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,
#1551
Pavel A. Pevzner
#13483
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Pavel Arkadevich Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science and director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego. He serves on the editorial board of PLoS Computational Biology and he is a member of the Genome Institute of Singapore scientific advisory board.
Go to Profile#1552
Mohammad Kaykobad
#15593
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mohammad Kaykobad is a computer scientist, educator, author, and columnist from Bangladesh. Along with Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, he started the national mathematics olympiad. He was a professor of computer science and engineering in Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. and currently is a faculty member of computer science and engineering in BRAC University.Also a faculty member of University of information technology and Sciences.
Go to Profile#1553
Matt Might
#28782
Overall Influence
Matthew Might is a computer scientist, biologist, educator, and public health administrator. Might serves as the director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama Birmingham.
Go to Profile#1554
Dana Randall
#18035
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Dana Randall is an American computer scientist. She works as the ADVANCE Professor of Computing, and adjunct professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Previously she was executive director of the Georgia Tech Institute of Data Engineering and Science that she co-founded, and director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center. Her research include combinatorics, computational aspects of statistical mechanics, Monte Carlo stimulation of Markov chains, and randomized algorithms.
Go to Profile#1555
Joanna Bryson
#25197
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007. Education Bryson attended Glenbard North High School and graduated in 1982. She studied Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago, graduating with an AB in 1986. In 1991 she moved to the University of Edinburgh where she completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence before an MPhil in Psychology. Bryson moved to MIT to complete her PhD, earning a doctorate under Lynn Andrea Stein in 2001 for her thesis "Intelligence by Design: Principles of Modularity and Coordination for Engineering Complex Adaptive Agents".
Go to Profile#1556
John Crawford
#14017
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John H. Crawford is an American computer engineer. Career During a long career at Intel starting in 1977, he was the chief architect of the Intel 80386 and Intel 80486 microprocessors. He also co-managed the design of the Intel P5 Pentium microprocessor family. Crawford was the recipient of the 1995 Eckert–Mauchly Award. He was awarded the IEEE Ernst Weber Engineering Leadership Recognition in 1997.
Go to Profile#1557
Ken Batcher
#37822
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Ken Batcher, full name Kenneth Edward Batcher was an emeritus professor of Computer Science at Kent State University. He also worked as a computer architect at Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio for 28 years.
Go to Profile#1558
Werner Buchholz
#27242
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Werner Buchholz was a German-American computer scientist. After growing up in Europe, Buchholz moved to Canada and then to the United States. He worked for International Business Machines in New York. In June 1956, he coined the term "byte" for a unit of digital information. In 1990, he was recognized as a computer pioneer by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Go to Profile#1559
Mira Mezini
#36647
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mira Mezini is a German computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. She heads the software engineering group.
Go to Profile#1560
Dimitris Metaxas
#37123
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Dimitris Metaxas is a distinguished professor and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, where he directs the Center for Computational Biomedicine Imaging and Modeling . Education Metaxas was educated at the University of Toronto where he was awarded a PhD degree in 1992 under the supervision of Demetri Terzopoulos as part of the Dynamic Graphics Project. He was awarded an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1988. He did his undergraduate studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of A...
Go to Profile#1561
Peter Weibel
#6855
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Peter Weibel was an Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator, and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet, then later moved from the page to the screen within the sense of post-structuralist methodology. His work includes virtual reality and other digital art forms. From 1999 he was the director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Go to Profile#1562
Serge Belongie
#38009
Overall Influence
Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where he also served as Associate Dean. He has also been a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning, specifically object recognition and image segmentation, with his scientific research in these areas cited over 50,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#1563
Leonard Uhr
#33097
Overall Influence
1927 - 2000 (73 years)
Leonard Uhr was an American computer scientist and a pioneer in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning and cognitive science. He was an expert in many aspects of human neurophysiology and perception, and a central theme of his research was to design artificial intelligence systems based on his understanding of how the human brain works. He was one of the early proponents of incorporation into artificial intelligence algorithms of methods for dealing with uncertainty.
Go to Profile#1564
Eric Bodden
#31472
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Eric Bodden is a German computer scientist. He holds the Chair of Secure Software Engineering at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute of the Paderborn University and is Director of Software Engineering and IT Security at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechatronic Design . He is also head of the engineering department in the Collaborative Research Centre 1119 CROSSING at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
Go to Profile#1565
Anna Patterson
#28845
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines. Education Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in artificial intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.
Go to Profile#1566
Kai Li
#18894
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kai Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and professor of Princeton University. He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.
Go to Profile#1567
Luc Steels
#17543
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Luc Steels is a Belgian scientist and artist. Steels is considered a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence in Europe who has made contributions to expert systems, behavior-based robotics, artificial life and evolutionary computational linguistics. He was a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies ICREA associated as a research professor with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. He was formerly founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris.
