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,
#14701
David Stuart
1765 - Present (261 years)
David Stuart was a fur trader who worked primarily for the North West and Pacific Fur companies throughout his varied career. Fort Astoria In the official Fort Astoria logbook maintained by station manager Duncan McDougall, Stuart was recorded in May 1811 as suffering overexertion and potentially a hernia from clearing timber. In the same month, the Chinookans reported sighting a merchant vessel near their settlements on the coast. Rather than lose the beaver skins to rival Maritime fur traders, McDougall sent Stuart on 22 May to Comcomly's village across the Columbia River. The reported vessel never actually appeared after its existence was announced by Chinookan traders.
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Keith Henderson
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Keith Henderson was a Scottish painter who worked in both oils and watercolours, and who is known for his book illustrations and his poster work for London Transport and the Empire Marketing Board. He had a long professional career that included periods as a war artist in both the First World War, in which he served in the trenches, and in the Second World War.
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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
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Leonard Ross
1945 - 1985 (40 years)
Leonard "Lenny" M. Ross, was an American teacher, lawyer, and government official who was famous for his celebrity as a child prodigy and television game show contestant. Ross's game show winnings, totaling $164,000 , were for two months in the spring of 1957 the highest ever earned on a United States television game show.
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Wifredo Lam
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla , better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Inspired by and in contact with some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Lam melded his influences and created a unique style, which was ultimately characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures. This distinctive visual style of his also influences many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramic...
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Theresa Pollak
1899 - 2002 (103 years)
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Ferdinand Hodler
1853 - 1918 (65 years)
Ferdinand Hodler was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism which he called "parallelism".
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William Kent
1684 - 1748 (64 years)
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
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Costantino Nivola
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Costantino Nivola was an Italian sculptor, architectural sculptor, muralist, designer, and teacher. Born in Sardinia, Nivola had already started his career when he fled Fascism for Paris in 1938, going to the U.S. in 1939. His major sculptural work is abstract, large-scale architectural reliefs in concrete, made in his own sandcasting and cement carving processes. These were erected in and on American buildings between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Creatively busy and while remaining active in Italy, Nivola also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere.
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Millard Sheets
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
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Arthur Streeton
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism. Early life Streeton was born in Mount Duneed, Victoria, south-west of Geelong, on 8 April 1867 the fourth child of Charles Henry and Mary Streeton. His family moved to Richmond in 1874. His parents had met on the voyage from England in 1854. In 1882, Streeton commenced art studies with G. F. Folingsby at the National Gallery School. On 2 June 1890, he sailed to Sydney, and stayed there with his sister in the suburb of Summer Hill.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Carl Larsson
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Carl Olof Larsson was a Swedish painter representative of the Arts and Crafts movement. His many paintings include oils, watercolors, and frescoes. He is principally known for his watercolors of idyllic family life. He considered his finest work to be Midvinterblot , a large painting now displayed inside the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts.
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Alexej von Jawlensky
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky , surname also spelt as Yavlensky, was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .
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Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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John Duncan
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Duncan was a Scottish Symbolist painter. Much of his work, apart from portraits, depicted Arthurian legends, Celtic folklore, and other mythological subjects. Biography Duncan was born in the Hilltown area of Dundee on 19 July 1866, the son of a butcher and cattleman. John, however, had no interest in the family business and preferred the visual arts. By the age of 15 he was submitting cartoons to the local magazine The Wizard of the North and was later taken on as an assistant in the art department of the Dundee Advertiser. At the same time he was also a student at the Dundee School of Art, then based at the High School of Dundee.
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Robert W. Chambers
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Life Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton . His parents met when his mother was twelve years old and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually the two formed the law firm of Chambers and Boughton which continued to prosper even after Joseph's death in 1861. Robert Chambers's great-grandfather, ...
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William Scott
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
William Scott was a prominent abstract painter from Northern Ireland, known for his themes of still life, landscape and female nudes. He is the most internationally celebrated of 20th-century Ulster painters. His early life was the subject of the film Every Picture Tells a Story, made by his son James Scott.
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Constantin Hansen
1804 - 1880 (76 years)
Carl Christian Constantin Hansen was one of the painters associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He was deeply interested in literature and mythology, and inspired by art historian Niels Laurits Høyen, he tried to recreate a national historical painting based on Norse mythology. He painted also many altarpieces and portraits, including the monumental oil painting The Danish Constituent Assembly between 1861 and 1865.
