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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#2001
Mikhail Atallah
#39838
Overall Influence
Mikhail Jibrayil Atallah is a Lebanese American computer scientist, a distinguished professor of computer science at Purdue University. Biography Atallah received his bachelor's degree from the American University of Beirut in 1975. He then moved to Johns Hopkins University for his graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1982 under the supervision of S. Rao Kosaraju. Since that time he has been a member of the Purdue University faculty.
Go to Profile#2002
Naftali Tishby
#31126
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Naftali "Tali" Tishby was a professor of computer science and computational neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Early life and education Tishby was born in 1952. His father Yeshaya Tishby is a researcher of Kabbalah and Jewish thought.
Go to Profile#2003
Leslie Ann Goldberg
#48039
Overall Influence
Leslie Ann Goldberg is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms for random sampling and approximate combinatorial enumeration.
Go to Profile#2004
Catherine Plaisant
#49735
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Catherine Plaisant is a French/American Research Scientist Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and assistant director of research of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab.
Go to Profile#2005
Frank Tompa
#30560
Overall Influence
Frank Tompa is a Canadian-American computer scientist. He is best known for his contributions to the creation of an electronic version of the Oxford English Dictionary, work that was further commercialized in the founding of Open Text Corporation.
Go to Profile#2006
Stefan Savage
#36207
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Stefan Savage is an American computer science researcher, currently a Professor in the Systems and Networking Group at the University of California, San Diego. There, he holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science. Savage is widely cited in computer security, particularly in the areas of email spam, network worms and malware propagation, distributed denial of service mitigation and traceback, automotive hacking and wireless security. He received his undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington .
Go to Profile#2007
Timothy C. Lethbridge
#50175
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Timothy Christian Lethbridge is a British/Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering at University of Ottawa, known for his contributions in the fields of software engineering, knowledge management and computer animation, and the development of Umple.
Go to Profile#2008
Eric Veach
#45575
Overall Influence
Eric Veach is a Canadian computer scientist known for his research on improvements to Monte Carlo sampling in Computer Graphics, which won him two technical academy awards. Education and career Veach obtained a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in 1990 at the University of Waterloo. In 1997, he graduated with a PhD from Stanford University. His thesis is titled Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation, a highly cited paper in Computer Graphics.
Go to Profile#2009
Marc Davis
#16799
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Marc Fraser Davis was a prominent American artist and animator for Walt Disney Animation Studios. He was one of Disney's Nine Old Men, the famed core animators of Disney animated films, and was revered for his knowledge and understanding of visual aesthetics. After his work on One Hundred and One Dalmatians he moved to Walt Disney Imagineering to work on rides for Disneyland and Walt Disney World before retiring in 1978.
Go to Profile#2010
Linda Shapiro
#46495
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Linda G. Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a professor of electrical engineering, and adjunct professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#2011
Ashutosh Saxena
#18379
Overall Influence
Ashutosh Saxena is an Indian-American computer scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. His research interests include deep learning, robotics, and 3-dimensional computer vision. Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, which is an artificial intelligence company that automates peoples' homes and builds applications such as fall detectors for senior living. Prior to Caspar.AI, Ashutosh co-founded Cognical Katapult , which provides a no credit required alternative to traditional financing for online and omni-channel retail.
Go to Profile#2012
Frank Frazetta
#4099
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Frank Frazetta was an American artist known for themes of fantasy and science fiction, noted for comic books, paperback book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers, and other media. He is often referred to as the "Godfather of fantasy art", and one of the most renowned illustrators of the 20th century. He was also the subject of a 2003 documentary Painting with Fire.
Go to Profile#2013
Shlomi Dolev
#45668
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Shlomi Dolev is a Rita Altura Trust Chair Professor in Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the head of the BGU Negev Hi-Tech Faculty Startup Accelerator. Biography Shlomi Dolev received B.Sc. in Civil Engineering and B.A. in Computer Science in 1984 and 1985, and his M.Sc. and D.Sc. in computer science in 1990 and 1992 from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. From 1992 to 1995 he was at Texas A&M University as a visiting research specialist.
