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,
#14951
Robert Lumiansky
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Robert Mayer Lumiansky was an American scholar of Medieval English and president of the American Council of Learned Societies. Born in Darlington, South Carolina, Robert Lumiansky received a bachelor's degree from The Citadel, a master's degree from the University of South Carolina, and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina. He was professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1973 and professor of English at New York University from 1975 to 1983. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Alan Perlis
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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J. S. Mitchell
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Joseph Stanley Mitchell, CBE, FRS, FRCP was a British radiotherapist and academic. He was Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge from 1957 to 1975. Early life Mitchel was born on 22 July 1909 in Birmingham, England. He was only son and the eldest child born to Joseph Brown Mitchell and his wife Ethel Maud Mary Mitchell . He was educated at Marlborough Road School and at King Edward's School, Birmingham, a boys school. He had been awarded an open scholarship to attend King Edward's School.
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Wilhelm Magnus
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Hans Heinrich Wilhelm Magnus known as Wilhelm Magnus was a German-American mathematician. He made important contributions in combinatorial group theory, Lie algebras, mathematical physics, elliptic functions, and the study of tessellations.
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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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Herman Lukoff
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
Herman Lukoff was a computer pioneer and fellow of the IEEE. Formative years Lukoff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Aaron and Anna Lukoff. He graduated from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943. While at the Moore School, he helped to develop the ENIAC and EDVAC computers.
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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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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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Ulrich Hütter
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Ulrich Hütter was an Austro-German aeronautical engineer and university teacher who came to wider prominence through his second career as a pioneer of wind power technology. Life Ulrich Hütter was born in Pilsen in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary . Eduard Hütter , his father, was an architect originally from Salzburg, whose professional career increasingly focused on monument conservation on behalf of the government. The family relocated to Salzburg in connection with Eduard Hütter's work after the war ended, and Ulrich Hütter enrolled at the classics-focused "Humanistisches Gymnasium" there in 192...
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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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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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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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W. A. Mackintosh
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
William Archibald Mackintosh, was a Canadian economist and political scientist, and was the twelfth principal of Queen's University from 1951 until 1961. He is best known for developing the staple thesis that explains Canadian economic history in terms of a series of exports of staple products – fish, fur, timber, and wheat.
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Clarence Manning
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Clarence Augustus Manning was an American slavicist. He worked for 43 years at the Columbia University in New York, eventually being appointed chairman of the Department of Slavic Studies. He published a number of studies on Slavic languages, countries and people, as well as translations of important Slavic works of literature, and was a pioneer in opening the field of study of Slavic peoples in the U.S. beyond the dominance of Russian studies of the times.
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Nico H.J. van den Boogaard
1938 - 1982 (44 years)
Nicolaas Hendricus Johannes van den Boogaard was a medievalist scholar, professor, and dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Amsterdam. Career In addition to his work as a teacher and administrator, he published widely on medieval French literature. His doctoral dissertation, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe: Collationnement, introduction et notes , continues to be cited. This dissertation built a corpus of Old French lyric poetry that Van den Boogaard then put into a computer database. In 1970, he enlarged the database and generated statistical information about several genres of medieval French literature.
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Oladele Ajose
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Oladele Adebayo Ajose was a Lagos prince who was the vice-chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University. He was an early advocate of primary health care in Nigeria and the first tenured African professor at the University of Ibadan and in Nigeria. He was one of the earliest Africans to hold a professorial chair.
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Herbert Read
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
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A. L. Strand
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
August Leroy Strand was an American entomologist who served as President of Montana State University from 1937 to 1942, and as President of Oregon State University from 1942 to 1961. Life and career Strand was born on February 12, 1894, in Victoria, Texas, to August M. and Christina Strand. His father was born in Sweden about 1855, and his mother in Sweden about 1861. They emigrated to the United States, first taking up residence in Missouri, where their first three children were born: Rose L. in 1885, Ettie C. in 1888, and May F. in 1887. The family moved to Victoria, Texas, where August was born in 1894.
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Dwight Hillis Wilson
1909 - 1962 (53 years)
Dwight Hillis Wilson Sr. was an American archivist, researcher, and teacher. He was the first archivist of Fisk University. Personal life Wilson was born on October 18, 1909, in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father, a Methodist minister, was also born in South Carolina while his mother came from Pennsylvania.
