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,
#1901
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay
#14055
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is an Indian computer scientist specializing in computational biology. A professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, she is a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winner in Engineering Science for 2010, IInfosys Prize 2017 laureate in the Engineering and Computer Science category and TWAS Prize winner for Engineering Sciences in 2018. Her research is mainly in the areas of evolutionary computation, pattern recognition, machine learning and bioinformatics. Since 1 August 2015, she has been the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, and she would oversee t...
Go to Profile#1902
Oliver Krüger
#22266
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Oliver Krüger is a German professor in Religious studies at the University of Fribourg . From 1994 to 1999 he studied sociology, classical archaeology, and comparative religion at the University of Bonn. In 2003, he graduated there with a PhD in religious studies. His thesis was the first in-depth study of posthumanism and transhumanism that shed light on the philosophical, religious, and cultural contexts of these utopias. In 2004 the thesis was awarded by the German Association for the History of Religion.
Go to Profile#1903
Allison Druin
#45411
Overall Influence
Allison Druin is an American computer scientist who studies human–computer interaction, and digital libraries, particularly focusing on children's use of educational technology. She is a professor emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Provost for Research and Strategic Partnerships at the Pratt Institute.
Go to Profile#1904
Michael D. Smith
#22168
Overall Influence
Michael D. Smith is the John H. Finley, Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 2007 to 2018. In addition to his academic position, Smith was the Chief Scientist and co-founder of Liquid Machines, Inc., a provider of enterprise rights management software.
Go to Profile#1905
Ursula Martin
#28013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#1906
Roel Wieringa
#39423
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roelf Johannes Wieringa is a Dutch computer scientist who was a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Twente, specialized in the "integration of formal and informal specification and design techniques".
Go to Profile#1907
Gurpreet Singh Lehal
#36276
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Gurpreet Singh Lehal is a professor in the Computer Science Department, Punjabi University, Patiala and Director of the Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language Literature and Culture. He is noted for his work in the application of computer technology in the use of the Punjabi language both in the Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi script.
Go to Profile#1908
Robert Axtell
#18049
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Robert Axtell is a professor at George Mason University, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, where he is departmental chair of the Department of Computational Social Science. He is also a member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Axtell is also the co-Director of the new Computational Public Policy Lab at Mason.
Go to Profile#1909
Ira Glass
#2875
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality. He is the host and producer of the radio and television series This American Life and has participated in other NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. His work in radio and television has won him awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Radio and the George Polk Award in Radio Reporting.
Go to Profile#1910
Bill Schelter
#14169
Overall Influence
1947 - 2001 (54 years)
William Frederick Schelter was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called Maxima. Schelter authored Austin Kyoto Common Lisp under contract with IBM. AKCL formed the foundation for Axiom, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the GNU C compiler to the Intel 386 architecture, used in the original ...
Go to Profile#1911
Bernard Greenberg
#41264
Overall Influence
Bernard S. Greenberg is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on Multics and the Lisp machine. Projects In 1978, Greenberg implemented Multics Emacs using Multics Maclisp. The success of this effort influenced the choice of Lisp as the basis for later versions of Emacs.
Go to Profile#1912
Chieko Asakawa
#28867
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Chieko Asakawa is a blind Japanese computer scientist, known for her work at IBM Research – Tokyo in accessibility. A Netscape browser plug-in she developed, the IBM Home Page Reader, became the most widely used web-to-speech system available. She is the recipient of numerous industry and government awards.
Go to Profile#1913
James F. O'Brien
#47692
Overall Influence
James F. O'Brien is a computer graphics researcher and professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also co-founder and chief science officer at Avametric, a company developing software for virtual clothing try on. In 2015, he received an award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#1914
Ora Lassila
#25473
Overall Influence
Ora Lassila is a Finnish computer scientist who lives in the U.S. and works as a technologist at Amazon Web Services. He has been conducting research into the Semantic Web since 1996, and was co-author, with Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, of the article "The Semantic Web" which appeared in Scientific American in 2001, now the most cited paper in the Semantic Web area. His early work in this area included proposing the original RDF Specification with Ralph R. Swick and he has been an elected member of the World Wide Web Consortium Advisory Board since 1998. He also belongs to the steering ...
