Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#2251

Ekram Hossain

#60253

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Ekram Hossain is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Hossain leads the Wireless Communications, Networks, and Services Research Group at University of Manitoba and is editor-in-chief for the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. In addition, Hossain has held visiting professorships at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore , Tohoku University, Japan , and School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Australia .

#2252

Jean Vuillemin

#45026

Overall Influence

Jean Vuillemin is a French computer scientist known for his work in data structures and parallel computing. He is a professor of computer science at the École normale supérieure . Contributions Vuillemin invented the binomial heap and Cartesian tree data structures. With Ron Rivest, he proved the Aanderaa–Rosenberg conjecture, according to which any deterministic algorithm that tests a nontrivial monotone property of graphs, using queries that test whether pairs of vertices are adjacent, must perform a quadratic number of adjacency queries.

#2253

Scott Kim

#9262

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Scott Kim is an American puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author of Korean descent. He started writing an occasional "Boggler" column for Discover magazine in 1990, and became an exclusive columnist in 1999, and created hundreds of other puzzles for magazines such as Scientific American and Games, as well as thousands of puzzles for computer games. He was the holder of the Harold Keables chair at Iolani School in 2008.

#2254

Peter E. Hart

#65943

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Peter E. Hart is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He was chairman and president of Ricoh Innovations, which he founded in 1997. He made significant contributions in the field of computer science in a series of widely cited publications from the years 1967 to 1975 while associated with the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, a laboratory where he also served as director.

#2255

Tom Conte

#44753

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Thomas Martin Conte is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing; and, since 2011, also Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering. He is a fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . He served as the president of the IEEE Computer Society in 2015.

#2256

Rangaswamy Narasimhan

#35631

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Rangaswamy Narasimhan was an Indian computer and cognitive scientist, regarded by many as the father of computer science research in India. He led the team which developed the TIFRAC, the first Indian indigenous computer and was instrumental in the establishment of CMC Limited in 1975, a Government of India company, later bought by Tata Consultancy Services. He was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri from the Government of India in 1977.

#2257

Hanspeter Mössenböck

#62332

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Hanspeter Mössenböck is an Austrian computer scientist. He is professor of practical computer science and systems software at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and leads the institute of systems software.

#2258

Andrew S. Levey

#57091

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Andrew S. Levey is an American nephrologist who transformed chronic kidney disease clinical practice, research, and public health by developing equations to estimate glomerular filtration rate , and leading the global standardization of CKD definition and staging.

#2259

Wafaa Bilal

#13330

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Dr. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is a Creative Capital Award winner in 2021 for his project In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA and named one of Foreign Policy magazine's Leading 100 Global Thinkers in 2016 for his work as an advocate. Bilal's work, Canto III, was included as part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal's current work 168:01 brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective healing process through education and audience participation.

#2260

Ann Copestake

#49843

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

#2261

James F. Allen

#36114

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

James Frederick Allen is a computational linguist recognized for his contributions to temporal logic, in particular Allen's interval algebra. He is interested in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and natural language understanding, believing that "deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences". He is the John H. Dessaurer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester

#2262

Tim Burton

#4899

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Timothy Walter Burton is an American filmmaker, animator, and artist. Known for pioneering goth culture in the American film industry, Burton is revered for his gothic horror and fantasy films. These include Beetlejuice , Edward Scissorhands , The Nightmare Before Christmas , Ed Wood , Sleepy Hollow , Corpse Bride , Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street , Dark Shadows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , as well as the television series Wednesday . Burton also directed the superhero films Batman and Batman Returns , the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes , the fantasy-dram...

#2263

William Peltier

#68596

Overall Influence

#2264

Jamie Bishop

#20514

Overall Influence

1971 - 2007 (36 years)

Christopher James Bishop , known as Jamie Bishop, was an instructor of German language at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as well as an artist and craftsman. He was among those shot and killed in the Virginia Tech shooting. He was the son of Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction author.

