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,
#201
Jean Ichbiah
#3612
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Jean David Ichbiah was a French computer scientist and the initial chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers. Early life Ichbiah was a descendant of Greek and Turkish Jews from Thessaloniki who emigrated to France.
Go to Profile#202
Rasmus Lerdorf
#2802
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish-Canadian programmer. He co-authored and inspired the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participating in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead , Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans, and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.
Go to Profile#203
Werner Vogels
#3050
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Werner Hans Peter Vogels is the chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon in charge of driving technology innovation within the company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.
Go to Profile#204
Philippe Kruchten
#2297
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Philippe Kruchten is a Canadian software engineer, and Professor of Software Engineering at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, known as Director of Process Development at Rational Software, and developer of the 4+1 Architectural View Model.
Go to Profile#205
Ravi Sethi
#4081
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ravi Sethi is an Indian computer scientist retired from executive roles at Bell Labs and Avaya Labs. He also serves as a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee. He is best known as one of three authors of the classic computer science textbook Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, also known as the Dragon Book.
Go to Profile#206
William Kahan
#2342
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
William "Velvel" Morton Kahan is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.
Go to Profile#207
John Zachman
#1026
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
John A. Zachman is an American business and IT consultant, early pioneer of enterprise architecture, chief executive officer of Zachman International , and originator of the Zachman Framework. Biography Zachman holds a degree in Chemistry from Northwestern University. He served for a number of years as a line officer in the United States Navy, and is a retired Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
Go to Profile#208
Tin Kam Ho
#4237
Overall Influence
Tin Kam Ho is a computer scientist at IBM Research with contributions to machine learning, data mining, and classification. Ho is noted for introducing random decision forests in 1995, and for her pioneering work in ensemble learning and data complexity analysis. She is an IEEE fellow and IAPR fellow.
Go to Profile#209
Gerald Weinberg
#2548
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Gerald Marvin Weinberg was an American computer scientist, author and teacher of the psychology and anthropology of computer software development. His most well-known books are The Psychology of Computer Programming and Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
Go to Profile#210
Zoubin Ghahramani
#3028
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Go to Profile#211
Dan Ingalls
#4067
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap computer graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. He designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He made major contributions to the Squeak version of Smalltalk, inc...
Go to Profile#212
Christopher J. Date
#3042
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Chris Date is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database theory. Biography Chris Date attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1951 to 1958 and received his BA in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1962. He entered the computer business as a mathematical programmer at Leo Computers Ltd. , where he quickly moved into education and training. In 1966, he earned his master's degree at Cambridge, and, in 1967, he joined IBM Hursley as a computer programming instructor. Between 1969 and 1974, he was a principal instructor in IBM'...
Go to Profile#213
Michael J. Fischer
#3870
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#214
Ion Stoica
#3368
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ion Stoica is a Romanian–American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva and Databricks with other original developers of Apache Spark.
Go to Profile#215
Jon Postel
#1686
Overall Influence
1943 - 1998 (55 years)
Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol , and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority until his death. During his lifetime he was referred to as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence; Postel himself noted that this "compliment" came with a barb, the suggestion that he should be replaced by a "professio...
Go to Profile#216
Peter G. Neumann
#2581
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Peter Gabriel Neumann is a computer-science researcher who worked on the Multics operating system in the 1960s. He edits the RISKS Digest columns for ACM Software Engineering Notes and Communications of the ACM. He founded ACM SIGSOFT and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.
Go to Profile#217
Jim Gray
#2953
Overall Influence
1944 - 2012 (68 years)
James Nicholas Gray was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation".
Go to Profile#218
Charles P. Thacker
#2034
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface . Biography Thacker was born in Pasadena, California, on February 26, 1943. His father was Ralph Scott Thacker, born 1906, an electrical engineer in the aeronautical industry. His mother was the former Fern Cheek, born 1922 in Oklahoma, a cashier and secretary, who soon raised their two sons on her own.
Go to Profile#219
Mark Weiser
#3730
Overall Influence
1952 - 1999 (47 years)
Mark D. Weiser was a computer scientist and chief technology officer at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Valley, Weiser was broadly viewed as a visionary and computer pioneer, and his ideas have influenced many of the world's leading computer scientists.
