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,
#1801
Glenn Ricart
#33821
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Glenn Ricart is a computer scientist. He was influential in the development of the Internet going back to 1969 and early implementation of the TCP/IP protocol. Since then he has been active in technology and business as well as donating his time to philanthropic and educational movements.
Go to Profile#1802
Iryna Gurevych
#40783
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Iryna Gurevych is a German computer scientist. She is Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Director of Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab. Life Gurevych received her diploma in English and German Linguistics from the Vinnytsia State Pedagogical University in 1998. In 2001, she received her Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from University of Duisburg-Essen.
Go to Profile#1803
Michael Fried
#4055
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Martin Fried is a modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Go to Profile#1804
Milly Koss
#39005
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Adele Mildred Koss, known as Milly Koss, was an American pioneering computer programmer. The Association for Women in Computing awarded her an Ada Lovelace Award in 2000. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1950. Following her first job interview with an insurance company, Koss, who was engaged at the time, was rejected for the reason that married women would have children and leave.
Go to Profile#1805
Patrick O'Neil
#32247
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Patrick Eugene O'Neil was an American computer scientist, an expert on databases, and a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. O'Neil did his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a B.S. in mathematics in 1963. After earning a master's degree at the University of Chicago, he moved to Rockefeller University, where he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics in 1969 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota. He was an assistant professor at MIT from 1970 to 1972, but then left academia for industry, returning in 1988 as a member of the UMass/Boston faculty.
Go to Profile#1806
Sudhir Kumar
#54624
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#1807
David Mount
#44242
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Mount is a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park department of computer science whose research is in computational geometry. Biography Mount received a B.S. in Computer Science at Purdue University in 1977 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University in 1983 under the advisement of Christoph Hoffmann.
Go to Profile#1808
John Iacono
#42903
Overall Influence
John Iacono is an American computer scientist specializing in data structures, algorithms and computational geometry. He is one of the inventors of the tango tree, the first known competitive binary search tree data structure.
Go to Profile#1809
Claire Mathieu
#27155
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Claire Mathieu is a French computer scientist and mathematician, known for her research on approximation algorithms, online algorithms, and auction theory. She works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Go to Profile#1810
Devavrat Shah
#42663
Overall Influence
Devavrat Shah is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. He is director of the Statistics and Data Science Center at MIT. He received a B.Tech. degree in computer science from IIT Bombay in 1999 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2004, where his thesis was completed under the supervision of Balaji Prabhakar.
Go to Profile#1811
Anna Lubiw
#26318
Overall Influence
Anna Lubiw is a computer scientist known for her work in computational geometry and graph theory. She is currently a professor at the University of Waterloo. Education Lubiw received her Ph.D from the University of Toronto in 1986 under the joint supervision of Rudolf Mathon and Stephen Cook.
Go to Profile#1812
Tetsuya Mizuguchi
#26807
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tetsuya Mizuguchi is a Japanese video game designer, producer, and businessman. Along with ex-Sega developers he is one of the co-founders of the video game development firm Q Entertainment. He formerly worked for Sega as a producer in their Sega AM3 'arcade machines' team, developing games like Sega Rally Championship and Sega Touring Car Championship, before moving on to become the head of Sega's United Game Artists division, the team responsible for Rez and Space Channel 5. Mizuguchi is better known for creating video games that incorporate interactive synesthesia into his game design, rega...
Go to Profile#1813
John Vincent Atanasoff
#21640
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
John Vincent Atanasoff, , was an American physicist and inventor credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College . Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.
Go to Profile#1814
Ralph McQuarrie
#7911
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Ralph Angus McQuarrie was an American conceptual designer and illustrator. His career included work on the original Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the film Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award.
Go to Profile#1815
Pushpak Bhattacharyya
#40804
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Pushpak Bhattacharyya is a computer scientist and a professor at Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay. He served as the director of Indian Institute of Technology Patna from 2015 to 2021. He is a past president of Association for Computational Linguistics , and Ex-Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor He currently heads the Natural language processing research group Center For Indian Language Technology lab at IIT Bombay.
Go to Profile#1816
Janusz Brzozowski
#37932
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Janusz Antoni Brzozowski was a Polish-Canadian computer scientist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. In 1962, Brzozowski earned his PhD in the field of electrical engineering at Princeton University under Edward J. McCluskey. The topic of the thesis was Regular Expression Techniques for Sequential Circuits. From 1967 to 1996 he was Professor at the University of Waterloo. He is known for his contributions to mathematical logic, circuit theory, and automata theory.
Go to Profile#1817
David Sankoff
#22694
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician, bioinformatician, computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa, and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics, computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics.
Go to Profile#1818
Keith Uncapher
#40063
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Keith Uncapher was an American computer engineer and manager. At the RAND Corporation Uncapher worked on several pioneering computer projects. He founded the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering. There, he assembled teams of engineers who helped to grow the early Internet.