Go to Profile#1915
Inderjit Dhillon
#37021
Overall Influence
Inderjit S. Dhillon is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the Director of the ICES Center for Big Data Analytics. His main research interests are in machine learning, data analysis, parallel computing, network analysis, linear algebra and optimization.
Go to Profile#1916
Pier Mannuccio Mannucci
#58206
Overall Influence
#1917
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
#43486
Overall Influence
Suresh Venkatasubramanian is an Indian computer scientist and professor at Brown University. In 2021, Prof. Venkatasubramanian was appointed to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on matters relating to fairness and bias in tech systems. He was formerly a professor at the University of Utah. He is known for his contributions in computational geometry and differential privacy, and his work has been covered by news outlets such as Science Friday, NBC News, and Gizmodo. He also runs the Geomblog, which has received coverage from the New York Times, Hacker News, KDnuggets and other media outlets.
Go to Profile#1918
David S. H. Rosenthal
#38253
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David Stuart Holmes Rosenthal is a British-American computer scientist. Biography Rosenthal is the son of Michael David Holmes Rosenthal and Marjorie Mary "Molly" Rosenthal . His brother Mark Geoffrey Thomas Rosenthal ran to be a member of the UK Parliament for Ynys Môn in 2015.
Go to Profile#1919
Michael Gelfond
#37608
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Gelfond is a Professor in Computer Sciences at Texas Tech University in the United States. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Russia in 1974 and emigrated to the United States in 1978. Gelfond's research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and an Area Editor of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
Go to Profile#1920
Coenraad Bron
#30465
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Coenraad Bron was a Dutch computer scientist. He worked with Edsger W. Dijkstra on the THE multiprogramming system. Together with Joep Kerbosch he invented the Bron–Kerbosch algorithm for the clique problem.
Go to Profile#1921
Ron Kimmel
#33587
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Ron Kimmel is a professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He holds a D.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technion, and was a post-doc at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Labs, and a visiting professor at Stanford University. He has worked in various areas of image and shape analysis in computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics. Kimmel's interest in recent years has been non-rigid shape processing and analysis, medical imaging, computational biometry, deep learning, numerical optimization of problems with a geometric flavor, and applications of metric and differential geometry.
Go to Profile#1922
Brian Campbell Vickery
#34209
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Brian Campbell Vickery was a British information scientist and classification researcher, and Professor and director at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London from 1973 to 1983.
Go to Profile#1923
Xin Yao
#58357
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#1924
Monika Henzinger
#33270
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Monika Henzinger is a German computer scientist, and is a former director of research at Google. She is currently a professor at the University of Vienna. Her expertise is mainly on algorithms with a focus on data structures, algorithmic game theory, information retrieval, search algorithms and Web data mining. She is married to Thomas Henzinger and has three children.
Go to Profile#1925
Joseph A. Konstan
#54005
Overall Influence
Joseph A. Konstan is an American computer scientist, the Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. His research interests are human computer interaction, social computing, collaborative information filtering, online communities and medical and health applications of Internet technology. He is best known for his work in collaborative filtering recommenders , and for his work in online HIV prevention.
Go to Profile#1926
Anthony C. Hearn
#19326
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Anthony C. Hearn is an Australian-American computer scientist and adjunct staff member at RAND Corporation and at the Institute for Defense Analyses Center for Computing Sciences. He is best known for his pioneering contributions in mathematical software development, most notably in developing the computer algebra system REDUCE, which is the oldest such system still in active use. He was also one of the founders of the CSNET computer network, for which he shared the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award with Peter J. Denning, David Farber, and Lawrence Landweber in 2009. He was elected a Fellow of ...
