Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

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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,

#1501

Róbert Szelepcsényi

#23778

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Róbert Szelepcsényi is a Slovak computer scientist of Hungarian descent and a member of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University in Bratislava. His results on the closure of non-deterministic space under complement, independently obtained in 1987 also by Neil Immerman , brought the Gödel Prize of ACM and EATCS to both of them in 1995.

#1502

Marlon Dumas

#27310

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Marlon Gerardo Dumas Menjivar is a Honduran computer scientist, and Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Tartu in Estonia, known for his contributions in the field of Business Process Management.

#1503

Ian F. Akyildiz

Ian F. Akyildiz

#25064

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ian F. Akyildiz received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981 and 1984, respectively. Currently, he is the President and CTO of the Truva Inc. since March 1989. He retired from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2021 after almost 35 years service as Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications and Chair of the Telecom group.

#1504

Stefano Soatto

#23419

Overall Influence

Stefano Soatto is professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles , in Los Angeles, CA, where he is also professor of electrical engineering and founding director of the UCLA Vision Lab.

#1505

David Hartley

#30524

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

David Fielding Hartley FBCS is a computer scientist and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was Director of the University of Cambridge Computing Service from 1970–1994, Chief Executive of United Kingdom Joint Academic Network 1994–1997, and Executive Director of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre 1997–2002. He is now much involved with the National Museum of Computing.

#1506

William Pugh

#33651

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

William Worthington Pugh Jr. is an American computer scientist who invented the skip list and the Omega test for deciding Presburger arithmetic. He was the co-author of the static code analysis tool FindBugs, and was highly influential in the development of the current memory model of the Java language. Pugh received a Ph.D. in computer science, with a minor in acting, from Cornell University.

#1507

Jan Willem Klop

#21326

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jan Willem Klop is a professor of applied logic at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical logic from Utrecht University. Klop is known for his work on the algebra of communicating processes, co-author of TeReSe and his fixed point combinatorYk = whereL = λabcdefghijklmnopqstuvwxyzr. Klop became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

#1508

Peter Blake

#679

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist. He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.

#1509

Marc Snir

#35244

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Marc Snir is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He holds a Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently pursues research in parallel computing. He was the principal investigator for the software of the petascale Blue Waters system and co-director of the Intel and Microsoft-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Center .

#1510

Richard Crandall

#20684

Overall Influence

1947 - 2012 (65 years)

Richard E. Crandall was an American physicist and computer scientist who made contributions to computational number theory. Background Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years at Caltech before transferring to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness. He earned his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#1511

Christian Huitema

#25386

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Christian Huitema was the first non-American chair of the Internet Architecture Board , serving from April 1993 to July 1995. He currently is a consultant focused on privacy on the Internet. Biography After graduating from the École Polytechnique, Huitema served for five years as an engineer at Sema Group in Montrouge before returning to the Centre national d'études des télécommunications in Issy-les-Moulineaux. In 1986, he joined the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation . Huitema collaborated on several research projects including the NADIR Project to study the ...

#1512

Nando de Freitas

#31977

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Nando de Freitas is a researcher in the field of machine learning, and in particular in the subfields of neural networks, Bayesian inference and Bayesian optimization, and deep learning. Biography De Freitas was born in Zimbabwe. He did his undergraduate studies and MSc at the University of the Witwatersrand, and his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge . From 2001, he was a professor at the University of British Columbia, before joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2017. He now works for Google's DeepMind.

#1513

Benjamin Kuipers

#25044

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Benjamin Kuipers is an American computer scientist at the University of Michigan, known for his research in qualitative simulation. Biography Kuipers graduated from Swarthmore College in 1970 with a B.A. in Mathematics. He then did two years of alternate service as a conscientious objector to military service, working in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. He began his doctoral studies in pure mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He soon discovered the field of Artificial Intelligence, and spent most of his time at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where his advisor was Marvin Minsky.

#1514

Ulrich Frank

#24133

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Ulrich Frank is a German Business informatician and Professor of Business informatics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, known for his work on the state of the art in information systems research and the development of the Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modeling meta modelling framework.

#1515

David DeWitt

#26658

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

David J. DeWitt is a computer scientist specializing in database management system research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to MIT, DeWitt was the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was also a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab at Madison, Wisconsin. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, wh...

#1516

Birger Møller-Pedersen

#37075

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Birger Møller-Pedersen is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Oslo, department of informatics. He published numerous works on object-oriented programming and has contributed to the creation of the BETA programming language, which is a descendant of Simula.