Go to Profile#1819
Samuel Buss
#18395
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Samuel R. Buss is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of mathematical logic, complexity theory and proof complexity. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1820
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud
#25541
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud is a French computer scientist, known for his work in the area of term rewriting. He was born on 21 May 1947 in Aix-les-Bains . From 1967 to 1969 he visited the Ecole Polytechnique . In 1970, 1972, and 1977, he wrote his Master thesis , PhD thesis , and Habilitation thesis , respectively, at the Université de Paris VI. In 1979, he became an associate professor at the Nancy University; 1985 he changed to the Université de Paris-Sud, where he became a full professor in 1986.
Go to Profile#1821
Bill Curtis
#30577
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Bill Curtis is a software engineer best known for leading the development of the Capability Maturity Model and the People CMM in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and for championing the spread of software process improvement and software measurement globally. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement. He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to software process, software measurement, and human factors in software engine...
Go to Profile#1822
Catherine Havasi
#41676
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Catherine Havasi is an American scientist who specialises in artificial intelligence at MIT Media Lab. She is co-founder and CEO of AI company Luminoso. Havasi was a member of the MIT group engaged in the Open Mind Common Sense AI project and that created the natural language AI program ConceptNet.
Go to Profile#1823
Bede Liu
#28915
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Bede Liu is a professor emeritus at Princeton University. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1934. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at National Taiwan University. He earned his master's degree and doctorate in 1956 and 1960, respectively, in electrical engineering, from what is now called New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#1824
Paul Vitányi
#45835
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Paul Michael Béla Vitányi is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Biography Vitányi was born in Budapest to a Dutch mother and a Hungarian father. He received his degree of mathematical engineer from Delft University of Technology in 1971 and his Ph.D. from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1978.
Go to Profile#1825
Thomas D. Wilson
#36296
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Dr. Thomas D. Wilson is a researcher in information science and has been contributing to the field since 1961, when he received his Fellowship from the British Library Association. His research has focused on information management and information seeking behaviour.
Go to Profile#1826
Dave Forney
#21430
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
George David Forney Jr. is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory. Biography Forney received the B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1961, summa cum laude, and the M.S. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and 1965, respectively. His Sc.D thesis introduced the idea of concatenated codes. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences . He is ...
Go to Profile#1827
Bruce Jay Nelson
#36851
Overall Influence
1952 - 1999 (47 years)
Bruce Jay Nelson was an American computer scientist best known as the inventor of the remote procedure call concept for computer network communications. Bruce Nelson graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1974, and went on to earn a master's in computer science from Stanford University in 1976, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. While pursuing his Ph.D., he worked at Xerox PARC where he developed the concept of remote procedure call . He and his collaborator Andrew Birrell were awarded the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award for the work on RPC.
Go to Profile#1828
James Randi
#466
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry , and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation . Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.
Go to Profile#1829
Keren Elazari
#39137
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Keren Elazari , also known as k3r3n3, is an Israeli cybersecurity analyst, writer, and speaker. She is a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv University Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center. Early life and education Elazari was born in and grew up in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her father is Ami Elazari, the CEO of an electric company and a former member of the Israel Defense Forces intelligence group, Unit 8200. Her mother works for an airline. Internet became available in Tel Aviv when Elazari was eleven or twelve years old, and she says she learned English and learned about hacking in online chat rooms.
Go to Profile#1830
Arnold L. Rosenberg
#44050
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Arnold Leonard Rosenberg is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished university professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and despite his retirement from UMass he continues to hold research positions at Northeastern University and Colorado State University.
Go to Profile#1831
Murray Goldberg
#26860
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Murray Goldberg is a noted Canadian educational technologist and a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Goldberg is best known for being the founder of the elearning companies WebCT, Brainify, Silicon Chalk, AssociCom, and Marine Learning Systems. Goldberg was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and raised in Edmonton. He moved to British Columbia to attend the University of Victoria in 1980. Murray graduated from UVic in 1985 and then went on to earn an MSc from the University of British Columbia. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary Ph.D.
Go to Profile#1832
Phillip Hallam-Baker
#32018
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Phillip Hallam-Baker is a computer scientist, mostly known for contributions to Internet security, since the design of HTTP at CERN in 1992. Self-employed since 2018 as a consultant and expert witness in court cases, he previously worked at Comodo, Verisign, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a frequent participant in IETF meetings and discussions, and has written a number of RFCs. In 2007 he authored the dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime; Ron Rivest used it as a source of project ideas for his course on Computer and Network Security at MIT in 2013.
Go to Profile#1833
Michael Stal
#39862
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michael Stal is German computer scientist. He received a Ph.D. title from the University of Groningen which appointed him an honorary professorship for software engineering in 2010. Stal is currently working for the corporate technology department of Siemens AG and as a professor at University of Groningen. He is editor-in-chief of the Java programming language magazine JavaSPEKTRUM.