#2265

Dan Olsen

#62522

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dan R. Olsen Jr. is an American computer scientist who specialized in the fields of human–computer interaction and information science. He worked in the computer science department of Brigham Young University from 1984 until his retirement in 2015, serving as chair of the department , and also directed the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University .

#2266

André Danthine

#34185

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

André Danthine was a professor of computer science at the University of Liège from 1967 to 1997; he is now a professor emeritus there. He specialized in computer networks and created the university's Research Unit in Networking in 1972.

#2267

Alec Muffett

#31707

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Alec David Edward Muffett is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library. He is active in the open-source software community.

#2268

Elliot Eisner

#9841

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Elliot Wayne Eisner was a professor of Art and Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and was one of the United States' leading academic minds. He was active in several fields including arts education, curriculum reform, qualitative research, and was the recipient of a University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in 2005 for his work in education as well as the Brock International Prize in 2004. In 1992, he became the recipient of the José Vasconcelos World Award of Education in recognition to his 30 years of scholarly and professional work, particularly his contribution in th...

#2269

Jonathan Shewchuk

#38769

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jonathan Richard Shewchuk is a Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his B.S. in Physics and Computing Science from Simon Fraser University in 1990, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, the latter in 1997.

#2270

Nadia Heninger

#35869

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

Nadia Heninger is an American cryptographer, computer security expert, and computational number theorist at the University of California, San Diego. Contributions Heninger is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routerss and other embedded devices, for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the National ...

#2271

Maria-Florina Balcan

#59150

Overall Influence

Maria-Florina Balcan is a Romanian-American computer scientist whose research investigates machine learning, algorithmic game theory, theoretical computer science, including active learning, kernel methods, random-sampling mechanisms and envy-free pricing. She is an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

#2272

Daniel Kroening

#44025

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Daniel Kroening is a German computer scientist, Professor in computer science at the University of Oxford, and Chief Science Officer at the company he co-founded, Diffblue Ltd. He is a fellow of Magdalen College.

#2273

Mihaela Cardei

#16230

Overall Influence

Mihaela Cardei is a Romanian-American computer scientist known for her research on wireless ad hoc networks. She is a professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, where she is also associate dean for graduate studies.

#2274

Shuicheng Yan

#68830

Overall Influence

#2275

Giulio Gabbiani

#68899

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

#2276

Xi Chen

#42569

Overall Influence

Xi Chen is a computer scientist. He is an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University. Chen won the 2021 Gödel Prize and Fulkerson Prize for his co-authored paper "Complexity of Counting CSP with Complex Weights" with Jin-Yi Cai.

#2277

Jean-Daniel Nicoud

#18471

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Jean-Daniel Nicoud , is a Swiss computer scientist, noted for inventing of a computer mouse with an optical encoder and the CALM . He obtained a degree in physics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 1963. Around 1965, he became interested in logical systems. He obtained his PhD at the EPFL in 1970 and became a professor in 1973.

#2278

Sean Eddy

#25808

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, computational biology and biological sequence analysis. projects include the use of Hidden Markov models in HMMER, Infernal Pfam and Rfam.

#2279

Hugh Christopher Longuet-higgins

#69081

Overall Influence

#2280

Thomas Strothotte

Thomas Strothotte

#26424

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Thomas Strothotte is a German-Canadian computer scientist and university administrator living in Germany. Strothotte was born in 1959 in Regina, Canada, and raised in Vancouver. His first degrees were taken at Simon Fraser University . His further graduate work was done in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart, McGill University in Montréal/Québec and the University of Waterloo/Ontario, leading to a Ph.D. in 1984. He also holds an MBA from Columbia University and an MBA from the London Business School .

#2281

Chandrajit Bajaj

#36686

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Chandrajit Bajaj is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin holding the Computational Applied Mathematics Chair in Visualization and is the director of the Computational Visualization Center, in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences .

#2282

Helmut Veith

#54512

Overall Influence

1971 - 2016 (45 years)

Helmut Veith was an Austrian computer scientist who worked on the areas of computer-aided verification, software engineering, computer security, and logic in computer science. He was a Professor of Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology , Austria.

