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,
#2101
Robert Lepper
#18342
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Robert Lepper was an American artist and art professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the country's first industrial design degree program. Lepper's work in industrial design, his fascination with the impact of technology on society and its potential role for artmaking formed the background for his class "Individual and Social Analysis", a two semester class focusing on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression, which with his theoretical dialogues with his most promising students outside the classroom fostered the inte...
Go to Profile#2102
Giorgio Ausiello
#52115
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Giorgio Ausiello is an Italian computer scientist. Born in 1941, in 1966 he graduated in physics under the supervision of Corrado Böhm. From 1966 to 1980, he served as a researcher at the Italian National Research Council . In 1980, he became a professor of compilers and operating systems at Sapienza University of Rome and since 1990 he has been a professor of theoretical computer science in the department of computer, control and management engineering, where he has been until recently the leader of the research group on algorithm engineering. At academic level Giorgio Ausiello has been chair...
Go to Profile#2103
Dick Bulterman
#30566
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dick C. A. Bulterman is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, where he heads the Distributed Multimedia Languages and Interfaces theme. He is also a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Dr. Bulterman was President and CEO of FX Palo Alto Laboratory from 2013–2015.
Go to Profile#2104
Tony Wasserman
#39956
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anthony "Tony" I. Wasserman, is an American computer scientist. He is a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative, was a professor of the Practice in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, and is executive director of the CMU Center for Open Source Investigation. He has been a SkyDeck accelerator program advisor at University of California, Berkeley since 2021.
Go to Profile#2105
Kasper Green Larsen
#53471
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Kasper Green Larsen is a Danish theoretical computer scientist. He is currently full professor at Aarhus University. Biography Larsen earned his doctorate from Aarhus University in 2013 under the supervision of Lars Arge.
Go to Profile#2106
Theodosios Pavlidis
#51901
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Theodosios Pavlidis is a computer scientist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Education Pavlidis studied at the National Technical University of Athens, where in 1957 he received his Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering degree. He continued to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MS in Electrical Engineering in 1962 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1964.
Go to Profile#2107
Pascale Fung
#44989
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Pascale Fung is a professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She is the director of the newly established, multidisciplinary Centre for AI Research at HKUST. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine intera...
Go to Profile#2108
Greg Street
#27056
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Greg Street is an American video game designer and former Head of Creative Development for Riot Games. Street was previously employed by Blizzard Entertainment as Lead Systems Designer on the award-winning MMORPG World of Warcraft, and is also known by his screen name "Ghostcrawler" on the World of Warcraft forums and his own Twitter account. Prior to being employed by Blizzard, Street worked as a marine biologist, eventually moving into the game design field. He also worked with Ensemble Studios on the Age of Empires series of real-time strategy games, during which period he was also known ...
Go to Profile#2109
Martin Wirsing
#50991
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin Wirsing is a German computer scientist, and Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Biography Wirsing studied Mathematics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and at Université Paris 7, obtaining the Diplom in Mathematics from LMU and the Mâitrise-ès-Sciences Mathématiques at the Université Paris 7. Supervised by Kurt Schütte, he received his PhD from LMU in 1976, with a thesis on a topic in mathematical logic . In 1975-1983 he was a research assistant at the chair of F.L. Bauer at Technical University of Munich where in 1984 he completed his Habilitatio...
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Frederic Parke
#36498
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Frederic Ira Parke is an American computer graphics researcher and academic. He did early work on animated computer renderings of human faces. Parke graduated from the University of Utah with a BS degree in physics in 1965. He was then a graduate student of the University of Utah College of Engineering where he received his MS and PhD in computer science.
Go to Profile#2111
Roberto Battiti
#56591
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Roberto Battiti is an Italian computer scientist, Professor of computer science at the University of Trento, director of the LIONlab , and deputy director of the DISI Department and delegate for technology transfer.
Go to Profile#2112
Prakash Panangaden
#40182
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Prakash Panangaden is an American/Canadian computer scientist noted for his research in programming language theory, concurrency theory, Markov processes and duality theory. Earlier he worked on quantum field theory in curved space-time and radiation from black holes. He is the founding Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation .
Go to Profile#2113
Jørn Jensen
#44305
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Jørn Jensen was one of the earliest Danish computer programmers. Examined as a mechanical engineer, he had worked with electromechanical construction. In 1958, he was employed at the Danish Regnecentralen , and very soon exhibited an extraordinary programming skill. He developed the main parts of the base programs to the Dansk Aritmetisk Sekvens Kalkulator , the first Danish computer. Among other programs, he designed a set of monitor programs to supervise the program running schedule on DASK. In tight collaboration with Peter Naur and others, he developed reliable, well documented compilers for the ALGOL 60 programming language.
Go to Profile#2114
Michael Overton
#36643
Overall Influence
Michael L. Overton is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. His research interests are in Numerical Analysis, Optimization, and Scientific Computing.
Go to Profile#2115
Helaman Ferguson
#18665
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Helaman Rolfe Pratt Ferguson is an American sculptor and a digital artist, specifically an algorist. He is also well known for his development of the PSLQ algorithm, an integer relation detection algorithm.
