber Security, and Reliance Cyber Science. He is als...
Go to Profile#1461
Jean-Marie Hullot
#19709
Overall Influence
1954 - 2019 (65 years)
Jean-Marie Hullot was a French computer scientist and programmer who authored important programs for the original Macintosh, NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X platforms. These include the SOS Interface for the Mac, which later became Interface Builder for NeXTSTEP , and later still evolved into an important part of Mac OS X. He also came up with the idea of the iPhone and lead the iCal and iSync development teams for Mac OS X .
Go to Profile#1462
W. David Sincoskie
#20886
Overall Influence
1954 - 2010 (56 years)
Walter David "Dave" Sincoskie was an American computer engineer. Sincoskie installed the first Ethernet local area network at Bellcore, and helped invent voice over IP technology. Sincoskie authored the first local ATM specification. He is also the inventor of the VLAN.
Go to Profile#1463
Christopher Ré
#30688
Overall Influence
Christopher Ré is an American computer scientist. He is currently employed by Stanford University, where he is an associate professor. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. Ré specializes in big data analysis. He co-founded Lattice.io, a data mining and machine learning company that was acquired by Apple in May 2017.
Go to Profile#1465
Jason Gaverick Matheny
#9863
Overall Influence
Jason Gaverick Matheny is an American national security expert serving as president and CEO of the RAND Corporation since July 2022. He was previously a senior civil servant in the Biden Administration from March 2021 to June 2022. He served as deputy assistant to the president for technology and national security, deputy director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and coordinator for technology and national security at the White House National Security Council.
Go to Profile#1466
Wes Graham
#31839
Overall Influence
1932 - 1999 (67 years)
James Wesley Graham, OC was a Canadian professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo. Graham was born on January 17, 1932, in Copper Cliff, Ontario. His interest in computing developed while studying math and physics at the University of Toronto. After working at IBM as a systems engineer, Graham accepted a position at the University of Waterloo in 1959 becoming one of the first computer science professors at the university. In 1962, Graham was named the director of Waterloo's Computing Centre when it was established as a separate entity from Department of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1467
David Bader
#23641
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Go to Profile#1468
Timo Honkela
#26826
Overall Influence
1962 - 2020 (58 years)
Timo Untamo Honkela was a computer scientist at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University School of Science and Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture. He holds a PhD from Helsinki University of Technology.
Go to Profile#1469
Carol Spradling
#32037
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Carol Spradling is an American professor, computer scientist who served as the first Director of the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. She is known for her work with computer ethics, profession-based education, interactive media, and expanding the involvement of underrepresented groups and women in computing. Dr. Spradling taught computer science courses and served as a provost fellow and a liaison to the Northland Center For Advanced Professional Studies program. Spradling served on the Missouri Department of High...
Go to Profile#1470
Jan Bosch
#32522
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jan Bosch is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Groningen and at Chalmers University of Technology, and IT consultant, particularly known for his work on software architecture.
Go to Profile#1471
Hussein Zedan
#31884
Overall Influence
1953 - 2019 (66 years)
Hussein S. M. Zedan was a computer scientist of Egyptian descent, mainly based in the United Kingdom. Hussein Zedan was born in 1953. He received his PhD degree in 1981 at the University of Bristol, studying under John Derwent Pryce and Hubert Schwetlick for a thesis entitled Modified Rosenbrock-Wanner methods for solving systems of stiff ordinary differential equations.
Go to Profile#1472
Norman Matloff
#22025
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Norman Saul Matloff is an American professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. Early life Norman Saul Matloff was born on December 16, 1948. Matloff received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975 from the mathematics department at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Thomas M. Liggett. His dissertation was titled Equilibrium Behavior in an Infinite Voting Model.
Go to Profile#1473
John Kosh
#7195
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John Kosh, known simply as Kosh, is an English art director, album cover designer, graphic artist, and documentary producer/director. He was born in London, England and rose to prominence in the mid-1960s while designing for the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera House. He was the creative director of Apple Corps for The Beatles and was art director and album cover designer for Abbey Road and Let It Be, as well as other Apple artists.
Go to Profile#1474
Brian Wilson
#6949
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Brian Wilson is a British systems scientist and honorary professor at Cardiff University, known for his development of soft systems methodology and enterprise modelling. Biography After graduating from University of Nottingham with a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, nuclear power engineering and control system design, Wilson joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority where he was concerned with the control and spatial stability of gas-cooled reactors and power plants. In 1966, he left the world of nuclear power engineering and control system design, and became a founder memb...
