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,
#151
Larry Constantine
#2094
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Larry LeRoy Constantine is an American software engineer, professor in the Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira Portugal, and considered one of the pioneers of computing. He has contributed numerous concepts and techniques forming the foundations of modern practice in software engineering and applications design and development.
Go to Profile#152
Jeff Dean
#2808
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he has been the lead of Google AI. He was appointed Alphabet's chief scientist in 2023 after a reorganization of Alphabet's AI focused groups.
Go to Profile#153
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#2261
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter . His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN.
Go to Profile#154
Stephen R. Bourne
#2433
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen Richard "Steve" Bourne is an English computer scientist based in the United States for most of his career. He is well known as the author of the Bourne shell , which is the foundation for the standard command-line interfaces to Unix.
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Cliff Shaw
#1663
Overall Influence
1922 - 1991 (69 years)
John Clifford Shaw was a systems programmer at the RAND Corporation. He is a coauthor of the first artificial intelligence program, the Logic Theorist, and was one of the developers of General Problem Solver and Information Processing Language . Information Processing Language is considered the true "father" of the JOSS language. One of the most significant events that occurred in the programming was the development of the concept of list processing by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw during the development of the language IPL-V. He invented the linked list, which remains fundam...
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Douglas T. Ross
#1818
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools , a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.
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Per Brinch Hansen
#2662
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing. Biography Early life and education Per Brinch Hansen was born in Frederiksberg, an enclave surrounded by Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, Jørgen Brinch Hansen, worked as a civil engineer, becoming a leading expert in soil mechanics, and later accepting a professorship at Technical University of Denmark. His mother, Elsebeth Brinch Hansen , was the daughter of Danish composer Oluf Ring and worked as a hairdresser before marrying.
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Bob Sproull
#2494
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Jennifer Widom
#2148
Overall Influence
Jennifer Widom is an American computer scientist known for her work in database systems and data management. She is notable for foundational contributions to semi-structured data management and data stream management systems. Since 2017, Widom is the dean of the School of Engineering and professor of computer science at Stanford University. Her honors include the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and multiple lifetime achievement awards from the Association for Computing Machinery.
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Jacob Ziv
#1285
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Jacob Ziv was an Israeli electrical engineer and information theorist who developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms alongside Abraham Lempel. Biography Born in Tiberias, British mandate Palestine, on 27 November 1931, Ziv received his B.Sc., Dip. Eng. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and his D.Sc. degree, receiving the degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. In 1970, Ziv joined the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and was the Herman Gross Professor of Electrical Engineering a...
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Jean E. Sammet
#2171
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Jean E. Sammet was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and her M.A. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1949. She received an honorary D.Sc. from Mount Holyoke College in 1978.
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David Wheeler
#2429
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
David John Wheeler FRS was a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge. Education Wheeler was born in Birmingham, England, the second of the three children of Marjorie, née Gudgeon, and Arthur Wheeler, a press tool maker, engineer, and proprietor of a small shopfitting firm. He was educated at a local primary school in Birmingham and then went on to King Edward VI Camp Hill School after winning a scholarship in 1938. His education was disrupted by World War II, and he completed his sixth form studies at Hanley High School. In 1945 he gained a scholarship to study the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1948.
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Robert Cailliau
#1715
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
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Scott Aaronson
#2078
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
#165
Trevor Hastie
#1985
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Trevor John Hastie is an American statistician and computer scientist. He is currently serving as the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for his contributions to applied statistics, especially in the field of machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics. He has authored several popular books in statistical learning, including The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Hastie has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge.
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Umesh Vazirani
#2151
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Umesh Virkumar Vazirani is an Indian–American academic who is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. His research interests lie primarily in quantum computing. He is also a co-author of a textbook on algorithms.
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Brian Randell
#2806
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Brian Randell DSc FBCS FLSW is a British computer scientist, and emeritus professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted authority on the early pre-1950 history of computing hardware.
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Winston W. Royce
#1607
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Winston Walker Royce was an American computer scientist, director at Lockheed Software Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He was a pioneer in the field of software development, known for his 1970 paper from which the Waterfall model for software development was mistakenly drawn.
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Clifford Stein
#2183
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Clifford Seth Stein , a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Stein is chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, Stein was a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
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Edward Fredkin
#1618
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist, physicist and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions included work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space , mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In more recent work, he used the term digital philosophy .
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Bernard Widrow
#2205
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Widrow is a U.S. professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the co-inventor of the Widrow–Hoff least mean squares filter adaptive algorithm with his then doctoral student Ted Hoff. The LMS algorithm led to the ADALINE and MADALINE artificial neural networks and to the backpropagation technique. He made other fundamental contributions to the development of signal processing in the fields of geophysics, adaptive antennas, and adaptive filtering. A summary of his work is.
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Simon Peyton Jones
#3382
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Simon Peyton Jones is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming. Education Peyton Jones graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Sciences in 1979. During this time he was an undergraduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently went on to complete the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science in 1980. He never did a PhD.
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Margaret Boden
#1206
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
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H. T. Kung
#2659
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Hsiang-Tsung Kung is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit . Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active r...
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David H. D. Warren
#2795
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David H. D. Warren is a computer scientist who worked primarily on logic programming and in particular the programming language Prolog in the 1970s and 1980s. Warren wrote the first compiler for Prolog, and the Warren Abstract Machine execution environment for Prolog is named after him.
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Steve McConnell
#2691
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Steven C. McConnell is an author of software engineering textbooks such as Code Complete, Rapid Development, and Software Estimation. He is cited as an expert in software engineering and project management.