Go to Profile#1568
Jim Kent
#12291
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
William James Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award. Early life Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States.
Go to Profile#1569
Paul H. Cress
#36934
Overall Influence
1939 - 2004 (65 years)
Paul H. Cress was a Canadian computer scientist. He was a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo when, starting in 1966, he and his colleague Paul Dirksen led a team of programmers developing a fast Fortran programming language compiler called WATFOR , for the IBM System/360 family of computers. The /360 WATFOR project was initiated by Professor J. Wesley Graham, following the successful implementation in 1965 of a WATFOR compiler for the IBM 7040 computer. An enhanced version of the /360 WATFOR compiler was called WATFIV, variously interpreted to mean "WATerloo F...
Go to Profile#1570
Oskar von Stryk
#16526
Overall Influence
#1571
Rudolf Kruse
#37943
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rudolf Kruse is a German computer scientist and mathematician. Education and professional career Rudolf Kruse obtained his diploma degree in 1979 from the TU Braunschweig, Germany, and a PhD in Mathematics in 1980 as well as the venia legendi in Mathematics in 1984 from the same university. Following a short stay at the Fraunhofer Society, in 1986 he joined the University of Braunschweig as a professor of computer science. From 1996–2017 he was a full professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg where he has been leading the computational intelligence research group.
Go to Profile#1572
Eero Simoncelli
#25158
Overall Influence
Eero Simoncelli is an American computational neuroscientist and Silver Professor at New York University. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 2000 to 2020. In 2020, he became the inaugural director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation.
Go to Profile#1573
Hanan Samet
#43599
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Hanan Samet is a Computer Science researcher and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland's Computer Science Department, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He completed his PhD at Stanford University in 1975.
Go to Profile#1574
Nigel Horspool
#25038
Overall Influence
R. Nigel Horspool is a retired professor of computer science, formerly of the University of Victoria. He invented the Boyer–Moore–Horspool algorithm, a fast string search algorithm adapted from the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm. Horspool is co-inventor of dynamic Markov compression and was associate editor and then editor-at-large of the journal Software: Practice and Experience from 2007 to 2017. He is the author of C Programming in the Berkeley UNIX Environment.
Go to Profile#1575
Zdzisław Pawlak
#26406
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Zdzislaw I. Pawlak was a Polish mathematician and computer scientist. He was affiliated with several organization, including the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Warsaw School of Information Technology. He served as the Director of the Institute of Computer Science at the Warsaw University of Technology . Pawlak was known for his contribution to many branches of theoretical computer science. He was credited with introducing the rough set theory and also known for his fundamental works on it. He also introduced the Pawlak flow graphs, a graphical framework for reasoning from data. He was conferred with Order of Polonia Restituta in 1999.
Go to Profile#1576
Takashi Murakami
#1708
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
is a Japanese contemporary artist. He works in fine arts as well as commercial media and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. His influential work draws from the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of postwar Japanese culture.
Go to Profile#1577
Allan Kaprow
#2693
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Allan Kaprow was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.
Go to Profile#1578
Alfred Menezes
#21690
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Education Alfred Menezes' family is from Goa, a state in western India, but he was born in Tanzania and grew up in Kuwait except for a few years at a boarding school in India. His undergraduate and post-graduate degrees are from the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#1579
Richard Bird
#36262
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Richard Simpson Bird was an English computer scientist. Posts He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England, and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory . Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#1580
Jessica McKellar
#29059
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Jessica Tess McKellar is an American software developer, engineering manager, and author. Education McKellar attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied computer science and chemistry.
Go to Profile#1581
Mark Kilgard
#39086
Overall Influence
Mark J. Kilgard is a graphics software engineer working at Nvidia. Prior to joining Nvidia, Mark Kilgard worked at Compaq and Silicon Graphics. While at Silicon Graphics, he authored the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, better known as GLUT, to make it easy to write OpenGL-based 3D examples and demos. The primary reason for this was the lack of a windowing and input API with OpenGL using GLX.
Go to Profile#1582
Rajeev Alur
#30744
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Rajeev Alur is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania who has made contributions to formal methods, programming languages, and automata theory, including notably the introduction of timed automata and nested words .
Go to Profile#1583
Jeanne Ferrante
#29828
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jeanne Ferrante is an American computer scientist active in the field of compiler technology. As a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, Ferrante has made important contributions regarding optimization and parallelization.
Go to Profile#1584
Christos Faloutsos
#46673
Overall Influence
Christos Faloutsos is a Greek computer scientist and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He has received the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the National Science Foundation , 22 best paper awards, and several teaching awards. He has served as a member of the executive committee of SIGKDD. He has published over 300 refereed articles, one monograph, and holds five patents. His research interests include data mining for streams and networks, fractals, indexing for multimedia and bio-informatics data bases, and performance.