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Jeff Moss
#18088
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Jeff Moss , also known as Dark Tangent, is an American hacker, computer and internet security expert who founded the Black Hat and DEF CON computer security conferences. Early life and education Moss received his first computer at the age of 10. He became fascinated because he wasn't old enough to drive a car or vote, but he could engage in adult conversation with people all over the country.
Go to Profile#1476
Herb Grosch
#12846
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Herbert Reuben John Grosch was an early computer scientist, perhaps best known for Grosch's law, which he formulated in 1950. Grosch's Law is an aphorism that states "economy is as the square root of the speed."
Go to Profile#1477
Wayne Rosing
#12759
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Wayne Rosing is an American engineering manager. Rosing was an engineering manager at Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General in the 1970s. He became a director of engineering at Apple Computer in 1980. There he led the Apple Lisa project, the forerunner to the Macintosh. He then went on to work at Sun Microsystems in 1985. After managing hardware development for products such as the SPARCstation, he became manager of Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1990. From 1992 through 1996 he headed the spin-off First Person, which developed the Java Platform. He was then chief technology offic...
Go to Profile#1478
Ron Pinter
#33370
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ron Yair Pinter is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in computational systems biology, integrated circuit layout and compiler optimization. He is professor of computer science and the Rappaport Medical School at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. He was a founding member of the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, . In the past, he has been a program manager at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and Vice President for Research and Development at Compugen. He is an author and co-author of more than 90 books and peer-reviewed articles, all of which were cited more than 2500 times.
Go to Profile#1479
Phil Moorby
#26236
Overall Influence
2000 - 2022 (22 years)
Phil Moorby was a British engineer and computer scientist. Moorby was born and brought up in Birmingham, England, and studied Mathematics at Southampton University, England. Moorby received his master's degree in computer science from Manchester University, England, in 1974. He moved to the United States in 1983.
Go to Profile#1480
Chris Avellone
#13450
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before working as a freelancer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as Planescape: Torment and the Fallout series.
Go to Profile#1481
Simon Tatham
#33925
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Simon Tatham is a British computer programmer. He created and maintains PuTTY, a free software implementation of Secure Shell and Telnet for Microsoft Windows and Unix, along with an xterm terminal emulator. He is also the original author of Netwide Assembler , and maintains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games. All of them run natively on Nintendo DS, Symbian S60, Unix , and Windows.
Go to Profile#1482
Mark Burgess
#22426
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mark Burgess is an independent researcher and writer, formerly professor at Oslo University College in Norway and creator of the CFEngine software and company, who is known for work in computer science in the field of policy-based configuration management.
Go to Profile#1483
Jeremy Ashkenas
#33507
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jeremy Ashkenas is a computer programmer known for the creation and co-creation of the CoffeeScript and LiveScript programming languages respectively, the Backbone.js JavaScript framework and the Underscore.js JavaScript library. While working in the graphics department at The New York Times, he shared the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for Images/Graphics/Interactives. After working at the Times, he was an employee of Observable, Inc. As of 2020, he works at Substack Inc. Jeremy returned to The New York Times in June 2022 as Director of Graphics for Opinion.
Go to Profile#1484
Maurizio Lenzerini
#30567
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Maurizio Lenzerini is an Italian professor of computer science and engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome , where he specializes in database theory, Ontology language, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning as well as service modeling. He is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed articles, a fellow of both the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence and ACM, and a member of the Academia Europaea - The Academy of Europe.
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Robert France
#33360
Overall Influence
1960 - 2015 (55 years)
Robert Bertrand France was a Jamaica-born American computer scientist. Robert B. France was born in Jamaica on October 8, 1960, the eldest son of Robert W. and Jeanette France. He attended high school in Guyana and studied for a BSc degree in Natural Sciences at the University of the West Indies in Saint Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics and receiving a first class degree in 1984. He then attended Massey University in New Zealand funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship, where he achieved a PhD degree in computer science in 1990. During the same year, he married Sheriffa R.
Go to Profile#1486
Naveen Garg
#34393
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Naveen Garg is a Professor of Computer Science in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, specializing in algorithms and complexity in theoretical computer science. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, India's highest prize for excellence in science, mathematics and technology, in the mathematical sciences category in the year 2016. Naveen Garg's contributions are primarily in the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems arising in network design, scheduling, routing, facility location etc.
Go to Profile#1487
Margaret H. Wright
#13986
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Margaret H. Wright is an American computer scientist and mathematician. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra, and scientific computing. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and for leadership in the applied mathematics community. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was the first woman to serve as Presiden...
