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,
#1601
Rajesh P. N. Rao
#37414
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Rajesh P. N. Rao is the Director of the NSF Center for Neurotechnology and the Cherng Jia and Elizabeth Yun Hwang Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#1602
Bernhard Nebel
#29459
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Bernhard Nebel, born on 6 May 1956, is a German artificial intelligence scientist. He is a full professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg where he holds the chair for foundations of artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#1603
Don Towsley
#43010
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Donald Fred Towsley is an American computer scientist who has been a distinguished university professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#1604
Barbara Simons
#21313
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Barbara Bluestein Simons is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery . She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher. She is the founder and former co-chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.
Go to Profile#1605
Juan E. Gilbert
#32259
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Juan E. Gilbert is an American computer scientist, researcher, inventor, and educator. An advocate of diversity in the computing sciences, Gilbert's efforts to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the computing disciplines have been recognized by professional engineering organizations and the United States government.
Go to Profile#1606
Nissim Francez
#28219
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nissim Francez is an Israeli professor, emeritus in the computer science faculty at the Technion, and former head of computational linguistics laboratory in the faculty. Early life and education Nissim Francez was born in Bulgaria. His family emigrated to Israel in 1949. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and philosophy from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1965. After his military service in the IDF, he studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, and received his M.sc. in 1971.
Go to Profile#1607
David Hanson
#11662
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
David Hanson Jr. is an American roboticist who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based robotics company founded in 2013. The designer and researcher creates human-looking robots who have realistic facial expressions, including Sophia and other robots designed to mimic human behavior. Sophia has received widespread media attention, and was the first robot to be granted citizenship.
Go to Profile#1608
David Applegate
#27035
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David L. Applegate is an American computer scientist known for his research on the traveling salesperson problem. Education Applegate graduated from the University of Dayton in 1984, and completed his doctorate in 1991 from Carnegie Mellon University, with a dissertation on convex volume approximation supervised by Ravindran Kannan.
Go to Profile#1609
Michael Collins
#38521
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Michael J. Collins is a researcher in the field of computational linguistics. He is the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research interests are in natural language processing as well as machine learning and he has made important contributions in statistical parsing and in statistical machine learning. In his studies Collins covers a wide range of topics such as parse re-ranking, tree kernels, semi-supervised learning, machine translation and exponentiated gradient algorithms with a general focus on discriminative models and structured prediction. One notable contribution is a state-of-the-art parser for the Penn Wall Street Journal corpus.
Go to Profile#1610
Hugo Brandt Corstius
#13755
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Hugo Brandt Corstius was a Dutch author, known for his achievements in both literature and science. In 1970, he was awarded a PhD on the subject of computational linguistics. He was employed at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam. However, to the general public he is mostly known for his writing, in particular as a columnist for Vrij Nederland and de Volkskrant and as linguist and literary critic for Vrij Nederland, de Volkskrant, and NRC Handelsblad.
Go to Profile#1611
Mark Steedman
#15036
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Biography Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex in 1968, with a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology, and from the University of Edinburgh in 1973, with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#1612
Chris Okasaki
#45511
Overall Influence
Chris Okasaki is an associate professor of computer science at the United States Military Academy. He authored Purely Functional Data Structures , based on a doctoral dissertation of the same name. He obtained a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 under advisers Peter Lee, Robert Harper, Daniel Sleator, and Robert Tarjan. Prior to his current academic appointment, he taught at Columbia University and the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#1613
Rudi Studer
#25464
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Rudi Studer is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at KIT, Germany. He served as head of the knowledge management research group at the Institute AIFB and one of the directors of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute . He is a former president of the Semantic Web Science Association, an STI International Fellow, and a member of numerous programme committees and editorial boards. He was one of the inaugural editors-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics, a position he held until 2007. He is a co-author of the "Semantic Wikipedia" proposal which led to the development of Wik...
Go to Profile#1614
Shwetak Patel
#21310
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Shwetak Naran Patel is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur best known for his work on developing novel sensing solutions and ubiquitous computing. He is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor at the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where he joined in 2008. His technology start-up company on energy sensing, Zensi, was acquired by Belkin International, Inc. in 2010. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2016, He was elected as an ACM Fellow for contributions to sustainability sensing, low-power wi...
Go to Profile#1615
Shmuel Safra
#18521
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Shmuel Safra is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He was born in Jerusalem. Safra's research areas include complexity theory and automata theory. His work in complexity theory includes the classification of approximation problemss—showing them NP-hard even for weak factors of approximation—and the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs and the PCP theorem, which gives stronger characterizations of the class NP, via a membership proof that can be verified reading only a constant number of its bits.
Go to Profile#1616
Georgios B. Giannakis
#32337
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Georgios B. Giannakis is a Greek-American Computer Scientist, engineer and inventor. He has been an Endowed Chair Professor of Wireless Telecommunications, he was Director of the Digital Technology Center, and at present he is a McKnight Presidential Chair with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#1617
Larry S. Davis
#44236
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Larry S. Davis is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. He currently works as a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon. Davis is best known for his research in the field of computer vision.