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John Edwin Windrow
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
John Edwin Windrow was an American educator. He became known as "Mr. Peabody" for his five-decade career at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a critic of Nashville's social ills and intellectual segregation.
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Shina Inoue Kan
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Shina Inoue Kan , also seen as "Shina Inouye", "Shina Kan", and "Shinako Kan", was a Japanese college professor. Early life Shina Inoue was born on 25 July 1899 in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. In 1921, her mother Hideko Inoue attended the Conference on Limitation of Armament in Washington D.C., representing the women's peace movement in Japan, with Yajima Kajiko and plant scientist Marian Irwin Osterhout. In 1931, Hide Inoue became the first woman president of Japan Women's University.
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Katherine R. Whitmore
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Katherine R. Whitmore was a Spanish literature professor at Smith College. She majored in Spanish language and literature at the University of Kansas, and received her doctorate from Berkeley. She taught at a college in Richmond and, from 1930 on, at Smith College. She married Brewer Whitmore, another professor at Smith, in 1939.
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Maximilian Salzmann
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Maximilian Salzmann was an Austrian ophthalmologist. In 1887 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, where he later worked as an assistant to Ernst Fuchs at the eye hospital. In 1906 he became an associate professor, then in 1911 was appointed professor of ophthalmology at the University of Graz. In 1918/19 he served as dean to the faculty of medicine.
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Elena Freda
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Elena Freda was an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist known for her collaboration with Vito Volterra on mathematical analysis and its applications to electromagnetism and biomathematics.
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John McCrae
1872 - 1918 (46 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during the First World War and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war. His famous poem is a threnody, a genre of lament.
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Georges Dwelshauvers
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Georges Dwelshauvers, who also wrote under the pseudonym Georges Mesnil was a Flemish Belgian philosopher and psychologist. He was the brother of the art critic and anarchist Jacques Mesnil. Dwelshauvers studied philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before studying in Germany, where he was attracted to the new experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. His attempt to submit a psychological thesis for a Brussels doctorate was blocked by Guillaume Tiberghien in what became known as the Dwelshauvers affair, and Dwelshauvers only started lecturing in philosophy after Tiberghien's retire...
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Igor Grabar
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich. He reached his peak in painting in 1903–1907 and was notable for a peculiar divisionist painting technique bordering on pointillism and his rendition of snow.
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J. C. P. Miller
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Jeffrey Charles Percy Miller was an English mathematician and computing pioneer. He worked in number theory and on geometry, particularly polyhedra, where Miller's monster refers to the great dirhombicosidodecahedron.
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Henry Thew Stephenson
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Henry Thew Stephenson was a teacher and writer. Stephenson was born in Cincinnati to Reuben Henry and Louise Stephenson. He attended Woodward High School before gaining degrees from Ohio State University, Harvard University. and Indiana University. He spent a year doing research at the British Museum.
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Jerry Bywaters
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Williamson Gerald Bywaters , known as Jerry Bywaters, was an American artist, university professor, museum director, art critic and a historian of the Texas region. Based in Dallas, Bywaters worked to elevate the quality of Texas art, attracting national recognition to the art of the region.
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Arthur Illies
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Karl Wilhelm Arthur Illies was a German painter and graphic artist. Life and work He was born to Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Illies, a merchant, and his wife, Albertine Mathilde née Schwarze. He attended the Johanneum then, at sixteen, began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter at the firm of . In the evenings he studied nude drawing with and, on Sundays, he studied animal drawing at the zoo with . In 1889, after passing his journeyman examination, he went to Munich for studies at the Königlichen Kunstgewerbeschule, where his primary instructor was Ludwig Lesker . The following year, he enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
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Kaj Franck
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Kaj Gabriel Franck was one of the leading figures of Finnish design and an influential figure in design and applied arts between 1940 and 1980. Franck's parents were Kurt Franck and Genéviève "Vevi" Ahrenberg. He was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and he was of German descent through his father.
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Ernest A. Batchelder
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Ernest Allan Batchelder was an American artist and educator who made Southern California his home in the early 20th century. He created art tiles and was a leader in the American Arts and Crafts Movement.