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Sugata Mitra
#9391
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sugata Mitra is an Indian computer scientist and educational theorist. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as visiting professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He won the TED Prize 2013.
Go to Profile#1586
Lawrence Carra
#17753
Overall Influence
1909 - 2006 (97 years)
Lawrence Carra was an American professor of drama at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a director of theater and television as well as a mentor to hundreds of actors and directors.
Go to Profile#1587
Peter Sanders
#18689
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Peter Sanders is a German computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research concerns the design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms and data structures, and he is particularly known for his research on suffix sorting finding shortest paths in road networks.
Go to Profile#1588
David J. Greenblatt
#46851
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#1589
Chung Laung Liu
#12315
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Chung Laung Liu , also known as David Liu or C. L. Liu, was a Taiwanese computer scientist. Born in Guangzhou, he spent his childhood in Macau. He received his B.Sc. degree in Taiwan, master's degree and doctorate in United States.
Go to Profile#1590
Michael Fellows
#21925
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Ralph Fellows AC HFRSNZ MAE is a computer scientist and the Elite Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway as of January 2016. Biography Fellows received his BA in Mathematics from Sonoma State University, and at the University of California, San Diego his M.A. in Mathematics in 1982 and in 1985 his Ph.D. in Computer Science with the dissertation Encoding Graphs in Graphs.
Go to Profile#1591
Ketan Mulmuley
#23765
Overall Influence
Ketan Mulmuley is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a sometime visiting professor at IIT Bombay. He specializes in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity theory, and in recent years has been working on "geometric complexity theory", an approach to the P versus NP problem through the techniques of algebraic geometry, with Milind Sohoni of IIT Bombay. He is also known for his result with Umesh Vazirani and Vijay Vazirani that showed that "Matching is as easy as matrix inversion", in a paper that introduced the isolation...
Go to Profile#1592
Bob Braden
#29464
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Robert Braden was an American computer scientist who played a role in the development of the Internet. His research interests included end-to-end network protocols, especially in the transport and network layers.
Go to Profile#1593
Salvatore J. Stolfo
#38830
Overall Influence
Salvatore J. Stolfo is an academic and professor of computer science at Columbia University, specializing in computer security. Early life Born in Brooklyn, New York, Stolfo received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1974. He received his Ph.D. from NYU Courant Institute in 1979 and has been on the faculty of Columbia ever since, where he's taught courses in Artificial Intelligence, Intrusion and Anomaly Detection Systems, Introduction to Programming, Fundamental Algorithms, Data Structures, and Knowledge-Based Expert Systems.
Go to Profile#1594
Chris Welty
#21142
Overall Influence
Christopher A. Welty is an American computer scientist, who works at Google Research in New York. He is best known for his work on ontologies, in the Semantic Web, and on IBM's Watson. While on sabbatical from Vassar College from 1999 to 2000, he collaborated with Nicola Guarino on OntoClean; he was co-chair of the W3C Rule Interchange Format working group from 2005 to 2009.
Go to Profile#1595
Jan van Bemmel
#26573
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jan H. van Bemmel is a Dutch former professor of medical informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was rector magnificus of the Erasmus University Rotterdam between 2000 and 2003.
Go to Profile#1596
Jan Bergstra
#19355
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Johannes Aldert "Jan" Bergstra is a Dutch computer scientist. His work has focussed on logic and the theoretical foundations of software engineering, especially on formal methods for system design. He is best known as an expert on algebraic methods for the specification of data and computational processes in general.
Go to Profile#1597
David W. Bates
#36393
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using clinical decision support. Bates has done work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry , medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals.
Go to Profile#1598
Tang Xiao'ou
#33479
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Tang Xiao’ou is a Chinese billionaire computer scientist and founder of SenseTime, an artificial intelligence company. He is also a Professor of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Go to Profile#1599
Kanwal Ameen
#13626
Overall Influence
Kanwal Ameen is a Pakistani professor in information management. She has served as chairperson of the Department of Information Management , formerly the Department of Library and Information Science, and as director, directorate of external linkages. On 31 May 2019, Ameen was appointed to a four-year term as vice-chancellor of the University of Home Economics.
Go to Profile#1600
John Kelsey
#26187
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
John Kelsey is a cryptographer who works at NIST. His research interests include cryptanalysis and design of symmetric cryptography primitives , analysis and design of cryptographic protocols, cryptographic random number generation, electronic voting, side-channel attacks on cryptography implementations, and anonymizing communications systems. He previously worked at Certicom and Counterpane Internet Security.
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