Go to Profile#177
Luca Cardelli
#3704
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Luca Andrea Cardelli is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. Among other contributions, in programming languages, he helped design the language Modula-3, implemented the first compiler for the functional language ML, defined the concept of typeful programming, and helped develop the experimental language Polyphonic C#.
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Daniel J. Bernstein
#2159
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Daniel Julius Bernstein is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a research professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before this, he was a visiting professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
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Jack Dongarra
#1954
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study .
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Robert Tappan Morris
#1735
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Robert Tappan Morris is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet. Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act . He went on to cofound the online store Viaweb, one of the first web applications, and later the venture capital funding firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham.
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Sophie Wilson
#1556
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sophie Mary Wilson is a transgender English computer scientist, who helped design the BBC Micro and ARM architecture. Wilson first designed a microcomputer during a break from studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years. She first began designing the ARM reduced instruction set computer in 1983, which entered production two years later. It became popular in embedded systems and is now the most widely used processor architecture in smartphones.
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John Ousterhout
#2657
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John Kenneth Ousterhout is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit, and proposed the idea of coscheduling. Ousterhout led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ousterhout also led the team that developed the Magic VLSI computer-aided design program.
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Brendan Eich
#1812
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Brendan Eich is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his firm opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the CEO of Brave Software.
Go to Profile#184
Ian Goodfellow
#3848
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Ian J. Goodfellow is an American computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain and director of machine learning at Apple and has made several important contributions to the field of deep learning including the invention of the generative adversarial network . Goodfellow co-wrote, as the first author, the textbook Deep Learning and wrote the chapter on deep learning in the authoritative textbook of the field of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intellige...
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Volker Strassen
#2384
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Volker Strassen is a German mathematician, a professor emeritus in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz. For important contributions to the analysis of algorithms he has received many awards, including the Cantor medal, the Konrad Zuse Medal, the Paris Kanellakis Award for work on randomized primality testing, the Knuth Prize for "seminal and influential contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms."
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Ralph Merkle
#1259
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ralph C. Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.
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Robert S. Boyer
#2936
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Robert Stephen Boyer is an American retired professor of computer science, mathematics, and philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin. He and J Strother Moore invented the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, a particularly efficient string searching algorithm, in 1977. He and Moore also collaborated on the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm, in 1992. Following this, he worked with Moore and Matt Kaufmann on another theorem prover called ACL2.
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Peter T. Kirstein
#1681
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Peter Thomas Kirstein was a British computer scientist who played a role in the creation of the Internet. He made the first internetworking connection on the ARPANET in 1973, by providing a link to British academic networks, and was instrumental in defining and implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
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Robert Fano
#2912
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a student and working lab partner to Claude Shannon, whom he admired zealously and assisted in the early years of Information Theory.
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Richard S. Sutton
#4039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard S. Sutton is a Canadian computer scientist. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta and a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, having several significant contributions to the field, including temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods.
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Nathaniel Rochester
#2423
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Nathaniel Rochester was the chief architect of the IBM 701, the first mass produced scientific computer, and of the prototype of its first commercial version, the IBM 702. He wrote the first assembler and participated in the founding of the field of artificial intelligence.
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J Strother Moore
#3109
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
J Strother Moore is a computer scientist. He is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm, and the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm. He made pioneering contributions to structure sharing including the piece table data structure and early logic programming. An example of the workings of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm is given in Moore's website. Moore received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and his Doctor of Philosophy in computational logic at the University of E...
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Bob Bemer
#2561
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Robert William Bemer was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Early life and education Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from Cranbrook Kingswood School in 1936 and took a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Albion College in 1940. He earned a certificate in aeronautical engineering at Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941.
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Monica S. Lam
#3923
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Monica Sin-Ling Lam is an American computer scientist. She is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Professional biography Monica Lam received a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia in 1980 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987.
Go to Profile#195
Thomas H. Cormen
#3554
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. In 2013, he published a new book titled Algorithms Unlocked. He is an emeritus professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and former Chairman of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science. Between 2004 and 2008 he directed the Dartmouth College Writing Program. His research interests are algorithm engineering, parallel computing, and speeding up computations with high latency. In 2022, he was elected as a Democratic member of the New Hampshire House of R...
Go to Profile#196
Masatoshi Shima
#570
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Masatoshi Shima is a Japanese electronics engineer. He was one of the architects of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. In 1968, Shima worked for Busicom in Japan, and did the logic design for a specialized CPU to be translated into three-chip custom chips. In 1969, he worked with Intel's Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor to reduce the three-chip Busicom proposal into a one-chip architecture. In 1970, that architecture was transformed into a silicon chip, the Intel 4004, by Federico Faggin, with Shima's assistance in logic design.
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Andrew McCallum
#4186
Overall Influence
Andrew McCallum is a professor in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His primary specialties are in machine learning, natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, and social network analysis.
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Brad Cox
#3192
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Brad J. Cox was an American computer scientist who was known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering and software componentry.
Go to Profile#199
Ben Goertzel
#1956
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society, and chair of Humanity+. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.
Go to Profile#200
Philip Wadler
#4045
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Philip Lee Wadler is a UK-based American computer scientist known for his contributions to programming language design and type theory. He is the chair of theoretical computer science at the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has contributed to the theory behind functional programming and the use of monads; and the designs of the purely functional language Haskell and the XQuery declarative query language. In 1984, he created the Orwell language. Wadler was involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0. He is also author of...
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