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,
#1701
Mary Jean Harrold
#33968
Overall Influence
1947 - 2013 (66 years)
Mary Jean Harrold was an American computer scientist noted for her research on software engineering. She was also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She was on the boards of both CRA and CRA-W and was Co-Chair of CRA-W from 2003 to 2006.
Go to Profile#1702
Mihai Pătrașcu
#36035
Overall Influence
1982 - 2012 (30 years)
Mihai Pătrașcu was a Romanian-American computer scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, USA. Pătrașcu attended Carol I National College in Craiova. As a high school student, he won 2 gold medals and 1 silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing his thesis under the supervision of Erik Demaine in 2008.
Go to Profile#1703
Matt Kaufmann
#27652
Overall Influence
Matt Kaufmann is a senior research scientist in the department of computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, United States. He was a recipient of the 2005 ACM Software System Award along with Robert S. Boyer and J Strother Moore, for his work on the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover.
Go to Profile#1704
Allen B. Downey
#32273
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Allen Benjamin Downey is an American computer scientist who is currently working as a Staff Scientist at DrivenData. He was a former Professor of Computer Science at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#1705
Janice Long
#8344
Overall Influence
1955 - 2021 (66 years)
Janice Berry , known professionally by her first married name Janice Long, was an English broadcaster who was best known for her work in British music radio. In a career that spanned five decades, she became the first woman to have her own daily music show on BBC Radio 1. She also appeared on other BBC Radio stations, such as BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio WM, and BBC Radio 6 Music, and was a regular presenter on the television chart show Top of the Pops.
Go to Profile#1706
David A. McAllester
#42719
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David A. McAllester is an American computer scientist who is Professor and former chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, 1979 and 1987 respectively. His PhD was supervised by Gerald Sussman. He was on the faculty of Cornell University for the academic year 1987-1988 and on the faculty of MIT from 1988 to 1995. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research from 1995 to 2002. He has been a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence since 1997.
Go to Profile#1707
Hans van Vliet
#34526
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Johannes Cornelis van Vliet is a Dutch computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of Software Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, known for his work in quantitative aspects of software engineering.
Go to Profile#1708
Neil Wiseman
#37746
Overall Influence
1934 - 1995 (61 years)
Neil Ernest Wiseman was a British computer scientist. Wiseman's pioneering research in computer graphics began in 1965, and resulted in a number of inventions and patents. These included a pen-following screen menu, which anticipated the pop-up menu, and one of the first systems for distributed Computer Graphics. His work brought him three patents, over 70 research publications, and more than 40 students who gained PhDs. In 1986 the Computer Laboratory appointed him to a personal Readership in computer graphics.
Go to Profile#1709
Moses Charikar
#47715
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Moses Samson Charikar is an Indian computer scientist who works as a professor at Stanford University. He was previously a professor at Princeton University. The topics of his research include approximation algorithms, streaming algorithms, and metric embeddings. He is known for the creation of the SimHash algorithm used by Google for near duplicate detection.
Go to Profile#1710
Thomas W. Reps
#38780
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Thomas W. Reps is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to automatic program analysis. Dr. Reps is Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which he joined in 1985. Reps is the author or co-author of four books and more than one hundred seventy-five papers describing his research. His work has covered a wide variety of topics, including program slicing, data-flow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, instrumentation , language-based program-development environments, the use of progra...
Go to Profile#1711
Nick Montfort
#15364
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.
Go to Profile#1712
Ellen Hildreth
#21596
Overall Influence
Ellen Catherine Hildreth is a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. Her fields are visual perception and computer vision. She co-invented the Marr-Hildreth algorithm along with David Marr.
Go to Profile#1713
Dana Ulery
#19789
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Dana Ulery is an American computer scientist and pioneer in scientific computing applications. Career Ulery received her BA from Grinnell College in 1959, with a double major in English Literature and Mathematics. She earned her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, in 1972 and 1975 respectively.
Go to Profile#1714
Ilkay Altintas
#16827
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center , at the University of California, San Diego , where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scien...
Go to Profile#1715
Jawed Siddiqi
#18731
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jawed Siddiqi FBCS is a Pakistani British computer scientist and software engineer. He is professor emeritus of software engineering at Sheffield Hallam University, England. He is the president of NCUP National Council of University Professors in the UK.
Go to Profile#1716
Ewin Tang
#44837
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ewin Tang is a computer scientist at the University of Washington. She was named as one of 2019 Science Forbes 30 Under 30 for her work developing algorithms for classical computers to perform calculations that were previously deemed only possible with quantum computers. That research began under the supervision of Scott Aaronson when Tang was only a teenager.