Go to Profile#220
Susan Dumais
#4358
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Susan Dumais is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies. According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval."
Go to Profile#221
Bonnie Nardi
#2001
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bonnie A. Nardi is an emeritus professor of the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she led the TechDec research lab in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. She is well known for her work on activity theory, interaction design, games, social media, and society and technology. She was elected to the ACM CHI academy in 2013. She retired in 2018.
Go to Profile#222
Gerard Salton
#3290
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for Information Retrieval.
Go to Profile#223
Jiawei Han
#4951
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jiawei Han is a Chinese-American computer scientist and writer. He currently holds the position of Michael Aiken Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on data mining, text mining, database systems, information networks, data mining from spatiotemporal data, Web data, and social/information network data.
Go to Profile#224
John Mashey
#3999
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John R. Mashey is an American computer scientist, director and entrepreneur. Career Mashey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, where he developed the ASSIST assembler language teaching software. He worked on the PWB/UNIX operating system at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1983, authoring the PWB shell, also known as the "Mashey Shell". He then moved to Silicon Valley to join Convergent Technologies, ending as director of software. He joined MIPS Computer Systems in early 1985, managing operating systems development, and helping design the MIPS RISC architecture, as well as specific CPUs, systems and software.
Go to Profile#225
Kurt Mehlhorn
#3578
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kurt Mehlhorn is a German theoretical computer scientist. He has been a vice president of the Max Planck Society and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science. Education and career Mehlhorn graduated in 1971 from the Technical University of Munich, where he studied computer science and mathematics, and earned his Ph.D. in 1974 from Cornell University under the supervision of Robert Constable. Since 1975 he has been on the faculty of Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he was chair of the computer science department from 1976 to 1978 and again from 1987 to 1989.
Go to Profile#226
Rina Dechter
#3722
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rina Dechter is a distinguished professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is on automated reasoning in artificial intelligence focusing on probabilistic and constraint-based reasoning. In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#227
Cynthia Dwork
#2784
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Cynthia Dwork is an American computer scientist best known for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.
Go to Profile#228
William J. Rapaport
#3126
Overall Influence
William Joseph Rapaport is a North American philosopher who is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the University at Buffalo. Philosophical work Rapaport has done research and written extensively on intentionality and artificial intelligence. He has research interests in computer science, artificial intelligence , computational linguistics, cognitive science, logic and mathematics, and published many scientific articles on them.
Go to Profile#229
Gregor Kiczales
#4993
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Gregor Kiczales is an American computer scientist. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known for developing the concept of aspect-oriented programming, and the AspectJ extension to the Java programming language, both of which he designed while working at Xerox PARC. He is also one of the co-authors of the specification for the Common Lisp Object System, and is the author of the book The Art of the Metaobject Protocol, along with Jim Des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow.
Go to Profile#230
Andrei Alexandrescu
#4029
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Andrei Alexandrescu is a Romanian-American C++ and D language programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated in his book Modern C++ Design and were first implemented in his programming library, Loki. He also implemented the "move constructors" concept in his MOJO library. He contributed to the C/C++ Users Journal under the byline". Alexandrescu worked as a research scientist at Facebook, before departing the company in August 2015 in order to focus on developing the D programm...
Go to Profile#231
Avie Tevanian
#2589
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Avadis "Avie" Tevanian is an American-Armenian software engineer. At Carnegie Mellon University, he was a principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system . He leveraged that work at NeXT Inc. as the foundation of the NeXTSTEP operating system. He was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple from 1997 to 2003, and then chief software technology officer from 2003 to 2006. There, he redesigned NeXTSTEP to become macOS. Apple's macOS and iOS both incorporate the Mach Kernel, and iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS are all derived from iOS. He was a longtime friend of Steve Jobs.