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Avard Fairbanks
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Avard Tennyson Fairbanks was a 20th-century American sculptor. Over his eighty-year career, he sculpted over 100 public monuments and hundreds of artworks. Fairbanks is known for his religious-themed commissions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints including the Three Witnesses, Tragedy of Winter Quarters, and several Angel Moroni sculptures on LDS temple spires. Additionally, Fairbanks sculpted over a dozen Abraham Lincoln-themed sculptures and busts among which the most well-known reside in the U.S. Supreme Court Building and Ford's Theatre Museum.
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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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Albert Wurts Whitney
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Albert Wurts Whitney was a statistician and actuarial scientist, known for his role in the application of Bayes' rule to the development of standards in setting insurance premiums for workmen's compensation. He was a pioneer in accident prevention work and public safety education.
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Frederick W. Hilles
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Frederick Whiley "Ted" Hilles was Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale University. He was a noted authority on the literary career of Sir Joshua Reynolds and edited the 1929 edition of Reynolds letters that was published by Cambridge University Press. During the Second World War he worked in intelligence for the U.S. Army at Bletchley Park in England.
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Marco Mincoff
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Marco Mincoff Shakespearean scholar and professor of English Studies at the University of Sofia. Mincoff was born July 15 , 1909 in Chamkorya . With a Humboldt grant he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin in 1933. From 1951 to 1974 he was head of the department of English at the University of Sofia. Over the years, teaching courses in grammar, phonetics, stylistics and the history of English literature, he wrote various textbooks and monographs. However his main subject was English Renaissance drama, on which he wrote numerous articles. His work earned him recognit...
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Rene d'Harnoncourt
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
René d'Harnoncourt was an Austrian-born American art curator. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1949 to 1967. Background Of Austrian, Czech, and French descent, Count Rene d'Harnoncourt was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Count Hubert d'Harnoncourt and his wife, the former Julie Mittrowsky. Although he showed an interest in art as a child, he received a technical education. After his family suffered severe financial losses, he moved to Paris in 1924, and went to Mexico in 1926. D'Harnoncourt initially eked out a minimal living as a commercial artist, but quickly ...
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William Henry Schofield
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
William Henry Schofield was an American academic, founder of the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature. He was professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation .
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Horace Day
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Horace Day , also Horace Talmage Day, was an American painter of the American scene who came to maturity during the Thirties and was active as a painter over the next 50 years. He traveled widely in the United States and continued to explore throughout his life subjects that first captured his attention as an artist in the Thirties. He gained early recognition for his portraits and landscapes, particularly his paintings in the Carolina Lowcountry.
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Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Hieronymus Christoph Jan Eugen Franz Gottfried Maria Freiherr von Pölnitz, known as Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz was a German social historian, economic historian and archivist.
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Oscar Craig
1846 - Present (180 years)
Oscar J. Craig was the first president of the University of Montana. Craig served as the president between July 1895 to October 1908, and he managed the university almost single-handedly for those thirteen years. Craig taught a few classes each semester, as well as helping to establish the campus itself. He also founded a significant amount of the programs at the university that still persist today. Prior to graduating from DePauw University in 1884, Craig served in the position of Superintendent of City Schools in Sullivan, Indiana for a few years. In 1883, he became a professor at Purdue University, teaching political economy and history before moving to Montana to found the University.
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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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Pratul Chandra Gupta
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Pratul Chandra Gupta was an Indian historian, writer and the author of Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, a historical account of the siege of Cawnpore. Considered by many as an authority on Maratha history, he translated The Maharashta Purana, an 18th-century Bengali text written by Gangaram into English, Edward C. Dimock, a known Indologist, being his co-translator. One of his books, INA in Military Operation, was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru but the book could not be published, reportedly due to political objections. The Last Peshwa and the English Commissioners, 1818-1851 and Shah Alam II and His Court are some of his other notable works.
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Jack Roderick
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Jack William Roderick, FIStructE, FICE, FASCE FTSE, FAA was Challis Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney from 1951 until his retirement in 1978. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta.