Go to Profile#2014
Karen Holtzblatt
#50603
Overall Influence
Karen Holtzblatt is an American computer scientist known for her contributions in human–computer interaction, and particularly in contextual design. She founded InContext Design in 1992, and is its CEO. Holtzblatt was elected to the CHI Academy in 2007 and won the inaugural ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Award for Practice in 2010. Holzblatt is also affiliated with the University of Maryland, as a research scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and iSchool.
Go to Profile#2015
Rudolf Berghammer
#45540
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rudolf Berghammer is a German mathematician who works in computer science. Life Rudolf Berghammer worked as an electrician at the Farbwerke Hoechst, Kelheim, from 1966 until 1970. He began studying Mathematics and Computer Science in 1973 at TU München. His academic teachers were Friedrich L. Bauer, Klaus Samelson, Gottfried Tinhofer, and Gunther Schmidt. After obtaining his diploma in 1979, he started working as an assistant mainly to Gunther Schmidt and Friedrich L. Bauer at TU München where he obtained his award-winning Ph.D. in 1984. From 1988 on, he worked as an assistant to Gunther Schm...
Go to Profile#2016
Cristina Lopes
#60533
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Cristina Videira Lopes is a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. Prior to being a professor, she was a Research Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . While at PARC, she was most known as a founder of the group that developed Aspect-Oriented Programming and started aspectj.org. More recently, she has been working in ubiquitous computing, with a focus in communication mechanisms that are pervasive, secure and intuitive for humans to perceive and interact with.
Go to Profile#2017
Michael Berthold
#51904
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Michael R. Berthold is a German computer scientist, entrepreneur, academic and author. He is a professor, and chair for bioinformatics and information mining at Konstanz University, and an honorary professor at Óbuda University. He is also the co-founder of KNIME, and is serving as a president and CEO of KNIME AG since 2017.
Go to Profile#2018
Alberto Broggi
#38712
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alberto Broggi is General Manager at VisLab srl and a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. Research in computer vision, hardware, and AV Broggi's research activities started in 1991–1994. His group together with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, built their own hardware architecture and installed it on board of a mobile laboratory to develop and test some initial concepts in the field of intelligent vehicles.
Go to Profile#2019
Erik Sandewall
#23596
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Erik Sandewall is a Swedish Professor in the Chair of Computer Science at Linköping University since 1975. He is known for his pioneering research in artificial intelligence. Education Erik Sandewall received the B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Uppsala University in 1964 and 1969 respectively.
Go to Profile#2020
Keith D. Cooper
#47145
Overall Influence
Keith D. Cooper is an American computer scientist, currently the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering at Rice University. He has been a Professor of Computer Science at Rice since July 1989 and served as the chair of that department from 2002 to 2008. As of July 2019, he serves as the Chair of the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. His primary research area has been program analysis and optimization. He was one of the founding members of the compiler group at Rice. He and Linda Torczon co-authored the book Engineering a Compiler.
Go to Profile#2021
Meredith Ringel Morris
#43040
Overall Influence
Meredith Ringel Morris is an American computer scientist who works in human-computer interaction and collaborative web search. She is a principal scientist at Google Brain and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School.
Go to Profile#2022
Frank Dellaert
#34041
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Frank Dellaert is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the IRIM@GT center and is well known for contributions to Robotics and Computer Vision.
Go to Profile#2023
Athanasios Tsakalidis
#49626
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Prof. Athanasios K. Tsakalidis is a Greek computer scientist, a professor at the Graphics, Multimedia and GIS Laboratory, Computer Engineering and Informatics Department , University of Patras, Greece.
Go to Profile#2024
Stephanie Dinkins
#47224
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for creating art about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, and history. Her aim is to "create a unique culturally attuned AI entity in collaboration with coders, engineers and in close consultation with local communities of color that reflects and is empowered to work toward the goals of its community."
Go to Profile#2025
Peter Ružička
#49489
Overall Influence
1947 - 2003 (56 years)
Peter Ružička was a Slovak computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of distributed computing and computer networks. He was a professor at the Comenius University, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics working in several research areas of theoretical computer science throughout his long career.