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Frederik Barkhof
#64380
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#2117
Ahmed K. Elmagarmid
#43578
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dr Ahmed K. Elmagarmid is a computer scientist, academic and executive. He is the founding executive director of Qatar Computing Research Institute, a national research institute under Hamad bin Khalifa University, a member of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. Since his appointment in 2010, Elmagarmid has focused on large-scale computing challenges that address national priorities for growth and development of Qatar. The computer research community, especially the database research recognizes the important role he has played at international level by creat...
Go to Profile#2118
Frank van Harmelen
#23042
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Frank van Harmelen is a Dutch computer scientist and professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was scientific director of the LarKC project , "aiming to develop the Large Knowledge Collider, a platform for very large scale semantic web reasoning."
Go to Profile#2119
Robert Edward Black
#51347
Overall Influence
Robert Edward Black is an American physician, epidemiologist, and professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is a leading expert on prevention of childhood mortality and diseases, especially diarrheal diseases in low- and middle-income countries.
Go to Profile#2120
Peter J Lang
#64431
Overall Influence
#2121
Daniel Rueckert
#58498
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Daniel Rueckert is Professor of Visual Information Processing and former Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. He received a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin and a PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College London entitled Segmentation and tracking in cardiovascular images using geometrically deformable models and templates.
Go to Profile#2122
Dorothea Blostein
#42072
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dorothea Blostein is a Canadian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science at Queen's University. She has published well-cited publications on computer vision, image analysis, and graph rewriting, and is known as one of the authors of the master theorem for divide-and-conquer recurrences. Her research interests also include biomechanics and tensegrity.
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Patricia Selinger
#38852
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Patricia G. Selinger is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for her work on relational database management systems. Education She received A.B. , S.M. , and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2124
Guillermo Sapiro
#23652
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Guillermo Sapiro is an Israeli-Uruguayan computer scientist, electrical engineer and professor who has made notable contributions to image processing. He worked at The University of Minnesota for 15 years before becoming a professor at Duke University. He has also worked at Hewlett Packard Labs researching image processing and is known for being one of the people who originally developed the LOCO-I Compression Algorithm for lossless image compression while he was working there. He has also made significant contributions towards the development of the rotobrush tool in Adobe After Effects, which has been included in After Effects since version CS5.
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Timothy J. Hickey
#42753
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Timothy J. Hickey is a professor of computer science and former Chair of the Computer Science and Internet Studies Program at Brandeis University. Hickey's specialties include analysis of algorithms, logic programming and parallel processing, symbolic manipulation, and groupware. His current research involved the study of Educational Technology, Brain-Computer Interfaces and Game-based Learning. He is the co-creator and lead developer of the JScheme programming language and the GrewpEdit collaborative editor.
Go to Profile#2126
Dorien Herremans
#54298
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Dorien Herremans is a Belgian computer music researcher. Herremans is currently an assistant professor in the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and research scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR. She also works as a certified instructor for the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and is director of SUTD Game Lab. Before going to SUTD, she was a recipient of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, where she worked on the project MorpheuS: Hybrid Machine Learning – Optimization techniques To Generate Structured Music Through Morphing And Fusion.
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John Wawrzynek
#54110
Overall Influence
John Wawrzynek is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a joint appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is the Chief Faculty Director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. He is currently a principal researcher in multiple large research centers at UC Berkeley including Algorithms and Specializers for Provably Optimal Implementations with Resilience and Efficiency , the Parallel Computing Laboratory , and the TerraSwarm Research Center.
Go to Profile#2128
Shlomo Dubnov
#52926
Overall Influence
Shlomo Dubnov is an American-Israeli computer music researcher and composer. He is a professor in the Music Department and Affiliate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and a founding faculty of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute in the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 2003. He is the Director of the Center for Research in Entertainment and Learning at UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute.
Go to Profile#2129
Cynthia Beath
#46015
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Cynthia Mathis Beath is an American economist and Professor Emerita at the Department of Information, Risk and Operations Management at the McCombs School of Business, Biography Beath obtained her BA in Psychology from Duke University in 1966, and later studied at University of California, Los Angeles, where she obtained her MBA in Computer and Information Systems in 1975, and her PhD in Computer and Information Systems in 1986
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Hagit Attiya
#58293
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hagit Attiya is an Israeli computer scientist who holds the Harry W. Labov and Charlotte Ullman Labov Academic Chair of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Her research is in the area of distributed computing.
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Torsten Suel
#56705
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Torsten Suel is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Greg Plaxton. He works on the subjects of implementation of bulk synchronous parallel computation, streaming algorithms for histograms, join operations in databases, distributed algorithms for dominating sets, and web crawler algorithms. A conference paper he co-authored in 2011 introduces fast retrieval techniques that were integrated into the Apache Lucene searc...
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Michael Backes
#58785
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Michael Backes is a German professor of computer science. He is the founding director and CEO of the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. He is known for his work on formal methods, cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies.
