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,
#2151
Moshe Tennenholtz
#53712
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Moshe Tennenholtz is an Israeli computer scientist and professor with the faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he holds the Sondheimer Technion Academic Chair.
Go to Profile#2152
Loren Terveen
#56399
Overall Influence
Loren Terveen is an American computer scientist and was the president of the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGCHI professional group from 2015 to 2018. Terveen is a professor of computer science and engineering and studies human-computer interaction at GroupLens Research at the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#2153
Amar Gupta
#38753
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Amar Gupta is an Indian computer scientist based in the United States. Gupta has worked in academics, private companies, and international organizations in positions that involved analysis and leveraging of opportunities at the intersection of technology and business, as well as the design, development, and implementation of prototype systems that led to widespread adoption of new techniques and technologies. He has surmounted several strategic, business, technical, economic, legal, and public policy barriers related to several innovative products and services.
Go to Profile#2154
Ramez Elmasri
#36967
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Ramez A. Elmasri was an Egyptian-American computer scientist and a noted researcher in the field of database systems. He was also professor and associate chairman in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas. He was best known as the author of the textbooks: "Fundamentals of Database systems" . His book has been a leading textbook in the database area worldwide for last 25 years. It is now in its seventh edition, having been translated into Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Greek, Euskara , and Arabic.
Go to Profile#2155
Jeffrey Vitter
#29525
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jeffrey Scott Vitter is a U.S. computer scientist and academic administrator. Born in 1955 in New Orleans, Vitter has served in several senior higher education administration posts. He is a former chancellor of the University of Mississippi . He assumed the chancellor position on January 1, 2016. His formal investiture to the chancellorship took place on November 10, 2016, at the University of Mississippi's Oxford Campus.
Go to Profile#2156
Cory Ondrejka
#20741
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Cory Ondrejka was the Chief Technology Officer of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. With Philip Rosedale, Ondrejka co-founded Second Life and played a significant role in the architecture of the product. After leaving Linden Lab, Ondrejka became Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy for the EMI Group until he left EMI in September 2009. He also was vice president of engineering at Facebook.
Go to Profile#2157
Mateo Valero
#34672
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mateo Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. Valero has received numerous awards, including the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2007, for "extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He is the director of ...
Go to Profile#2158
Dorothea Wagner
#56027
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Dorothea Wagner is a German computer scientist, known for her research in graph drawing, route planning, and social network analysis. She heads the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2159
Raj Jain
#24481
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Raj Jain is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Education Dr. Jain obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978, an M.E. in Automation from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India in 1974, and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Awdhesh Pratap Singh University, Rewa, Madhya Pradesh, India in 1972.
Go to Profile#2160
Mykhailo Zghurovskyi
#15841
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mykhailo Zakharovych Zghurovskyi, also spelled as Mykhailo Zgurovsky, , Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine . Today he is a rector of the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute".
Go to Profile#2161
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
#43407
Overall Influence
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the chair of the Computer Sciences department. He co-leads a research group with Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau. He and Andrea have co-written a textbook on operating systems, "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces" , that is downloaded millions of times yearly and used at hundreds of institutions worldwide. His research been cited over 15,000 times and is one of the leading experts in the area of data storage.
Go to Profile#2162
Carlo Ghezzi
#54952
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Carlo Ghezzi is an emeritus professor and former chair of software engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and an adjunct professor at the Università della Svizzera italiana , Switzerland. At the Politecnico, he has been the Rector's Delegate for research, department chair, head of the PhD program, and member of the academic senate and of the board of governors of Politecnico.
Go to Profile#2163
Cem Say
#48848
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ahmet Celal Cem Say is a Turkish theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science. He is a full time professor at the Boğaziçi University Department of Computer Engineering in Istanbul, Turkey. Cem Say is the author of the QSI algorithm for qualitative system identification, an AI task relevant in the study of qualitative reasoning. His work in complexity theory includes studies on small-space quantum automata and new characterizations of the complexity classes NL and P in terms of verifiers modeled by finite-state machines allowed to use only a fixed number of random bits. He...