Go to Profile#1834
Ronald C. Arkin
#36489
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Craig Arkin is an American roboticist and roboethicist, and a Regents' Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for the motor schema technique in robot navigation and for his book Behavior-Based Robotics.
Go to Profile#1835
Catherine McGeoch
#42505
Overall Influence
Catherine Cole McGeoch is an American computer scientist specializing in empirical algorithmics and heuristics for NP-hard problems. She is currently Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society at Amherst College. She has been the Editor in Chief of ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics and was a member of the ACM Publications Board.
Go to Profile#1836
Carolyn Rosé
#21900
Overall Influence
Carolyn Penstein Rosé is an American computer scientist who is a Professor of Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research looks to understand human conversation, and use this understanding to build computer systems that support effective communication in an effort to improve human learning. She has previously served as President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences and a Leshner Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#1837
Steven DeRose
#19052
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Steven J DeRose is a computer scientist noted for his contributions to Computational Linguistics and to key standards related to document processing, mostly around ISO's Standard Generalized Markup Language and W3C's Extensible Markup Language .
Go to Profile#1838
Chris Umans
#41192
Overall Influence
Christopher Umans is a professor of Computer Science in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on algorithms, computational complexity, algebraic complexity, and hardness of approximation.
Go to Profile#1839
Craig Gentry
#32249
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Craig Gentry is an American computer scientist working as CTO of TripleBlind. He is best known for his work in cryptography, specifically fully homomorphic encryption. Education In 1993, while studying at Duke University, he became a Putnam Fellow. In 2009, his dissertation, in which he constructed the first Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme, won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Go to Profile#1840
Katie Bouman
#26435
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#1841
Eddie Kohler
#35105
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Eddie Kohler is a computer scientist specializing in networks and operating systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Prior to Harvard, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1842
Ashwin Ram
#25003
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Ashwin Ram is an Indian-American computer scientist. He was chief innovation officer at PARC from 2011 to 2016, and published books and scientific articles and helped start at least two companies. Biography Ashwin Ram was born in New Delhi, India, on July 27, 1960. He is a great-grandson of Sir Ganga Ram and is the eldest of three children. He grew up in New Delhi with a brief stint in Bombay, and attended one of India's oldest boarding schools, Mayo College.
Go to Profile#1843
Marta Kwiatkowska
#43522
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Her research focuses on developing modelling and automated verification techniques for computing systems in order to guarantee safe, secure, reliable, timely and resource-efficient operation.
Go to Profile#1844
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln
#31961
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Yvonna Sessions Lincoln is an American methodologist and higher-education scholar. Currently a Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Lincoln holds the Ruth Harrington Endowed Chair of Educational Leadership. As an author, she has been largely collected by libraries.
Go to Profile#1845
Venkatesan Guruswami
#36960
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Venkatesan Guruswami is a senior scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and Professor of EECS and Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He did his high schooling at Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan in Chennai, India. He completed his undergraduate in Computer Science from IIT Madras and his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Madhu Sudan in 2001. After receiving his PhD, he spent a year at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, and then was a member of the faculty at the University of Washington from 2002 to 2009. His primary area of research is computer science, and in particular on error-correcting codes.
Go to Profile#1846
Edward A. Lee
#37590
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Edward Ashford Lee is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and author. He is Professor of the Graduate School and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley. Lee works in the areas of cyber-physical systems, embedded systems, and the semantics of programming languages. He is particularly known for his advocacy of deterministic models for the engineering of cyber-physical systems.
Go to Profile#1847
Perry R. Cook
#48091
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Perry R. Cook is an American computer music researcher and professor emeritus of computer science and music at Princeton University. He was also founder and head of the Princeton Sound Lab. Cook has worked in the areas of physical modeling, singing voice synthesis, music information retrieval, principles of computer music controller design, audio analysis and real-time computer music programming languages and systems, and has written a number of books on these subjects. Together with Gary Scavone, he authored the Synthesis Toolkit and with Ge Wang the ChucK programming language. He is also a co-founder, with Dan Trueman in 2005, of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra .
Go to Profile#1848
Richard J. Cole
#37937
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard J. Cole is a Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and works on the Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. Research His research areas include algorithmic economic market theory and game theory, string and pattern matching, amortization, parallelism, and network and routing problems. His notable research contributions include an optimal parallel algorithm for sorting in the PRAM model, and an optimal analysis of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm.
Go to Profile#1849
Charles Molnar
#30395
Overall Influence
1935 - 1996 (61 years)
Charles Edwin Molnar was a co-developer of one of the first minicomputers, the LINC , while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. His collaborator was Wesley A. Clark.
Go to Profile#1850
Tanel Tammet
#31369
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Tanel Tammet is an Estonian computer scientist, professor, software engineer, and computer programmer. He was also one of the founding members of the Estonian Greens party, and helped found the IT College in Tallinn.
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