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,
#1951
Andrew Huang
#19950
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is an American researcher and hacker, who holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from MIT and is the author of the freely available 2003 book Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering. As of 2012 he resides in Singapore. Huang is a member of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and a resident advisor and mentor to hardware startups at HAX, an early stage hardware accelerator and venture capital firm.
Go to Profile#1952
Alessandro Sette
#56958
Overall Influence
Alessandro Sette is an Italian immunologist. He was born on August 11, 1960, in Rome, Italy, to Pietro Sette, a prominent Italian businessman and politician, and Renata Sette. Sette is a professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology . He is an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. Sette studies the specific epitopes that the immune system recognizes in cancer, autoimmunity, allergy, and infectious diseases.
Go to Profile#1953
Sam Hocevar
#26785
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Samuel Hocevar is a French software and video game developer. He was the project leader of the Debian operating system from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008, and one of the founding members of Goatse Security.
Go to Profile#1954
Dominique Perrin
#21906
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Dominique Pierre Perrin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to coding theory and to combinatorics on words. He is a professor of the University of Marne-la-Vallée and currently serves as the President of ESIEE Paris.
Go to Profile#1955
Dario Floreano
#21790
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Dario Floreano is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer. He is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and was the founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics.
Go to Profile#1956
Behnaam Aazhang
#21241
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Behnaam Aazhang is the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and Director of the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative. Early life and education Aazhang was born in Bandar-Anzali, Iran, and attended Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran from 1975 until 1978. He moved to the United States in 1979. Aazhang received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aazhang was a research assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois from 1981 to 1985.
Go to Profile#1957
Jean Paul Jacob
#28431
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Jean Paul Jacob was a Brazilian electronic engineer, researcher and professor. He received his electronic engineering degree from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, in Brazil, and his MS and PhD degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from the University of California, at Berkeley, in 1966.
Go to Profile#1958
Ramachandran S. Vasan
#59383
Overall Influence
#1959
Vijaya Ramachandran
#51205
Overall Influence
Vijaya Ramachandran is an Indian-American theoretical computer scientist known for her research on graph algorithms and parallel algorithms. She is the William Blakemore II Regents Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#1960
Georgios N. Yannakakis
#50957
Overall Influence
Georgios N. Yannakakis is Director and Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games. He is one of the leading researchers within player affective modelling and adaptive content generation for games. He is considered one of the most accomplished experts at the intersection of games and AI.
Go to Profile#1961
Andrzej Cichocki
#55906
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Andrzej Cichocki is a Polish computer scientist, electrical engineer and a professor at the Systems Research Institute of Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland and a visiting professor in several universities and research institutes, especially Riken AIP, Japan. He is most noted for his learning algorithms for Signal separation , Independent Component Analysis , Non-negative matrix factorization , tensor decomposition, Deep Matrix Factorizations for ICA, NMF, PCA, neural networks for optimization and signal processing, Tensor network for Machine Learning and Big Data, and brain–computer interfaces.
Go to Profile#1962
Don Sannella
#53648
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Donald T. Sannella FRSE is professor of computer science in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Sannella graduated from Yale University, University of California, Berkeley and University of Edinburgh with degrees in computer science. His research interests include: algebraic specification and formal software development, correctness of modular systems, types and functional programming, resource certification for mobile code.
Go to Profile#1963
Victoria Coleman
#29202
Overall Influence
Victoria Stavridou-Coleman is currently serving as the 37th chief scientist of the United States Air Force. She took her oath of office on April 6, 2021, administered by the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.
Go to Profile#1964
Kenneth Yamada
#59530
Overall Influence
Kenneth Yamada is an American biologist at the National Institutes of Health and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Yamada's research focuses on discovering novel mechanisms and regulators of cell interactions with the extracellular matrix and their roles in craniofacial development and disease.
Go to Profile#1965
Yongge Wang
#24983
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Yongge Wang is a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte specialized in algorithmic complexity and cryptography. He is the inventor of IEEE P1363 cryptographic standards SRP5 and WANG-KE and has contributed to the mathematical theory of algorithmic randomness. He co-authored a paper demonstrating that a recursively enumerable real number is an algorithmically random sequence if and only if it is a Chaitin's constant for some encoding of programs. He also showed the separation of Schnorr randomness from recursive randomness. He also invented a distance based statistical testing technique to improve NIST SP800-22 testing in randomness tests.
Go to Profile#1966
Wendy Myrvold
#33177
Overall Influence
Wendy Joanne Myrvold is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist known for her work on graph algorithms, planarity testing, and algorithms in enumerative combinatorics. She is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Victoria.
Go to Profile#1967
Susan H. Rodger
#36468
Overall Influence
Susan H. Rodger is an American computer scientist known for work in computer science education including developing the software JFLAP for over twenty years. JFLAP is educational software for visualizing and interacting with formal languages and automata. Rodger is also known for peer-led team learning in computer science and integrating computing into middle schools and high schools with Alice. She is also currently serving on the board of CRA-W and was chair of ACM SIGCSE from 2013 to 2016.