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Tamara Munzner
#45911
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Tamara Macushla Munzner is an American-Canadian scientist. She is an expert in information visualization who works as a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia . Early life Tamara Macushla Munzner was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the daughter of abstract painter Aribert Munzner. She graduated from South High School in 1986. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. She returned to Stanford for her graduate studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. Her thesis, In...
Go to Profile#2165
Eugene Schultz
#53982
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Eugene Schultz was an American computer security researcher and expert on cybersecurity. Life Schultz was born on September 10, 1946, in Chicago to E. Eugene Sr. and Elizabeth Schultz. He was married to Cathy Brown for 36 years. The couple had three daughters.
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Biswanath Mukherjee
#58239
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Biswanath Mukherjee is an Indian-American Distinguished Professor of computer science at University of California, Davis. He is also a fellow of IEEE for contributions to architectures, algorithms, and protocols for optical networks.
Go to Profile#2167
Jayadev Misra
#42991
Overall Influence
Jayadev Misra is an Indian-born computer scientist who has spent most of his professional career in the United States. He is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in computer science and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Professionally he is known for his contributions to the formal aspects of concurrent programming and for jointly spearheading, with Sir Tony Hoare, the project on Verified Software Initiative .
Go to Profile#2168
Zhi-Quan Tom Luo
#50398
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Zhi-Quan Luo is Vice President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Director of Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data and Director of CUHK-Tencent AI Lab Joint Laboratory on Machine Intelligence.
Go to Profile#2169
David Wolfe
#35487
Overall Influence
David Wolfe is a mathematician and amateur Go player. Education and career Wolfe graduated from Cornell University in 1985, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994, with a dissertation Mathematics of Go: Chilling Corridors combining both subjects and supervised by Elwyn Berlekamp.
Go to Profile#2170
Urmila Mahadev
#23930
Overall Influence
Urmila Mahadev is an American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for her work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. Education and career Mahadev is originally from Los Angeles, where her parents are physicians. She became interested in quantum computing through a course with Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, where she graduated in 2010.
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Maxime Crochemore
#57525
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Maxime Crochemore is a French computer scientist known for his numerous contributions to algorithms on strings. He is currently a professor at King's College London. Biography Crochemore earned his doctorate in 1978 and his Doctorat d'état in 1983 from the University of Rouen. He was a professor at Paris 13 University in 1985–1989, and moved to a professorship at Paris Diderot University in 1989. In 2002–2007, Crochemore was a senior research fellow at King's College London, where he is a professor since 2007. Since 2007, he is also a professor emeritus at the University of Marne-la-Vallée.
Go to Profile#2172
Michèle Sebag
#38210
Overall Influence
Martine-Michèle Sebag is a French computer scientist, primarily focused on machine learning. She has over 6,000 citations. Biography Sebag studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and later worked in the computer science industry, starting at Thomson Corporation, where she was introduced to artificial intelligence. She then moved into the research field, at the Laboratoire de Mécanique des Solides at Ecole Polytechnique.
Go to Profile#2173
Ronitt Rubinfeld
#36989
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ronitt Rubinfeld is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University. Education Rubinfeld was born in 1964 in Ohio and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child, she attended Huron High School and went on to graduate from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering . Following that, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley , under the supervision of Manuel Blum. In the years 1990–1992 she did a post-doctorate at Princet...
Go to Profile#2174
Joëlle Coutaz
#38806
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Joëlle Coutaz is a French computer scientist, specializing in human-computer interaction . Her career includes research in the fields of operating systems and HCI, as well as being a professor at the University of Grenoble. Coutaz is considered a pioneer in HCI in France, and in 2007, she was awarded membership to SIGCHI. She was also involved in organizing CHI conferences and was a member on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
Go to Profile#2175
Shih-Fu Chang
#43753
Overall Influence
Shih-Fu Chang is a Taiwanese American computer scientist and electrical engineer noted for his research on multimedia information retrieval, computer vision, machine learning, and signal processing. Chang is currently the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Columbia University, where he is also the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor. He served as the chair of the Special Interest Group of Multimedia of Association for Computing Machinery from 2013 to 2017. He was ranked as the Most Influential Scholar in the field of Multimedia by Aminer in 2016. He was elected as an ...