Go to Profile#1717
Natarajan Shankar
#21539
Overall Influence
Natarajan Shankar is a computer scientist working at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where he leads the Symbolic Analysis Laboratory. Education Shankar received his Ph.D. degree in computer science, under advisors Robert S. Boyer and J Strother Moore, from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.
Go to Profile#1718
James. C. Bezdek
#51628
Overall Influence
#1719
Josef Kittler
#47897
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Josef Kittler is a British scientist and Distinguished Professor at University of Surrey, specialising in pattern recognition and machine intelligence. Biography Josef Kittler received his B.A. in Electrical Engineering , PhD in Pattern Recognition , and ScD , all from University of Cambridge. He joined Surrey University in 1986 and became Distinguished Professor in 2004.
Go to Profile#1720
Richard B. Lipton
#51708
Overall Influence
#1721
Marek Chrobak
#50366
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marek Chrobak is a full professor at University of California, Riverside. He is known for his work competitive analysis of online algorithms, particularly for the k-server problem, on information dissemination in ad-hoc radio networks, and on graph drawing.
Go to Profile#1722
Peter A. Freeman
#33706
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Peter A. Freeman is the founding dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing, a position he held from 1990 to 2002. Freeman was assistant director of the National Science Foundation from 2002 to 2007.
Go to Profile#1723
Liuba Shrira
#46014
Overall Influence
Liuba Shrira is a professor of computer science at Brandeis University, whose research interests primarily involve distributed systems. Liuba Shrira received her PhD from Technion. She is affiliated with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Previously, she was a researcher in the MIT Programming Methodology Group , a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research , and a visiting professor at Technion .
Go to Profile#1724
David Magerman
#25447
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
David Mitchell Magerman is an American computer scientist and philanthropist. He spent 22 years working for an investment management company and hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. Early life and education Magerman was born to Melvin and Sheila Magerman. His father owned All-City Taxi in Miami, Florida, and his mother was a secretary for a group of accounting firms in Tamarac.
Go to Profile#1725
François Pachet
#35570
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
François Pachet is a French scientist, composer and director of the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab. Before joining Spotify he led Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. He is one of the pioneers of computer music closely linked to artificial intelligence, especially in the field of machine improvisation and style modelling. He has been elected ECCAI Fellow in 2014.
Go to Profile#1726
Ashok K. Chandra
#28989
Overall Influence
1948 - 2014 (66 years)
Ashok K. Chandra was a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California, United States, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center. Chandra received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, an MS from University of California, Berkeley, and a BTech from IIT Kanpur. He was previously Director of Database and Distributed Systems at IBM Almaden Research Center.
Go to Profile#1727
Hanspeter Pfister
#29720
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hanspeter Pfister is a Swiss computer scientist. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of scientific visualization, information visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a wide range of topics, including biomedical image analysis and visualization, image and video analysis, and visual analytics in data science.
Go to Profile#1728
Samuel Madden
#36926
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Samuel R. Madden is an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Career Madden was born and raised in San Diego, California. After completing bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT, he earned a PhD specializing in database management at the University of California Berkeley under Michael Franklin and Joseph M. Hellerstein. Before joining MIT as a tenure-track professor, Madden held a post-doc position at Intel's Berkeley Research center.
Go to Profile#1729
James McLurkin
#29312
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
James McLurkin is a Senior Hardware Engineer at Google. Previously, he was an engineering assistant professor at Rice University specializing in swarm robotics. In 2005, he appeared on an episode of PBS' Nova and is a winner of the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Prize.
Go to Profile#1730
Deepak Kapur
#39302
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Deepak Kapur is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. Biography Kapur was born in a lower-middle-class family based in Amritsar, where his father, Nawal Kishore Kapur, was a cloth broker; his mother, Bimla Vati, was a housewife.
Go to Profile#1731
Brian R. Gaines
#28286
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Brian R. Gaines is a British scientist, engineer, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. Biography Gaines received his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge, and he is a Chartered Engineer, and Chartered Psychologist.
Go to Profile#1732
Eric K. Meyer
#29619
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Eric K. Meyer is an American associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a newspaper publisher. He is also a former associate dean for academic and administrative affairs with the university's College of Media.
Go to Profile#1733
Golan Levin
#27192
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Golan Levin is an American new media artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. Biography Levin received a self-designed Bachelor's degree in Art and Design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, and a Master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab in 2000, as a student in John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computation Group . Between degrees, Levin worked as an interface designer at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation, where he was introduced to the field of interactive new media art by Michael Naimark, Brenda Laurel, and Scott Snibbe, among others.
Go to Profile#1734
Ari Luotonen
#28297
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Ari Luotonen is a Finnish software developer and author. He studied for M.Sc. in Tampere University of Technology, but cut his studies short with an Equivalent of B.Sc. in Computer Science. In July 1993, he moved to Geneva to work for CERN. There, he wrote a large proportion of CERN httpd, especially HTTP caching support. In addition, Luotonen contributed to the implementation of numerous CGI applications, the most famous being the WIT - W3 Interactive Talk.