Go to Profile#2026
Rick Stevens
#22000
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rick Stevens is a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory. Early life and education Stevens started programming at the age of 14 with IBM computer. From 1978 to 1980, Stevens attended Michigan State University where he majored in physics and computer science, before moving to Western Michigan University where he got his B.S. in applied mathematics and philosophy in 1984. Following it, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he passed both M.S.
Go to Profile#2027
Aaron R. Folsom
#61690
Overall Influence
#2028
Kathleen McKeown
#47575
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Kathleen R. McKeown is an American computer scientist, specializing in natural language processing. She is currently the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science and is the Founding Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#2029
Robert Slade
#39333
Overall Influence
Robert Michael Slade, also known as Robert M. Slade and Rob Slade, is a Canadian information security consultant, researcher and instructor. He is the author of Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses, Software Forensics, Dictionary of Information Security and co-author of Viruses Revealed. Slade is the author of thousands of technical book reviews, today published on the techbooks mailing list and in the RISKS Digest, and archived in his Internet Review Project. An expert on computer viruses and malware, he is also the Mr. Slade of "Mr. Slade's lists".
Go to Profile#2030
Robert Piloty
#29969
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Robert Piloty was a German computer scientist and former Professor of Communications Processing at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He was one of the pioneers in the construction of program-controlled computer systems and the founding father of computer science courses in Germany. As a member of the advisory board and chairman of the commission for the introduction of computer science studies in Germany, he was significantly involved in the introduction and design of computer science studies throughout Germany. His efforts also led to the establis...
Go to Profile#2031
Chih-Jen Lin
#50976
Overall Influence
Chih-Jen Lin is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at National Taiwan University, and a leading researcher in machine learning, optimization, and data mining. He is best known for the open-source library LIBSVM, an implementation of support vector machines.
Go to Profile#2032
Sergio Verdú
#49912
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sergio Verdú is a former professor of electrical engineering and specialist in information theory. Until September 22, 2018, he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he taught and conducted research on information theory in the Information Sciences and Systems Group. He was also affiliated with the program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He was dismissed from the faculty following a university investigation of alleged sexual misconduct.
Go to Profile#2033
Carole Goble
#28356
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carole Anne Goble, is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group with Norman Paton.
Go to Profile#2034
Veronika Megler
#35647
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Veronika Margaret Megler is an Australian computer scientist. Megler is currently principal data scientist at Amazon Web Services, and is well known as the co-developer of The Hobbit, a 1982 text adventure game adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Go to Profile#2035
Thomas Reardon
#18509
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Thomas Reardon is an American computational neuroscientist and the CEO and co-founder of CTRL-labs. Formerly, he was a computer programmer and developer at Microsoft. He is credited with creating the project to build Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer , which was the world's most used browser during its peak in the early 2000s. He founded CTRL-labs in 2015 with neuroscientists from Columbia University. Following the acquisition of CTRL-labs he leads the neural interfaces group at Facebook Reality Labs.
Go to Profile#2036
James E. Thornton
#30402
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
James E. Thornton was an American computer engineer. Thornton studied electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota earning a bachelor's degree in 1950. Immediately afterwards he went to Engineering Research Associates , which was acquired by Remington Rand in 1952. In 1958 he left with other ERA engineers to form the new Control Data Corporation . He remained there until 1973 and was involved in the development of the CDC 1604, CDC 6600, 6400, 6500, and the STAR-100. With Seymour Cray, he was the main developer of the pioneering supercomputer CDC 6000, which came onto the market in 1...
Go to Profile#2037
Xuejia Lai
#17037
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Xuejia Lai is a cryptographer, currently a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His notable work includes the design of the block cipher IDEA based on the Lai-Massey scheme, the theory of Markov ciphers, and the cryptanalysis of a number of cryptographic hash functions. His book On the Design and Security of Block Ciphers is frequently cited in cryptography papers.
Go to Profile#2039
Ken Rinaldo
#28102
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kenneth E. Rinaldo is an American neo-conceptual artist and arts educator, known for his interactive robotics, 3D animation, and BioArt installations. His works include Autopoiesis , and Augmented Fish Reality , a fish-driven robot.