Go to Profile#2176
Maja Matarić
#43195
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Maja Matarić is an American computer scientist, roboticist and AI researcher, and the Chan Soon-Shiong Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California. She is known for her work in human-robot interaction for socially assistive robotics, a new field she pioneered, which focuses on creating robots capable of providing personalized therapy and care that helps people help themselves, through social rather than physical interaction. Her work has focused on aiding special needs populations including the elderly, stroke patients, an...
Go to Profile#2177
Kevin Robert Elz
#37306
Overall Influence
Kevin Robert Elz, often referred to in computing circles as Robert Elz, or simply kre, is a computer programmer and a pioneer in connecting Australia to the Internet, and more recently, in connecting Thailand.
Go to Profile#2178
Nicola Leone
#54212
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Nicola Leone is an Italian computer scientist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and database theory. Leone is currently the rector of the University of Calabria and a professor of Computer Science. Previously, he was a professor of Database Systems at the TU Wien.
Go to Profile#2179
Ross D. King
#39903
Overall Influence
Ross Donald King is a Professor of Machine Intelligence at Chalmers University of Technology. Education King completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology at the University of Aberdeen in 1983 and went on to study for a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Newcastle in 1985. Following this, he completed a PhD at The Turing Institute at the University of Strathclyde in 1989 for work on developing machine learning methods for protein structure prediction.
Go to Profile#2180
Joe Quesada
#2112
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Joseph Quesada is an American comic book artist, writer, editor, and television producer. He became known in the 1990s for his work on various Valiant Comics books, such as Ninjak and Solar, Man of the Atom. He later worked on numerous books for DC Comics and Marvel Comics, such as Batman: Sword of Azrael and X-Factor, before forming his own company, Event Comics, where he published his creator-owned character, Ash.
Go to Profile#2181
Masatoshi Kudo
#66099
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#2182
Sally Jackson
#15500
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sally Ann Jackson is an American scholar of argumentation, communication, and rhetoric. She is a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Biography Jackson earned all three of her degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has held faculty positions at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln , Michigan State University , University of Oklahoma , and the University of Arizona . At Arizona she also served in a series of administrative positions, including Vice Provost/Vice President for Learning and Information Technologies and Chief Information Officer.
Go to Profile#2183
Guillermo Simari
#22583
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Guillermo Ricardo Simari is an Argentine computer scientist born in the city of Buenos Aires. He has headed the Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Lab at National University of the South since 1990.
Go to Profile#2184
Johanna Moore
#46353
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Johanna Doris Moore FRSE is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Her research publications include contributions to natural language generation, spoken dialogue systems, computational models of discourse, intelligent tutoring and training systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, and knowledge representation.
Go to Profile#2185
Carla Brodley
#49985
Overall Influence
Carla E. Brodley is a computer scientist specializing in machine learning. Brodley is a Fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence , and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . She is the Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, where she serves as the Executive Director for the Center for Inclusive Computing and holds a tenured appointment in Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Brodley served as dean of Khoury College from 2014-2021. She is a proponent for greater enrollment of women and under-represented minorities in c...
Go to Profile#2186
Robert Longo
#6836
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician. Longo became first well known in the 1980s for his Men in the Cities drawing and print series, which depict sharply dressed men and women writhing in contorted emotion. He lives in New York and East Hampton.
Go to Profile#2187
Charles Colbourn
#43396
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Charles Joseph Colbourn is a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician, whose research concerns graph algorithms, combinatorial designs, and their applications. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Dorothean Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont; since then he has been a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University.
Go to Profile#2188
Ryan Williams
#34237
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Richard Ryan Williams, known as Ryan Williams , is an American theoretical computer scientist working in computational complexity theory and algorithms. Education Williams graduated from the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science before receiving his bachelor's degree in math and computer science from Cornell University in 2001 and his Ph.D in computer science in 2007 from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Manuel Blum. From 2010 to 2012, he was a member of the Theory Group of IBM Almaden Research Center. From Fall 2011 to Fall 2016, he was a professor at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#2189
Michael Cranford
#43992
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michael Cranford is a video game designer and programmer. As a designer and programmer his works include The Bard's Tale, The Bard's Tale II, and Dark Seed. Cranford left the video game industry in 1992 to pursue an academic career as an ethicist.