#1517

Georg Gottlob

#25945

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Georg Gottlob FRS is an Austrian-Italian computer scientist who works in the areas of database theory, logic, and artificial intelligence and is Professor of Informatics at the University of Calabria. He was Professor at the University of Oxford.

#1518

Anita K. Jones

#15292

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Anita Katherine Jones is an American computer scientist and former U.S. government official. She was Director, Defense Research and Engineering from 1993 to 1997. Jones was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and implementation of software systems and for extensive public service.

#1519

Krste Asanović

#31542

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Krste Asanović from the University of California, Berkeley has written and co-authored many academic papers concerning computer architecture. , he is chairman of the Board of the RISC-V Foundation. Asanović was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to computer architecture. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to computer architecture, including the open RISC-V instruction set and Agile hardware".

#1520

Kevin Karplus

#30384

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Kevin Karplus is a professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz, currently in the Biomolecular Engineering Department. He is probably best known for work he did as a computer science graduate student at Stanford University on the Karplus–Strong string synthesis algorithm.

#1521

Henry F. Korth

#28112

Overall Influence

Henry Francis Korth is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the Computer Science and Business program at Lehigh University. Early life and education Korth holds an A.B degree in mathematics from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Later he studied at Princeton University and graduated in 1979 for M.A. and M.S.E. degrees. After that he completed his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. His dissertation title was "Locking Protocols: General Lock Classes and Deadlock Freedom".

#1522

Eran Segal

#17158

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Eran Segal is a computational biologist professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He works on developing quantitative models for all levels of gene regulation, including transcription, chromatin, and translation. Segal also works as an epidemiologist.

#1523

David F. Bacon

#34471

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

David Bacon is an American computer programmer. Career Bacon began working as a programmer at age 16 and worked for a startup during his senior year of high school. At Columbia College, Columbia University, he worked first with David E. Shaw on the NON-VON supercomputer, and then on network algorithms and simulation with Yechiam Yemini, creating the NEST Network Simulator, which served as the basis for a number of other network simulators including Cornell's REAL and thence LBL's ns simulator.

#1524

Jon Callas

#16091

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Jon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry." Callas is credited with creating several Internet Engineering Task Force standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP, which he wrote. Prior to his work at Entrust, he was Chief Technical Officer and...

#1525

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

#360

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines , a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.

#1526

Jeffrey Shallit

Jeffrey Shallit

#15611

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is an active number theorist and a noted critic of intelligent design. He is married to Anna Lubiw, also a computer scientist.

#1527

Martin Kay

#24772

Overall Influence

1935 - 2021 (86 years)

Martin Kay was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics. Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he received his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1961. In 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, one of the earliest centres for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he moved to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, US, where he eventually became head of research in linguistics and machine translation. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.

#1528

Nasir Ahmed

#20336

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Nasir Ahmed is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico . He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards and commonly used in digital signal processing. He also described the discrete sine transform , which is related to the DCT.

#1529

Ingo Wegener

#32245

Overall Influence

1950 - 2008 (58 years)

Ingo Wegener was an influential German computer scientist working in the field of theoretical computer science. Education and career Wegener was educated at the Bielefeld University. He earned a diploma in mathematics there in 1976, a doctorate in 1978, and a habilitation in 1981. His doctoral dissertation, Boolesche Funktionen, deren monotone Komplexität fast quadratisch ist, was jointly supervised by and Rudolf Ahlswede.

#1530

Eric Lengyel

#29337

Overall Influence

Eric Lengyel is a computer scientist specializing in game engine development, computer graphics, and geometric algebra. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Davis and a master's degree in mathematics from Virginia Tech.

#1531

Juan Pavón

#32725

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Juan Pavón is a Spanish computer scientist, full professor of the Complutense University of Madrid . He is a pioneer researcher in the field of Software Agents, co-creator of the FIPA MESSAGE and INGENIAS methodologies, and founder and director of the research group GRASIA: GRoup of Agent-based, Social and Interdisciplinary Applications at UCM. He is known for his work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically in agent-oriented software engineering. He has been often cited by mainstream media, as a reference in Artificial Intelligence.

#1532

Andries Brouwer

#16431

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology . He is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984 to 1985 versions of the roguelike computer game Hack that formed the basis for NetHack. He is also a Linux kernel hacker. He is sometimes referred to by the handle aeb.