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J. Alex Halderman
#18224
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
J. Alex Halderman is professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where he is also director of the Center for Computer Security & Society. Halderman's research focuses on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact society and public policy.
Go to Profile#1489
James Z. Wang
#28032
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
James Ze Wang is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He is also an affiliated professor of the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences Program; the Computational Science Graduate Minor; and the Social Data Analytics Graduate Program. He is co-director of the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory. He was a visiting professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2007 to 2008. In 2011 and 2012, he served as a program manager in the Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#1490
Norman Margolus
#19538
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Norman H. Margolus is a Canadian-American physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing. He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1491
Jack Wolf
#23866
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Jack Keil Wolf was an American researcher in information theory and coding theory. Biography Wolf was born in 1935 in Newark, New Jersey, and graduated from Weequahic High School in 1952. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960 for his thesis "On the Detection and Estimation Problem for Multiple Nonstationary Random Processes". He held faculty appointments at New York University 1963–1965, the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1965–1973 and the University of Massachusetts Amherst 1973–1984, and worked at RCA Laboratories and Bell Laboratories.
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Telle Whitney
#24128
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Telle Whitney is the former CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. A computer scientist by training, she cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with Anita Borg in 1994 and joined the Anita Borg Institute in 2002.
Go to Profile#1493
Miller Puckette
#19367
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Miller Smith Puckette is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data , a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input ...
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Thomas Binford
#22444
Overall Influence
Thomas Oriel Binford has been a researcher in image analysis and computer vision since 1967. He developed a model-based approach to computer vision in which complex objects are represented as collections of generalized cylinders. His results are reflected in work in other areas of research, including the interpretation of complex scenes using invariants and quasi-invariants, inference rules and evidential reasoning in extended Bayes networks of symbolic geometric constraints, the SUCCESSOR system, a portable, intelligent vision system, stereo and visual robot navigation, segmentation and featu...
Go to Profile#1495
Peter Shirley
#33111
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peter Shirley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA and adjunct professor at the University of Utah in computer science. He has made extensive contributions to interactive photorealistic rendering. His textbook, Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, is considered one of the leading introductory texts on computer graphics and is currently in the fourth edition.
Go to Profile#1496
I-Chen Wu
#18483
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
I-Chen Wu is a professor at Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University. He received his B.S. in Electronic Engineering from National Taiwan University , M.S. in computer science from NTU, and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University, in 1982, 1984 and 1993, respectively.
Go to Profile#1497
Amit Sheth
#20827
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Amit Sheth is a computer scientist at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2007 to June 2019, he was the Lexis Nexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, and a Professor of Computer Science at Wright State University. Sheth's work has been cited by over 48,800 publications. He has an h-index of 106, which puts him among the top 100 computer scientists with the highest h-index. Prior to f...
Go to Profile#1498
Sergiy Vilkomir
#23049
Overall Influence
1956 - 2020 (64 years)
Sergiy A. Vilkomir was a Ukrainian-born computer scientist. Sergiy Vilkomir was born in 1956 in present-day Ukraine. He finished Mathematical College at the Moscow State University National Mathematical Boarding High School no. 18 , studied for an MSc degree in Mathematics and Mathematics Education at Kharkov State University , and for a PhD degree at Kharkov Polytechnic Institute . In Kharkiv, Ukraine, he then worked at the Ukrainian Polytechnic Institute , the Central Institute of Complex Automation , the Institute of Safety and Reliability of Technological Systems , the Ukrainian State Scientific and Technical Centre on Nuclear and Radiation Safety .
Go to Profile#1499
Ronald Fedkiw
#30620
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ronald Paul "Ron" Fedkiw is a full professor in the Stanford University department of computer science and a leading researcher in the field of computer graphics, focusing on topics relating to physically based simulation of natural phenomena and machine learning. His techniques have been employed in many motion pictures. He has earned recognition at the 80th Academy Awards and the 87th Academy Awards as well as from the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1500
Ted Selker
#17313
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Edwin Joseph Selker, better known as Ted Selker, is an American computer scientist known for his user interface inventions. Biography Selker graduated from Brown University in 1979 with a BS in Applied Mathematics, and from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MS in Computer and Information Sciences in 1981. From June 1981 to 1983 he worked as research assistant in the Stanford University, Robotics Laboratory. One of his projects was a collaborative display system for the WAITS system of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . He worked for Atari for a year, then returned ...
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