Go to Profile#2040
Gerhard Chroust
#34628
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gerhard Chroust is an Austrian systems scientist, and Professor Emeritus for Systems Engineering and Automation at the Institute of System Sciences at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Chroust is an authority in the fields of formal programming languages and interdisciplinary information management.
Go to Profile#2041
Ian Munro
#54783
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James Ian Munro is a Canadian computer scientist. He is known for his fundamental contributions to algorithms and data structures . After earning a bachelor's degree in 1968 from the University of New Brunswick and a master's in 1969 from the University of British Columbia, Munro finished his doctorate in 1971 from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Allan Borodin. In , he formalized the notion of an implicit data structure, and has continued work in this area. He is currently a University Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Water...
Go to Profile#2042
Egon Börger
#32671
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Egon Börger is a German-born computer scientist based in Italy. Life and work Börger was born in Bad Laer, Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Germany. Between 1965 and 1971 he studied at the Sorbonne, Paris , Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain and University of Münster . Between 1972 and 1976, he was at the Università di Salerno in Italy, where he taught the first courses in the newborn Computer Science Degree. Since 1985 he has held a Chair in computer science at the University of Pisa, Italy. Since September 2010, he has been an elected member of the Acad...
Go to Profile#2043
Jonathan Katz
#37061
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland who conducts research on cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2019–2020 he was a faculty member in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, where he held the title of Eminent Scholar in Cybersecurity. In 2013–2019 he was director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#2044
Mitsuru Matsui
#31025
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
is a Japanese cryptographer and senior researcher for Mitsubishi Electric Company. Career While researching error-correcting codes in 1990, Matsui was inspired by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir's differential cryptanalysis, and discovered the technique of linear cryptanalysis, published in 1993. Differential and linear cryptanalysis are the two major general techniques known for the cryptanalysis of block ciphers.
Go to Profile#2045
Susan J. Eggers
#47308
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Susan J. Eggers is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computer architecture and compilers. "Eggers is best known for her foundational work in developing and helping to commercialize simultaneous multithreaded processors, one of the most important advancements in computer architecture in the past 30 years. In the mid-1990s, Moore's Law was in full swing and, while computer engineers were finding ways to fit up to 1 billion transistors on a computer chip, the increase in logic and memory alone did not result in significant performance gains. Eggers was among those who arg...
Go to Profile#2046
Nikolaus Correll
#38355
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Nikolaus Correll is a roboticist and an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Department of Computer Science with courtesy appointments in the departments of Aerospace, Electrical and Materials Engineering. Nikolaus is the faculty director of the Interdisciplinary Research Theme on Multi-functional Materials at the College of Engineering and Applied Science, and the founder and CTO of Robotic Materials Inc.
Go to Profile#2047
Marc Auslander
#48020
Overall Influence
Marc Alan Auslander is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to the PL/8 compiler. He spent his entire career at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.
Go to Profile#2048
Jan Węglarz
#19504
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jan Węglarz is a Polish computer scientist. His current research focuses on operations research. He studied at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, where he graduated in mathematics in 1969, and later on Poznań University of Technology, when he received title from automatics in 1971. He started work there in 1971. He received a doctorate in 1974, and habilitation in 1977. In 1988 he received the title of professor. Member of Polish Academy of Sciences , member-co-founder of Polish Information Processing Society , member of American Mathematical Society, Operations Research Society of America, member of Poznan Chapter of Agder Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Go to Profile#2049
Wojciech Szpankowski
#37838
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Wojciech Szpankowski is the Saul Rosen Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. He is known for his work in analytic combinatorics, analysis of algorithms and analytic information theory. He is the director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Science of Information.
Go to Profile#2050
Donald B. Johnson
#56780
Overall Influence
1933 - 1994 (61 years)
Donald Bruce Johnson was an American computer scientist, a researcher in the design and analysis of algorithms, and the founding chair of the computer science department at Dartmouth College. Johnson received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973 under the supervision of David Gries. He took a faculty position in the computer science department at Pennsylvania State University, and later moved to the department of mathematics at Dartmouth. When the Dartmouth computer science department was founded in 1994, he became its first chair.
Go to Profile