Go to Profile#1618
Raymond J. Mooney
#42951
Overall Influence
Raymond J. Mooney is an American computer scientist, professor of computer science, and director of the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on machine learning and natural language processing.
Go to Profile#1619
Helen Chan Wolf
#30995
Overall Influence
Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International. Career In the early 1960s, Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research to train computers in recognising human faces . Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition. These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process arou...
Go to Profile#1620
Michael J. C. Gordon
#27793
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Michael John Caldwell Gordon was a British computer scientist. Life Mike Gordon was born in Ripon, Yorkshire, England. He attended Dartington Hall School and Bedales School. In 1966, he was accepted to study engineering at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, but transferred to mathematics. During his studies, in 1969 he worked at the National Physical Laboratory in London during the summer, gaining his first exposure to computers.
Go to Profile#1621
Larry Yaeger
#35098
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Larry Steven Yaeger is a former Apple Distinguished Scientist and Full Professor of Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, currently employed at Google. Outside of academia he is best known for designing the handwriting recognition software used in the Apple Newton and Inkwell. Yaeger's academic research focused on the evolution of true artificial intelligence through natural selection. He is the lead developer of Polyworld.
Go to Profile#1622
Mirella Lapata
#37613
Overall Influence
Mirella Lapata FRSE is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing .
Go to Profile#1623
James Robert Slagle
#46791
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
James R. "Robert" Slagle is an American computer scientist notable for his many achievements in Artificial Intelligence. Since 1984 he has been the Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, with former appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the National Institutes of Health , the Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1624
Dieter Fensel
#35132
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Dieter Fensel is a German researcher in the field of formal languages and the semantic web. He is University Professor at the University of Innsbruck, where he directs the Semantic Technologies Institute Innsbruck , a research center associated with the university.
Go to Profile#1625
Andreas Reuter
#37598
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andreas Reuter is a German computer science professor and research manager. His research focuses on databases, transaction systems, and parallel and distributed computer systems. Reuter has been scientific and executive director of EML European Media Laboratory GmbH and gGmbH since 1998 and Managing Director of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies from 2010 until 2016. In October 2015, he was appointed Senior Professor at the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#1626
Gary Miller
#31590
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gary Lee Miller is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 2003 he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for the Miller–Rabin primality test. He was made an ACM Fellow in 2002 and won the Knuth Prize in 2013.
Go to Profile#1627
Danny Lange
#41224
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Danny B. Lange is a Danish computer scientist who has worked on machine learning for IBM, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Uber, and Unity Technologies. Early life and education Lange was born in Denmark. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the Technical University of Denmark.
Go to Profile#1628
David Stavens
#32203
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
David Stavens is an American entrepreneur and scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Udacity, a co-creator of Stanley, the winning car of the second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and co-founder and CEO of Nines. Stavens has published in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and has helped start organizations with an aggregate market cap of over $30 billion.
Go to Profile#1629
Narendra Ahuja
#25020
Overall Influence
Narendra Ahuja is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research primarily concerns computer vision and pattern recognition.
Go to Profile#1630
Claude Crépeau
#30246
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Claude Crépeau is a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. Ηe was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1962. He received a master's degree from the Université de Montréal in 1986, and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, working in the field of cryptography with Silvio Micali as his Ph.D. advisor and Gilles Brassard as his M.Sc advisor. He spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université d'Orsay, and was a CNRS researcher at École Normale Supérieure from 1992 to 1995. He was appointed associate professor at Université de Montréal in 1995, and has been a faculty member at McGill University since 1998.
Go to Profile#1631
Joris van der Hoeven
#35756
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Joris van der Hoeven is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, specializing in algebraic analysis and computer algebra. He is the primary developer of GNU TeXmacs. Education and career Joris van der Hoeven received in 1997 his doctorate from Paris Diderot University with thesis Asymptotique automatique. He is a Directeur de recherche at the CNRS and head of the team Max Modélisation algébrique at the Laboratoire d'informatique of the École Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#1632
Stanley Donwood
#2011
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Dan Rickwood , known professionally as Stanley Donwood, is an English artist and writer. Since 1994, he has created all the artwork for the rock band Radiohead with their singer, Thom Yorke, plus Yorke's other projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. He also creates artwork for Glastonbury Festival and has published books of writing.
Go to Profile#1633
Keno Fischer
#34026
Overall Influence
Keno Fischer is a German computer scientist known for being a core member implementing the Julia programming language . He is an alumnus of Harvard for both his BA and MA. He works at Julia Computing, which he co-founded with Julia co-creators, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah and Deepak Vinchhi. He received a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Harvard in 2016, and he completed a Master of Arts in Physics also from Harvard in 2016.
Go to Profile#1634
Robert C. Seacord
#32082
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Robert C. Seacord is an American computer security specialist and writer. He is the author of books on computer security, legacy system modernization, and component-based software engineering. Education Seacord earned a Bachelor's degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in December 1983. He has also completed graduate-level courses at Carnegie-Mellon University in software design, creation and maintenance; user interfaces; software project management; formal methods; human factors; operating systems; and entrepreneurship.