Go to Profile#1927
Edward S. Davidson
#30752
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Edward S. Davidson is a professor emeritus in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research interests His research interests include computer architecture, pipelining theory, parallel processing, performance modeling, intelligent caches, and application tuning. In the 1970s, he developed the reservation table approach to optimum design and cyclic scheduling of pipelines, designed and implemented an eight-node symmetric multiprocessor system in 1976, and developed a variety of systematic methods for modeling performance and enhancing systems, in...
Go to Profile#1928
Allan Borodin
#48484
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Allan Bertram Borodin is a Canadian-American computer scientist who is a professor at the University of Toronto. Biography Borodin did his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1963. After earning a master's degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1966 , he continued his graduate studies at Cornell University, completing a doctorate in 1969 under the supervision of Juris Hartmanis. He joined the Toronto faculty in 1969 and was promoted to full professor in 1977. He served as department chair from 1980 to 1985, and became Universit...
Go to Profile#1929
Jerome I. Elkind
#25779
Overall Influence
Jerome Elkind is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. In 1988 he was co-founder of the Lexia Institute. Biography Elkind was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his undergraduate degree in 1951 and Sc.D. in 1957. He went on to join BBN Technologies and participated for them in the 1960 Symposium on Principles of Self-Organization. He then was appointed head of the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center . Here he held budgetary responsibility for new projects. He also worked with Bob Taylor on the Xerox Alto. He went on to ...
Go to Profile#1930
Marie-Paule Cani
#50174
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Marie-Paule Cani is a French computer scientist conducting advanced research in the fields of shape modeling and computer animation. She has contributed to over 300 research publications having around 12000 citations.
Go to Profile#1931
David Zuckerman
#53149
Overall Influence
David Zuckerman is an American theoretical computer scientist whose work concerns randomness in computation. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Biography Zuckerman received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1987, where he was a Putnam Fellow in 1986. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 advised by Umesh Vazirani. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hebrew University of Jerusalem before joining the University of Texas in 1994.
Go to Profile#1932
Ipke Wachsmuth
#36771
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ipke Wachsmuth was born 1950. He is a German computer scientist within the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Wachsmuth is a professor for artificial intelligence at Bielefeld University and teaches computer science and artificial intelligence since 1989. From 2002 until 2009 he was the managing director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld. His research mainly focuses on human-machine interaction and virtual reality.
Go to Profile#1933
Nikil Dutt
#39762
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Nikil Dutt is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Irvine, United States. Professor Dutt's research interests are in embedded systems, electronic design automation, computer architecture, optimizing compilers, system specification techniques, distributed systems, and formal methods.
Go to Profile#1934
Clarence Ellis
#31007
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Clarence "Skip" Ellis was an American computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at the CU-Boulder, he was the director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science. Ellis was the first Black Person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science , and the first Black Person to be elected a Fellow of the ACM . Ellis was a pioneer in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware. He and his team at Xerox PARC created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems.
Go to Profile#1935
Bridget Riley
#3796
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Bridget Louise Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France. Early life and education Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London. Her father, John Fisher Riley, originally from Yorkshire, had been an Army officer. He was a printer by trade and owned his own business. In 1938, he relocated the printing business, together with his family, to Lincolnshire.
Go to Profile#1936
Peter Hofstee
#23372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Harm Peter Hofstee is a Dutch physicist and computer scientist who currently is a distinguished research staff member at IBM Austin, USA, and a part-time professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
Go to Profile#1937
Luc Devroye
#26868
Overall Influence
Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye wrote around 300 mathematical articles, mostly on probabilistic analysis of algorithms, on the asymptotic analysis of combinatorial structures , and on random number generation .
Go to Profile#1938
Anupam Joshi
#25751
Overall Influence
Anupam Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and Acting Dean of the UMBC College of Engineering and Information Technology in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA. He is also the Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity.