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Raimundo Lida
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Raimundo Lida was an Argentine philologist, philosopher of language, literary critic and essayist. He specialised in Romance philology, aesthetics, the literature of the Spanish Golden Age and modernist literature. He taught at Harvard University from 1953, where he was chair of the department of Romance Languages. The second of three children, his siblings were the hematologist Emilio Lida and María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, also a philologist.
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Howard H. Aiken
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Howard Hathaway Aiken was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer. Biography Aiken studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1939. During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. Inspired by Charles Babbage's difference engine, he envisioned an electro-mechanical computing device that could do much of the tedious work for him. This computer was originally called the ASCC and later renamed Harvard Mark I.
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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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Thornton Carle Fry
1892 - 1991 (99 years)
Thornton Carle Fry was an applied mathematician, known for his two widely-used textbooks, Probability and its engineering uses and Elementary differential equations . Career Thornton C. Fry received his bachelor's degree from Findlay College in 1912 and then pursued graduate study in Wisconsin in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. He received his M.A. in 1913 and his Ph.D. in 1920 in applied mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with thesis under the supervision of Charles S. Slichter.
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Howard Liddell
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Howard Scott Liddell was an American professor of psychology who was involved in the Macy Conferences. Liddell graduated from the University of Michigan in 1917. After completing his MA, he moved to Cornell University as an instructor, completing his Ph.D. in 1923 and becoming an assistant professor in 1926. In 1930 he was appointed Chairman of Department of Physiology in the Medical College He became professor of Psychology in 1939 and then professor of Psychobiology in 1947. The Behavior Farm Laboratory which he founded at Cornell University was renamed the Liddell Laboratory of Comparati...
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Donald Burmister
1883 - 1981 (98 years)
Donald M. Burmister was a professor of civil engineering and a pioneer in the field of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. Career Donald Burmister served as faculty member at Columbia University for 34 years, beginning in 1929. He was a consultant on the foundation design for many notable construction projects including the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Verazanno-Narrows Bridge, Tappan Zee Bridge, first New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, and reconstruction of the White House in 1950.
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Nicholas Tatonetti
Nicholas Tatonetti is an American bioscientist who is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Chief Officer of Cancer Data Science at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University. His lab develops data mining approaches to understand clinical and molecular data.
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Heinz Rutishauser
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...
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Norbert Wiener
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
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Dan Willard
Dan Edward Willard was an American computer scientist and logician, and a professor of computer science at the University at Albany. Education and career Willard did his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Stony Brook University, graduating in 1970. He went on to graduate studies in mathematics at Harvard University, earning a master's degree in 1972 and a doctorate in 1978. After leaving Harvard, he worked at Bell Labs for four years before joining the Albany faculty in 1983.
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King-Sun Fu
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
King-Sun Fu was a Chinese-born American computer scientist. He was a Goss Distinguished Professor at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was instrumental in the founding of International Association for Pattern Recognition , served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the field of pattern recognition and machine intelligence. In honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, IAPR gives the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize to a living person in the recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.
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Richard Shope
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Richard Edwin Shope was an American virologist who, together with his mentor Paul A. Lewis at the Rockefeller Institute, identified influenzavirus A in pigs in 1931. Using Shope's technique, Smith, Andrewes, and Laidlaw of England's Medical Research Council cultured it from a human in 1933. They and Shope in 1935 and 1936, respectively, identified it as the virus circulating in the 1918 pandemic. In 1933, Shope identified the Shope papilloma virus, which infects rabbits. His discovery later assisted other researchers to link the papilloma virus to warts and cervical cancer. He received the...
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William S. Gray
1885 - 1960 (75 years)
William S. Gray was an American educator and literacy advocate. Life and career Gray was born in the town of Coatsburg, Illinois, on June 5, 1885. He graduated from high school in 1904 and began teaching in a one-room school house in Adams County, Illinois. After four years of teaching and being a principal he went to Illinois State Normal University for a two-year teacher training course. His studies were influenced by the North American Herbartian movement that emphasized starting with what the child knows and proceeding with an inductive instructional approach.
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J. C. R. Licklider
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider , known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologist and computer scientist who is considered to be among the most prominent figures in computer science development and general computing history.
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Kyūichirō Washizu
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Kyūichirō Washizu was a Japanese aircraft engineer and academic. He served as professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Tokyo and professor of engineering science at the Osaka University. He led the performance-related design of the kamikaze attack aircraft Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka during World War II.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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