Go to Profile#232
David A. Huffman
#2973
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
David Albert Huffman was an American pioneer in computer science, known for his Huffman coding. He was also one of the pioneers in the field of mathematical origami. Education Huffman earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in 1944. Then, he served two years as an officer in the United States Navy. He returned to Ohio State to earn his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1949. In 1953, he earned his Doctor of Science in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , with the thesis The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits, advised by Samuel H.
Go to Profile#233
Gilles Brassard
#3205
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gilles Brassard, is a faculty member of the Université de Montréal, where he has been a Full Professor since 1988 and Canada Research Chair since 2001. Education and early life Brassard received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1979, working in the field of cryptography with John Hopcroft as his advisor.
Go to Profile#234
David Harel
#3030
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Harel is a computer scientist, currently serving as President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980, and holds the William Sussman Professorial Chair of Mathematics. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years.
Go to Profile#235
Peter Wegner
#4261
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Peter A. Wegner was a professor of computer science at Brown University from 1969 to 1999. He made significant contributions to both the theory of object-oriented programming during the 1980s and to the relevance of the Church–Turing thesis for empirical aspects of computer science during the 1990s and present. In 2016, Wegner wrote a brief autobiography for Conduit, the annual Brown University Computer Science department magazine.
Go to Profile#236
Ronald J. Williams
#4117
Overall Influence
Ronald J. Williams is professor of computer science at Northeastern University, and one of the pioneers of neural networks. He co-authored a paper on the backpropagation algorithm which triggered a boom in neural network research. He also made fundamental contributions to the fields of recurrent neural networks and reinforcement learning. Together with Wenxu Tong and Mary Jo Ondrechen he developed Partial Order Optimum Likelihood , a machine learning method used in the prediction of active amino acids in protein structures. POOL is a maximum likelihood method with a monotonicity constraint an...
Go to Profile#237
Jon Bentley
#4136
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Jon Louis Bentley is an American computer scientist who is credited with the heuristic-based partitioning algorithm k-d tree. Education and career Bentley received a B.S. in mathematical sciences from Stanford University in 1974, and M.S. and PhD in 1976 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; while a student, he also held internships at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics. At CMU, his students inclu...
Go to Profile#238
Endre Szemerédi
#1034
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#239
James D. Foley
#4132
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
James David Foley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus and held the Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology . He was Interim Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing from 2008–2010. He is perhaps best known as the co-author of several widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics, of which over 400,000 copies are in print and translated in ten languages. Foley most recently conducted research in instructional technologies and distance education...
Go to Profile#240
Steven M. Bellovin
#3633
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Steven M. Bellovin is a researcher on computer networking and security who has been a professor in the computer science department at Columbia University since 2005. Previously, Bellovin was a fellow at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#241
Richard M. Karp
#2754
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
Go to Profile#242
Vernor Vinge
#2005
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Vernor Steffen Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He has won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep , A Deepness in the Sky , Rainbows End , and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High , and The Cookie Monster .
Go to Profile#243
Tomaso Poggio
#2665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Tomaso Armando Poggio , is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.
Go to Profile#244
Kathleen Booth
#2769
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth was a British computer scientist and mathematician who wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London. She helped design three different machines including the ARC , SEC , and APEC.
Go to Profile#245
David Gelernter
#2719
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University. Gelernter is known for contributions to parallel computation in the 1980s, and for books on topics such as computed worlds . Gelernter is also known for his belief, expressed in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture , that liberal academia has a destructive influence on American society. He is in addition known for his views against women in the workforce, and his rejection of the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic clim...
Go to Profile#246
Abraham Lempel
#2831
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Abraham Lempel was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms. Biography Lempel was born on 10 February 1936 in Lwów, Poland . He studied at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and received a B.Sc. in 1963, an M.Sc. in 1965, and a D.Sc. in 1967. Since 1977 he held the title of full professor, and was a professor emeritus at Technion.
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Radia Perlman
#2851
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol , which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for exampl...
Go to Profile#248
Constantinos Daskalakis
#2777
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Constantinos Daskalakis is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize and the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2018.
Go to Profile#249
Mark Russinovich
#2978
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mark Eugene Russinovich is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before Microsoft acquired it in 2006.
Go to Profile#250
Nancy Lynch
#4885
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