Go to Profile#1635
Mark D. Hill
#33259
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mark D. Hill is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been cited over 27,000 times. He is the John P. Morgridge Professor and Gene M. Amdahl Professor of Computer Science. Hill specializes in computer architecture, parallel computing, memory systems, and performance evaluation.
Go to Profile#1636
Jin-Yi Cai
#39388
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jin-Yi Cai is a Chinese American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science, and also the Steenbock Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research is in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity theory. In recent years he has concentrated on the classification of computational counting problems, especially counting graph homomorphisms, counting constraint satisfaction problems, and Holant problems as related to holographic algorithms.
Go to Profile#1637
Francesca Rossi
#35299
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Francesca Rossi is an Italian computer scientist, currently working at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. Education and career She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from the University of Pisa in 1986, and a PhD in computer science from the same university in 1993. After her graduation, she stayed at the University of Pisa as an assistant professor until 1998. She then moved to the University of Padova where she was an associate professor until 2001, and a full professor until 2018. In 2014–2015 she was on sabbatical as a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1638
Victor Vianu
#27312
Overall Influence
Victor Vianu is a computer scientist, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM from 2009 to 2015.
Go to Profile#1639
Radhia Cousot
#33756
Overall Influence
1947 - 2014 (67 years)
Radhia Cousot was a French computer scientist known for inventing abstract interpretation. Studies Radhia Cousot was born on 6 August 1947, in Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia, where she survived the massacre of the children in her school on February 8, 1958. She then went to the Lycée de jeunes filles at Sousse, the Lycée français at Algiers and then the Polytechnic School of Algiers . She specialized in mathematical optimization and integer linear programming. Supported by a UNESCO fellowship , she obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble in 1972.
Go to Profile#1640
Timothy O'Shea
#18179
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Sir Timothy Michael Martin O'Shea is a British computer scientist and academic. He was the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2018. Biography O'Shea grew up in London, attended the Royal Liberty School, in Romford, Essex. A computer scientist, he was Master of Birkbeck College from 1998 to 2002 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 2001.
Go to Profile#1641
Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi
#4750
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Dr. Mohammad Ali Modjtahedi Gilani was an Iranian University professor and lifetime principal of the highly prestigious Alborz High School in Tehran, Iran. Founder of Sharif University of Technology and dean of Tehran Polytechnic University . Memoirs of Mohammad-Ali Modjtahedi 2000 were published as part of Harvard University's Iranian Oral History Project, editor Habib Ladjevardi.
Go to Profile#1642
Banksy
#567
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a gra...
Go to Profile#1643
Emin Gün Sirer
#26228
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. He was an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and is the former co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts . He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking.
Go to Profile#1644
William Ward Armstrong
#34829
Overall Influence
William Ward Armstrong is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1966 and is most known as the originator Armstrong's axioms of dependency in a Relational database.
Go to Profile#1645
Arthur van Hoff
#35220
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Arthur van Hoff is a Dutch computer scientist and businessman. Biography After studying computer science at the University of Strathclyde and Hogere Informatica Opleiding, Van Hoff joined Sun Microsystems as an engineer with the Distributed Objects Everywhere team. In 1993, he joined the Java development team, writing the language's compiler and taking responsibility for its first release to Netscape in August 1995. In 1996, he left Sun, feeling that the options to develop Java outside of the organization were "too tempting", and established the startup Marimba, serving as its Chief Technology Officer.
Go to Profile#1646
Mark Guzdial
#35068
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Joseph Guzdial is a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He was formerly a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the College of Computing and the GVU Center. He has conducted research in the fields of computer science education and the learning sciences and internationally in the field of Information Technology. From 2001–2003, he was selected to be an ACM Distinguished Lecturer, and in 2007 he was appointed Vice-Chair of the ACM Education Board Council. He was the original developer of th...
Go to Profile#1647
Pascal Hitzler
#27959
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Pascal Hitzler is a German American computer scientist specializing in Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence. He is endowed Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering Chair, Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Agriculture and Advanced Analytics and Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Kansas State University, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal and the IOS Press book series Studies on the Semantic Web.
Go to Profile#1648
Boris Katz
#24631
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Boris Katz is a principal American research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and head of the Laboratory's InfoLab Group. His research interests include natural language processing and understanding, machine learning and intelligent information access. His brother Victor Kac is a mathematician at MIT.
Go to Profile#1649
Oliver Günther
#19448
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Oliver Günther is president of the University of Potsdam and former president of the German Informatics Society . Education In 1979 and 1980, Günther was the winner of Germany's National Mathematics Competition. He holds a Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1650
Russ Altman
#20451
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University. Education Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College in 1983, a Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford in 1989 and M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1990. After his internship at Stanford, he became board certified in 1991 in internal medicine and in clinical informatics in 2014. After a year of post-doctoral research, he joined the faculty as assistant professor in 1992. He became full professor in 2004, and was chair of the department of bioengineering from 2007 to June 2012.
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