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Franciszek Misztal
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Franciszek Misztal - Polish aircraft designer. He studied at Lviv Polytechnic and received his doctorate in 1929 at the Technical University in Aachen. From 1928 he worked in the PZL in Warsaw as a constructor. Contributor to the design of aircraft PZL.23 Karaś , PZL.19, PZL.26 and the chief designer of PZL.38 Wilk. Inventor of the caisson structure with corrugated wings.
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Ritchie Girvan
1877 - Present (149 years)
Ritchie Girvan was a Scottish literary scholar, author, and academic; throughout his career he was associated with the University of Glasgow, where he made his name studying the Old English poem Beowulf. He is best known for his 1935 book Beowulf and the Seventh Century: Language and Content.
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Lucien March
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Lucien March was a French demographer, statistician, and engineer. In 1878 Lucien March enrolled in l'École polytechnique and after graduation in 1880 served in the naval artillery corps. He was the director of the from 1896 to 1920. In 1896, he introduced Hollerith punched card tabulating machines into France and later invented an improved machine, the classifier-counter-printer, which was used until the 1940s. He also arranged a sorting process using the workplace addresses of the people counted in the French population census to generate valuable economic data and labor statistics.
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Hale Woodruff
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Hale Aspacio Woodruff was an American artist known for his murals, paintings, and prints. Early life, family and education Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois, on August 26, 1900. He grew up in a black family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended the local segregated schools. He studied at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Harvard Fogg Art Museum.
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James Goldschmidt
1874 - 1940 (66 years)
James Paul Goldschmidt was a German jurist who made important contributions to German criminal law and criminal procedure law. He studied legal science in Heidelberg and Berlin. Of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, Goldschmidt was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1919 until his retirement in 1934 due to racial policy of Nazi Germany. In 1938 he eventually emigrated to the United Kingdom, and later Uruguay, where he died in 1940.
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Louis Bouché
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Louis George Bouché was an American artist, muralist, and decorator. He was a 1933 Guggenheim Fellow. Life Bouché was born in New York City. He traveled to Paris at age thirteen in 1909 to live with family and studied at the Lycée Carnot, Académie Colarossi, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1915, with Dimitri Romanovsky and Frank Vincent DuMond. In 1921 he married Marian. Bouché curated an art gallery in Wanamaker's department store, from 1922 to 1926.
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Clifford Ulp
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Clifford McCormick Ulp was one of Rochester's foremost professors of the arts during the first half of the 20th century. Early life Clifford Ulp was born in Olean, New York in 1885. He attended Rochester's East High School. He continued his studies at the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, or what is now known as Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated in 1908. He also attended the Art Students League in New York City on scholarship. Some of his more well known teachers included Charles H. Woodbury, Emile Gruppe and William Merritt Chase.
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George Gilmour
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
George Peel Gilmour B.A, M.A, Ph.D. was a Canadian university president. He was the youngest chancellor of McMaster University, serving from 1941 to 1949, then serving under the title of president and vice-chancellor until 1961. Gilmour Hall, the building containing the office of the president and the office of the registrar at McMaster University, is named after him.
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Hans Grundig
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Hans Grundig was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement. He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season .
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Josef Albers
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919. In 1920, Albers joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student and later became a faculty member in 1922, teaching the principles of handicrafts.
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William D. Travis
#14996
El Greco
1541 - 1614 (73 years)
Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos , most widely known as El Greco , was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word , which means "Cretan".
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Edward Hopper
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Hopper created subdued drama out of commonplace subjects layered with a poetic meaning, inviting narrative interpretations. He was praised for "complete verity" in the America he portrayed. His career benefited significantly from his marriage to fellow artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work, both as a life-model and as a creative partner.
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Dionizy Smoleński
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Dionizy Smoleński was a specialist in the theory of combustion, explosives, and internal ballistics. Smoleński was professor at the Wrocław and the Warsaw University of Technology. He was also rector of those universities, in 1951–1960 and 1965–1969, respectively. Smoleński was a member of Polish Academy of Sciences, and held the post of scientific secretary, then vice-chairman of this organization. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was an officer of the Home Army, vice-chief of arming of the Supreme Command of the Home Army. He was also a member of Sejm of the Polish People's Republic...
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Thomas Gainsborough
1727 - 1788 (61 years)
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
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Barnes Wallis
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis was an English engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.
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