Go to Profile#2190
Svetha Venkatesh
#20850
Overall Influence
Svetha Venkatesh is one of the top 15 women in the world in Artificial Intelligence. She is Indian/Australian and is an Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environments, in the Department of Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin University, as well as a professor of computer science and director of the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin. She was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2004 for her contributions to the "formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data". She was...
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John Tromp
#43921
Overall Influence
John Tromp is a Dutch computer scientist. He formerly worked for Dutch Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. Tromp discovered the number of legal states of the board game Go, and co-authored with Bill Taylor the Tromp-Taylor Rules, which they call "the logical rules of Go".
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Biswajeet Pradhan
#64339
Overall Influence
Biswajeet Pradhan is a spatial scientist, modeller, author and who is now working as a Distinguished Professor and the founding Director of the Centre for Advanced Modelling and Geo-spatial Information Systems , Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He is working primarily in the fields of remote sensing, geographic information systems , complex modelling, machine learning and Artificial intelligence based algorithms and their application to natural hazards, natural resources and environmental problems. Many of his research outputs were put into practice.
Go to Profile#2193
Harry Buhrman
#42780
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Harry Buhrman is a Dutch computer scientist, currently Professor of algorithms, complexity theory, and quantum computing at the University of Amsterdam , group leader of the Quantum Computing Group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica , and executive director of QuSoft, the Dutch research center for quantum software.
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David Brumley
#40988
Overall Influence
David Brumley is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a well-known researcher in software security, network security, and applied cryptography. Prof. Brumley also worked for 5 years as a Computer Security Officer for Stanford University.
Go to Profile#2195
Michael Sperberg-McQueen
#46113
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is an American markup language specialist. He was co-editor of the Extensible Markup Language 1.0 spec , and chair of the XML Schema working group. Biography He was also instrumental in the Text Encoding Initiative , an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research. He was co-editor, with Lou Burnard, of the TEI's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in 1994. He also served as editor in chief of the TEI from 1988 to 2000.
Go to Profile#2196
Elizabeth Rather
#38164
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Elizabeth "Bess" D. Rather is the co-founder of FORTH, Inc. and is a leading expert in the Forth programming language. She became involved with Forth while she was at the University of Arizona, but working part-time for National Radio Astronomy Observatory . While she initially aimed to rewrite their systems in FORTRAN, her discovery of the power of Forth convinced her to leave the University to work for NRAO and Kitt Peak National Observatory, where she wrote the first Forth manual and started popularizing the language in the scientific community. She co-founded FORTH, Inc. with Charles Moore in 1973.
Go to Profile#2197
Wayne Snyder
#56554
Overall Influence
Wayne Snyder is an associate professor at Boston University known for his work in E-unification theory. He was raised in Yardley, Pennsylvania, worked in his father's aircraft shop, attended the Berklee School of Music, and obtained an MA in Augustan poetry at Tufts University. He then studied computer science, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. In 1987 he came to Boston University, teaching introductory computer science, and researching on automated reasoning, and, more particularly, E-unification.
Go to Profile#2198
Lars Ramkilde Knudsen
#46652
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lars Ramkilde Knudsen is a Danish researcher in cryptography, particularly interested in the design and analysis of block ciphers, hash functions and message authentication codes . Academic After some early work in banking, Knudsen enrolled at Aarhus University in 1984 studying mathematics and computer science, gaining an MSc in 1992 and a PhD in 1994. From 1997-2001, he worked at the University of Bergen, Norway. Currently, Knudsen is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark. Ivan Damgård was Lars' mentor during his studies at Aarhus University. His Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2199
Magne Jørgensen
#56265
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Magne Jørgensen is a Norwegian scientist and software engineer in the field of scientific computing. Jørgensen is chief research scientist at Simula Research Laboratory and is involved in the Research Group for Programming and Software Engineering as professor at the Department for Informatics at the University of Oslo.
Go to Profile#2200
Elisabeth André
#35634
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Elisabeth André is a German Computer Scientist from Saarlouis, Saarland who specializes in Intelligent User Interfaces, Virtual Agents, and Social Computing. Education 1988—Computer Science diploma at the University of Saarland1995—Computer Science PhD at the University of SaarlandAndré's research interests include Affective Computing, Embodied Conversational Agents, Multimodal Human-Machine Interaction, and Social Signal Processing.
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