Go to Profile#1968
Danielle Belgrave
#41309
Overall Influence
Danielle Charlotte Belgrave is a Trinidadian-British computer scientist based at DeepMind, who uses statistics and machine learning to understand the progression of diseases. Early life and education Belgrave grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, where her high school mathematics teacher inspired her to work as a data scientist. She studied statistics and business at the London School of Economics . She was a graduate student at University College London , where she earned a master's degree in statistics. In 2010 Belgrave moved to the University of Manchester, where she earned a PhD for research supervised by Iain Buchan, Christopher Bishop and supported by a Microsoft Research scholarship.
Go to Profile#1969
Carl Ebeling
#37946
Overall Influence
Carl Ebeling is a United States computer scientist and professor. His recent interests include coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures of integrated circuits. Education and career He earned MS from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University . Since 1986 he was with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, full professor since 1997. In late 2012, he left his academic position for a position at Altera.
Go to Profile#1970
Timothy M. Chan
#47740
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Timothy Moon-Yew Chan is a Founder Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was formerly Professor and University Research Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.
Go to Profile#1971
Josef Coresh
#56757
Overall Influence
Josef Coresh is an American epidemiologist. He is the inaugural George W. Comstock Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. Coresh serves as the director of both the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training Program and the George W. Comstock Center for Public Health Research and Prevention at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#1972
Gary Drescher
#8003
Overall Influence
Gary L. Drescher is a scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , and author of multiple books on AI, including Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. His book describes a theory of how a computer program might be implemented to learn and use new concepts that have not been programmed into it. It introduces the Schema Mechanism, a general learning and concept-building mechanism inspired by Jean Piaget's account of human cognitive development.
Go to Profile#1973
Lars Rasmussen
#13369
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen is a Danish computer scientist, technology executive, and the co-founder of Google Maps. He was later the director of engineering for Facebook in London. In early 2003, Lars and his brother Jens co-founded a mapping-related startup, Where 2 Technologies, which was acquired by Google in October 2004. Rasmussen became the head of the Google Maps team and worked at Google until joining Facebook in late 2010.
Go to Profile#1974
G. M. Nijssen
#41524
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Gerardus Maria "Sjir" Nijssen is a Dutch computer scientist, former professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, consultant, and author. Nijssen is considered the founder of verbalization in computer science, and one of the founders of business modeling and information analysis based on natural language.
Go to Profile#1975
Sergey Levine
#59790
Overall Influence
#1976
Klara Nahrstedt
#39179
Overall Influence
Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and directs the Coordinated Science Laboratory there. Her research concerns multimedia, quality of service, and middleware.
Go to Profile#1977
Laurence Devillers
#37920
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Laurence Devillers , is a professor of artificial intelligence & ethics at Paris-Sorbonne University since 2011 and at Computer science laboratory for mechanics and engineering sciences at the Scientific Research National Center, a head of the team "Affective and social dimension in spoken interaction". Laurence Devillers has taken part in several national and European projects on human-robots social and affective interactions. Laurence Devillers is leading a cluster of robots-human co-evolution at the Institute of Digital Society and "Robotic interactive" at Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#1978
Katherine Yelick
#36923
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick, an American computer scientist, is the vice chancellor for research and the Robert S. Pepper Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010-2019.
Go to Profile#1979
Nelson Morgan
#48317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Nelson Harold Morgan is an American computer scientist and professor in residence of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Morgan is the co-inventor of the Relative Spectral approach to speech signal processing, first described in a technical report published in 1991.
Go to Profile#1980
John Naughton
#14673
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Naughton is an Irish academic, journalist and author. He is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, Director of the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University, adjunct professor at University College, Cork and the Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper.
Go to Profile#1981
Stephen M. Watt
#38691
Overall Influence
Stephen M. Watt, a computer scientist and mathematician, is past Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Go to Profile#1982
Peter Tippett
#25607
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter S. Tippett is an American physician, researcher, and inventor known for contributions to information security, clinical medicine, and technology. These contributions include the development of the anti-virus program "Corporate Vaccine". Tippett was Vice President of Verizon's Innovations Incubator and Chief Medical Officer for Verizon Enterprise Services from 2009 to 2015. He is currently the Founder and CEO of careMESH Inc.
Go to Profile#1983
Sara Cox
#6322
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Sara Joanne Cyzer is an English broadcaster. She presented Radio 1 Breakfast on BBC Radio 1 from 3 April 2000 until 19 December 2003. Since January 2019, she hosts the BBC Radio 2 drivetime show, Monday–Friday 4pm–7pm .
Go to Profile#1984
Roy Lichtenstein
#711
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings we...