Go to Profile#1735
Joseph Kosuth
#2156
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and London, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including Ghent and Rome. Early life and career Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother and a Hungarian father. Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963 Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship. He spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967.
Go to Profile#1736
Harry Mairson
#37848
Overall Influence
Harry George Mairson is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science in the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His research is in the fields of logic in computer science, lambda calculus and functional programming, type theory and constructive mathematics, computational complexity theory, and algorithmics.
Go to Profile#1737
Pascal Van Hentenryck
#39973
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is credited with pioneering advances in constraint programming and stochastic optimization, bridging theory and practice to solve real-world problems across a range of domains including sports scheduling, protein folding, kidney matching, disaster relief, power systems, recommender systems, and transportation. He has developed several optimization technologies including CHIP, Numerica, the Optimization Programming Language , and Comet. He has also published severa...
Go to Profile#1738
John Regehr
#45432
Overall Influence
John Regehr is a computer scientist specializing in compiler correctness and undefined behavior. , he is a professor at the University of Utah. He is best known for the integer overflow sanitizer which was merged into the Clang C compiler, the C compiler fuzzer Csmith, and his widely read blog Embedded in Academia. He spent the 2015-2016 academic year on sabbatical in Paris, France, working with TrustInSoft on Frama-C and related code analysis tools.
Go to Profile#1739
Craig Partridge
#41304
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Craig Partridge is an American computer scientist, known for his contributions to the technical development of the Internet. Partridge graduated in 1979 from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington D.C. He received his A.B. in history in 1983, and in 1992 received his Ph.D. in computer science, from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1740
Joan Feigenbaum
#24189
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Joan Feigenbaum is a theoretical computer scientist with a background in mathematics. She is the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. At Yale she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics. Feigenbaum co-invented the computer-security research area of trust management.
Go to Profile#1741
Ernesto Damiani
#28467
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ernesto Damiani is a professor of computer science at the University of Milan, where he leads the Architectures Research Lab. He is the Senior Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems Institute at Khalifa University, in the UAE. He holds visiting positions at Tokyo Denki University, Université de Bourgogne. Damiani received an honorary doctorate from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, France . His research spans security, Big Data and knowledge processing, where he has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles and books. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of ACM.
Go to Profile#1742
Jussi Karlgren
#48871
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jussi Karlgren is a Swedish computational linguist, research scientist at Spotify, and co-founder of text analytics company Gavagai AB. He holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Stockholm University, and the title of docent of language technology at Helsinki University.
Go to Profile#1743
Shankar Sastry
#27016
Overall Influence
S. Shankar Sastry is the Founding Chancellor of the Plaksha University, Mohali and a former Dean of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. From 1996-1999, he was the director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley. From 1999-early 2001, he was on leave from Berkeley as director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . He has served as chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciencess, University of California, Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004. From 2004 to 2007 he was the director of CITRIS ...
Go to Profile#1744
Joe Armstrong
#37052
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Joseph Leslie Armstrong was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is best known as one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language. Early life and education Armstrong was born in Bournemouth, England in 1950.
Go to Profile#1745
Peng Shi
#51411
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Peng Shi from the University of Adelaide, Australia was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to control and filtering techniques for hybrid dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#1746
Ray Johnson
#6782
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as "New York's most famous unknown artist". Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968,...
Go to Profile#1747
Magnus Egerstedt
#22662
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Magnus B. Egerstedt is a Swedish-American roboticist who is the Dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He was formerly the Steve C. Chaddick School Chair and Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1748
Jim Horning
#39633
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
James Jay Horning was an American computer scientist and ACM Fellow. Overview Jim Horning received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1969 for a thesis entitled A Study of Grammatical Inference. He was a founding member, and later chairman, of the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of Toronto, Canada, from 1969 until 1977. He was then a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1977 until 1984 and a founding member and senior consultant at DEC Systems Research Center from 1984 until 1996. He was founder and director of STAR Lab from 1997 ...
Go to Profile#1749
John Day
#37707
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John D. Day is an electrical engineer, an Internet pioneer, and a historian. He has been involved in the development of the communication protocols of Internet and its predecessor ARPANET since the 1970s, and he was also active in the design of the OSI reference model. He has contributed in the research and development of network management systems, distributed databases, supercomputing, and operating systems.
Go to Profile#1750
Eric Brill
#33191
Overall Influence
Eric Brill is a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing. He created the Brill tagger, a supervised part of speech tagger. Another research paper of Brill introduced a machine learning technique now known as transformation-based learning.
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