#1533

Richard Turner

#25008

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Richard Turner is a distinguished service professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Turner has a BA in mathematics from Huntingdon College, an MS in computer science from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and a DSc in engineering management from the George Washington University.

#1534

Marc Rochkind

#24359

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Marc J. Rochkind invented the Source Code Control System while working at Bell Labs, as well as writing Advanced UNIX Programming, and founding XVT Software, Inc. External links Marc Rochkind's web site

#1535

Michael Wellman

#30555

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Michael Paul Wellman is the Richard H. Orenstein Division Chair of Computer Science and Engineering and Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

#1536

Kevin Leyton-Brown

Kevin Leyton-Brown

#29368

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Kevin Leyton-Brown is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2003. He was the recipient of a 2014 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, a 2013/14 Killam Teaching Prize, and a 2013 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association of Computer Science. Leyton-Brown co-teaches a popular game theory course on Coursera.org, along with Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham. Leyton-Brown serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the Artificial In...

#1537

Yasmin Kafai

#20015

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Yasmin B. Kafai is a German American academic who is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, with a secondary appointment in Computer and Information Sciences at University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is a past president of the International Society of the Learning Sciences , and an executive editor of the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

#1538

Christopher G. Atkeson

Christopher G. Atkeson

#19719

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Christopher Granger Atkeson is an American roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University . Atkeson is known for his work in humanoid robots, soft robotics, and machine learning, most notably on locally weighted learning.

#1539

Lorinda Cherry

#26718

Overall Influence

1944 - 2022 (78 years)

Lorinda Cherry was an American computer scientist and programmer. Much of her career was spent at Bell Labs, where she was for many years a member of the original Unix Lab. Cherry developed several mathematical tools and utilities for text formatting and analysis, and influenced the creation of others.

#1540

Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton

#31385

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with the Distributed and Interactive Systems group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica , the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.

#1541

Zidong Wang

#45163

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Zidong Wang from Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to networked control and complex networks.

#1542

Paul Syverson

#11041

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Paul Syverson is a computer scientist best known for inventing onion routing, a feature of the Tor anonymity network. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Syverson, and Tor's co-creators Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, among its Top 100 Global Thinkers "for making the web safe for whistleblowers".

#1543

Brian Harvey

#23385

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Brian Keith Harvey is a former Lecturer SOE of computer science at University of California, Berkeley. He and his students developed an educational programming language named UCBLogo which is free and open-source software, a dialect of the language Logo, as an interpreter, for learners.

#1544

Richard Shoup

#25359

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Richard Shoup was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, mainly known from his pioneering work on computer graphics and animation. Originally from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, he last resided in San Jose, California.

#1545

Esko Ukkonen

#39026

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Esko Juhani Ukkonen is a Finnish theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to string algorithms, and particularly for Ukkonen's algorithm for suffix tree construction. He is a professor emeritus of the University of Helsinki.

#1546

Saul Gorn

#34383

Overall Influence

1912 - 1992 (80 years)

Saul Gorn was an American pioneer in computer and information science who was a member of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years. Gorn was hired by the Moore School as an associate professor in 1955. He worked on the early ENIAC and EDVAC computers.

#1547

Marie desJardins

#33557

Overall Influence

Marie desJardins is an American computer scientist, known for her research on artificial intelligence and computer science education. She is also active in broadening participation in computing. Biography DesJardins grew up in Columbia, Maryland. She received an A. B. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard University in 1985. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Berkeley in 1992.

#1548

Pentti Kanerva

#15681

Overall Influence

Pentti Kanerva is an American neuroscientist who is the originator of the sparse distributed memory model. He is responsible for relating the properties of long-term memory to mathematical properties of high-dimensional spaces and compares artificial neural-net associative memory to conventional computer random-access memory and to the neurons in the brain. This theory has been applied to design and implement the random indexing approach to learning semantic relations from linguistic data.

#1549

Michael Kass

#35994

Overall Influence

Michael Kass is an American computer scientist best known for his work in computer graphics and computer vision. He has won an Academy Award and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award and is an ACM Fellow.

#1550

Carel S. Scholten

#25726

Overall Influence

1925 - 2009 (84 years)

Carel S. Scholten was a physicist and a pioneer of computing. He went to the Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam and then studied physics from 1945 to 1952 at the University of Amsterdam. In 1947 he was asked by the Dutch Mathematisch Centrum to collaborate in building an automatic calculator with his friend and fellow student Bram Loopstra. Their first system, the ARRA I was not a success, but its successor, the ARRA II, on which Gerrit Blaauw also collaborated, was.

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