Go to Profile#2133
Jörg-Rüdiger Sack
#41467
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jörg-Rüdiger Wolfgang Sack is a professor of computer science at Carleton University, where he is Chancellor's Professor. </ref> Sack received a master's degree from the University of Bonn in 1979 and a Ph.D. in 1984 from McGill University, under the supervision of Godfried Toussaint. He is co-editor-in-chief and executive editor of the journal Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, co-editor of the Handbook of Computational Geometry , and co-editor of the proceedings of the biennial Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium . He was a co-founding editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of Spatial Information Science but is no longer an editor there.
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Reza Iravani
#14687
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mohammad Reza Iravani is a professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. He holds the L. Lau Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering in same department .
Go to Profile#2135
Michael Randolph Garey
#64953
Overall Influence
#2136
Eugene Nalimov
#52167
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Eugene Nalimov is a chess programmer and former Microsoft employee, currently working for Context Relevant. Starting in 1998, he wrote a tablebase generator which included many different endgames. He received a ChessBase award at the ChessBase meeting in Maastricht in 2002 for his work.
Go to Profile#2137
Bernhard Rumpe
#47430
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Bernhard Rumpe is a German computer scientist, professor of computer science and head of the Software Engineering Department at the RWTH Aachen University. His research focusses on "technologies, methods, tools ... necessary to create software in the necessary quality that is as efficient and sustainable as possible."
Go to Profile#2138
Carver Mead
#59175
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
#2139
Norbert Fuhr
#44959
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Norbert Fuhr is a professor of computer science and the leader of the Duisburg Information Engineering Group based at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Education His first degree is in technical computer science, which he got from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1980, and in 1986 he received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science of the same university on "Probabilistic Indexing and Retrieval".
Go to Profile#2140
Jeffrey P. Buzen
#42029
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jeffrey Peter Buzen is an American computer scientist in system performance analysis best known for his contributions to queueing theory. His PhD dissertation and his 1973 paper Computational algorithms for closed queueing networks with exponential servers have guided the study of queueing network modeling for decades.
Go to Profile#2141
Richard Mattson
#39336
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Richard Lewis Mattson is an American computer scientist known for his pioneering work on using memory trace data to simulate the performance of the memory hierarchy. He developed the stack distance profile, and used it to model page misses in virtual memory systems as a function of the amount of real memory available. The same methods have been applied as well more recently for modeling the behavior of CPU caches at lower levels of the memory hierarchy, and of web caches for internet content.
Go to Profile#2142
Michael J. Freedman
#57881
Overall Influence
Michael J. Freedman is an American computer scientist who is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he works on distributed systems, networking, and security. He is also the cofounder of database company Timescale.
Go to Profile#2143
Albert Zomaya
#54532
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Albert Y. Zomaya is currently the Chair Professor of High Performance Computing & Networking and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. He is also the Director of the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing. He is currently the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing and Springer's Scalable Computing and Communications. He was past Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers.
Go to Profile#2144
Cuthbert Hurd
#22407
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Cuthbert Corwin Hurd was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, who was instrumental in helping the International Business Machines Corporation develop its first general-purpose computers.
Go to Profile#2145
Frank Stella
#1172
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City. Biography Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.
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Serafim Batzoglou
#48999
Overall Influence
Serafim Batzoglou is Chief Data Officer at Seer Inc. Prior to that he was Chief Data Officer at insitro, VP of computational genomics at Illumina, and professor of computer science at Stanford University between 2001 and 2016. His lab focused on computational genomics with special interest in developing algorithms, machine learning methods, and systems for the analysis of large scale genomic data. He has also been involved with the Human Genome Project and ENCODE.
Go to Profile#2147
Karsten Nohl
#36370
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Karsten Nohl is a German cryptography expert and hacker. His areas of research include Global System for Mobile Communications security, radio-frequency identification security, and privacy protection.
Go to Profile#2148
Adrian Perrig
#56792
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Adrian Perrig is a Swiss computer science researcher and professor at ETH Zurich, leading the Network Security research group. His research focuses on networking and systems security, and specifically on the design of a secure next-generation internet architecture.
Go to Profile#2149
Serge Vaudenay
#42726
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Serge Vaudenay is a French cryptographer and professor, director of the Communications Systems Section at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Serge Vaudenay entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris as a normalien student in 1989. In 1992, he passed the agrégation in mathematics. He completed his Ph.D. studies at the computer science laboratory of École Normale Supérieure, and defended it in 1995 at the Paris Diderot University; his advisor was Jacques Stern. From 1995 to 1999, he was a senior research fellow at French National Centre for Scientific Research . In 1999, he moved ...
Go to Profile#2150
Hsinchun Chen
#23379
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Hsinchun Chen is the Regents' Professor and Thomas R. Brown Chair of Management and Technology at the University of Arizona and the Director and founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab . He also served as lead program director of the Smart and Connected Health program at the National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2015. He received a B.S. degree from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, an MBA from SUNY Buffalo and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Systems from New York University.
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