Go to Profile#1985
Alok R. Chaturvedi
#22839
Overall Influence
Alok R. Chaturvedi is a professor of information systems and the founder and the director of SEAS Laboratory at the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. His research is focused on using artificial intelligence, computational ecology, and enterprise integration for wargaming enterprise situations. He received a Ph.D. and M.S in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from B.I.T Ranchi .
Go to Profile#1986
Joanna Rutkowska
#35083
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Joanna Rutkowska is a Polish computer security researcher, primarily known for her research on low-level security and stealth malware, and as founder of the Qubes OS security-focused desktop operating system.
Go to Profile#1987
Dennis Fairclough
#40099
Overall Influence
Dennis Fairclough is Deputy Chair/Professor at the Computing & Networking Sciences Department at Utah Valley University. He specializes in teaching Borland C++ Builder and Java. Raised in Northern California, Fairclough earned a Ph.D. at Brigham Young University. He taught at BYU's department of electric engineering from 1976 to 1984. He was an architect of Wicat Systems and began the computer-related section at Eyring Research Institute. He subsequently founded Praxis Computer Systems and Icon Systems.
Go to Profile#1988
Paulo S. L. M. Barreto
#27024
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Paulo S. L. M. Barreto is a Brazilian cryptographer and one of the designers of the Whirlpool hash function and the block ciphers Anubis and KHAZAD, together with Vincent Rijmen. He has also co-authored a number of research works on elliptic curve cryptography and pairing-based cryptography, including the eta pairing technique, identity-based cryptographic protocols, and the family of Barreto–Naehrig pairing-friendly elliptic curvess. More recently he has been focusing his research on post-quantum cryptography, being one of the discoverers of quasi-dyadic codes and quasi-cyclic moderate-dens...
Go to Profile#1989
Alexander J. Smola
#60262
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#1990
Ellen Voorhees
#39074
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ellen Marie Voorhees is an American computer scientist known for her work in document retrieval, information retrieval, and natural language processing. She works in the retrieval group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology .
Go to Profile#1991
Markus Gross
#49809
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Markus Gross is a Professor of Computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich , head of its Computer Graphics Laboratory, and the director of Disney Research, Zurich. His research interests include physically based modeling, computer animation, immersive displays, and video technology. He has published more than 430 scientific papers on algorithms and methods in the field of computer graphics and computer vision, and holds more than 30 patents. He has graduated more than 60 Ph.D. students.
Go to Profile#1992
Srinivasan Keshav
#46436
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Srinivasan Keshav is an American-Canadian Computer Scientist of Indian descent who is currently the Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. Biography After undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1986, he received his PhD in 1991 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis entitled Congestion Control in Computer Networks. His advisor was Domenico Ferrari. He then joined the research staff at Bell Labs; while at Bell Labs, he also had visiting faculty positions at IIT Delhi and Columbia University. In 1996 he beca...
Go to Profile#1993
Jean-loup Gailly
#32707
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jean-loup Gailly is a French computer scientist and an author of gzip. He wrote the compression code of the portable archiver of the Info-ZIP and the tools compatible with the PKZIP archiver for MS-DOS. He worked over zlib in collaboration with Mark Adler. He prefers to write his hyphenated first name with only the J but not the L capitalized.
Go to Profile#1994
Christopher R. Johnson
#25415
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christopher Ray Johnson is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute . His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#1995
Cyrus Shahabi
#24547
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Cyrus Shahabi is an Iranian-American computer scientist and a 2003 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Biography Shahabi received his bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 1989, followed by a master's degree and PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996 respectively. He currently serves as director of the Integrated Media Systems Center and the Information Laboratory at USC.
Go to Profile#1996
Dan Hirschberg
#41409
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Daniel S. Hirschberg is a full professor in Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the theory of design and analysis of algorithms. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1975. He supervised the PhD dissertation of Lawrence L. Larmore.
Go to Profile#1997
James Aspnes
#55587
Overall Influence
James Aspnes is a professor in Computer Science at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. His main research interest is distributed algorithms.
Go to Profile#1998
Yvonne Rogers
#44119
Overall Influence
Yvonne Rogers is a British psychologist and computer scientist. She serves as director of the Interaction Centre at University College London. She has authored or contributed to more than 250 publications. Her book Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction written with Jenny Preece and Helen Sharp has sold more than 200,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into six other languages. Her work is described in Encounters with HCI Pioneers: A Personal History and Photo Journal.
Go to Profile#1999
Rachel Thomas
#50888
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Rachel Thomas is an American computer scientist and founding Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco. Together with Jeremy Howard, she is co-founder of fast.ai. Thomas was selected by Forbes magazine as one of the 20 most incredible women in artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#2000
Neil D. Jones
#50442
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Neil D. Jones was an American computer scientist. He was a Professor Emeritus in computer science at University of Copenhagen. His work spanned both programming languages and the theory of computation. Within programming languages he was particularly known for his work on partial evaluation and for pioneering work within both data-flow analysis, control-flow analysis and termination analysis. Within the theory of computation, he was among the pioneers of the study of Log-space reductions and P-completeness.
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