Go to Profile#1939
John Stasko
#50414
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
John Thomas Stasko III is a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he joined the faculty in 1989. He also is one of the founding members of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center there. Stasko is best known for his extensive research in information visualization and visual analytics, including his earlier work in software visualization and algorithm animation.
Go to Profile#1940
Robert R. Korfhage
#21740
Overall Influence
1930 - 1998 (68 years)
Robert Roy Korfhage was an American computer scientist, famous for his contributions to information retrieval and several textbooks. He was son of Dr. Roy Korfhage who was a chemist at Nestlé in Fulton, Oswego County, New York. Korfhage earned his bachelor's degree in engineering mathematics at University of Michigan, while working part-time at United Aircraft and Transport Corporation in East Hartford as programmer. At the same university, he earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in mathematics, his PhD dissertation being On Systems of Distinct Representatives for Several Collections of Set...
Go to Profile#1941
Eduard Hovy
#52761
Overall Influence
Eduard Hovy is a Research Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is one of the original 17 Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Biography Eduard Hovy received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the National University of Distance Education in Madrid in 2013 and the University of Antwerp in 2015.
Go to Profile#1942
Bonnie Webber
#43109
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bonnie Lynn Nash-Webber is a computational linguist. She is an honorary professor of intelligent systems in the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh. Education and career Webber completed her PhD at Harvard University in 1978, advised by Bill Woods, while at the same time working with Woods at Bolt Beranek and Newman.
Go to Profile#1943
Brad Karp
#43675
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Brad Nelson Karp is an American computer scientist, specializing in computer networks. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1992 and got his master's and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1995 and 2000 respectively, under the supervision of H. T. Kung. Later on he became a staff scientist at the Center for Internet Research and at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California where he worked until 2002. After working as a senior staff researcher at Intel Research of Pittsburgh and as an adjunct assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he moved in 2005 to University College London, where he is now a reader.
Go to Profile#1944
Milind Tambe
#39589
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Milind Tambe is an Indian-American educator serving as a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. He also serves as the director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University and the director of "AI for Social Good" at Google Research India.
Go to Profile#1945
Dimitris Fotakis
#50889
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Dimitris Fotakis is associate professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the National Technical University of Athens. He is a prominent researcher in the field of algorithmic game theory. Born and raised in Patras, he received a Computer Engineering Diploma and a PhD in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece. From September 2001 until September 2003, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Algorithms and Complexity Group, Saarbrücken, Germany. Since February 2009, he has been a faculty ...
Go to Profile#1946
Larry Masinter
#39083
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Larry Melvin Masinter is an early internet pioneer and ACM Fellow. After attending Stanford University, he became a Principal Scientist of Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems and author or coauthor of 26 of the Internet Engineering Task Force's Requests for Comments.
Go to Profile#1947
Anna Karlin
#35027
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anna R. Karlin is an American computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Biography Karlin was born into an academic family. Her father, Samuel Karlin, was a mathematician at Stanford University, and her brother, Kenneth Karlin, is a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#1948
George A. Bekey
#29265
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
George A. Bekey is an American roboticist and the Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Bekey was born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1928 before immigrating at the beginning of WW2 to Bolivia before moving to the United States five years later at the age of 17 in 1945.
Go to Profile#1949
Peter Pagé
#26716
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Peter Pagé was a German software pioneer. He joined Software AG in Darmstadt in 1971 as one of 6 employees and in 1975 became Vice President of Software AG. Page developed NATURAL as the first fourth-generation programming language, which was instrumental in Software AG's success.
Go to Profile#1950
Jim Hall
#42748
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jim Hall is a computer programmer and advocate of free software, best known for his work on FreeDOS. Hall began writing the free replacement for the MS-DOS operating system in 1994 when he was still a physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. He remains active with FreeDOS, and is currently the coordinator for the project.
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