#2283

Trevor Mudge

#55498

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Trevor Mudge is a computer scientist, academic and researcher. He is the Bredt Family Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

#2284

Davide Sangiorgi

#49482

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Davide Sangiorgi is an Italian professor of computer science at the University of Bologna. He has previously held research positions at the University of Edinburgh and at Inria. He has received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Robin Milner in 1993. He has had visiting positions at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica , University of Cambridge, University of Oxford.

#2285

J. Anthony Hall

#45500

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

J. Anthony Hall FREng is a leading British software engineer specializing in the use of formal methods, especially the Z notation. Anthony Hall was educated at the University of Oxford with a BA in chemistry and a DPhil in theoretical chemistry. His subsequent posts have included:ICI Research Fellow, Department of Theoretical Chemistry, University of Sheffield Principal Scientific Officer, British Museum Research Laboratory Senior Consultant, Systems Programming Limited Principal Consultant, Systems Designers Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Principal Consultant, Praxis Critical ...

#2286

Sha Xin Wei

#45760

Overall Influence

Sha Xin Wei is a media philosopher and professor at the School of Arts, Media + Engineering in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He has created ateliers such as the Synthesis Center at Arizona State University, the Topological Media Lab at Concordia University, and Weightless Studio in Montreal for experiential experiments and experimental experience.

#2287

Roger Mead

#44741

Overall Influence

1938 - 2015 (77 years)

Roger Mead was an English statistician and Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the University of Reading. He is known for his paper with John Nelder on the widely-used Nelder–Mead method and for his work on statistical methods for agriculture and the design of experiments. He was made an Honorary Life Member of the International Biometric Society in 2014.

#2288

David C. Poole

#64328

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

David Christopher Poole is a British-American scientist who researches oxygen transport in health and disease focusing on the mechanisms of exercise intolerance. Academic work He is a University Distinguished Professor and Coffman Chair for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Scholars in the Departments of Kinesiology and Anatomy & Physiology at Kansas State University. His laboratory has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.

#2289

Carsten Lund

#39347

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Carsten Lund is a Danish-born theoretical computer scientist, currently working at AT&T Labs in Bedminster, New Jersey, United States. Lund was born in Aarhus, Denmark, and received the "kandidat" degree in 1988 from the University of Aarhus and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in computer science. His thesis, entitled The Power of Interaction, was chosen as an ACM 'Distinguished Dissertation'.

#2290

Roger Chou

#69355

Overall Influence

#2291

Alcherio Martinoli

#46731

Overall Influence

Alcherio Martinoli is a roboticist and an associate professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering where he heads the Distributed Systems and Algorithms Laboratory.

#2292

Bakhadyr Khoussainov

#27742

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Bakhadyr M. Khoussainov is a computer scientist and mathematician, who was born and educated in the Soviet Union, works in the fields of mathematical logic, computability theory, computable model theory and theoretical computer science. With Anil Nerode, he is the co-founder of the theory of automatic structures, which is an extension of the theory of automatic groups.

#2293

Hal Finney

#27559

Overall Influence

1956 - 2014 (58 years)

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. Finney later worked for PGP Corporation. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

#2294

Nivio Ziviani

#52943

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Nivio Ziviani, a Brazilian researcher born in the city of Belo Horizonte on August 27, 1946, holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, 1971, a master's degree in informatics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, 1976, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, 1982. As a researcher, he is known for his projects in information retrieval and recommendation systems. In 2011, he received the Scientific Merit Award from the Brazilian Computer Society. Ziviani has Erdös number 2. Currently, he is...

#2295

Andrew D. Gordon

#53009

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Andrew D. Gordon is a British computer scientist employed by Microsoft Research. His research interests include programming language design, formal methods, concurrency, cryptography, and access control.

#2296

John Rushby

#51633

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

John Rushby is a British computer scientist now based in the United States and working for SRI International. He previously taught and did research for Manchester University and later Newcastle University.

#2297

Scott Shenker

#67660

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Scott J. Shenker is an American computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the leader of the Extensible Internet Group at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California.

#2298

Assaf Schuster

#58900

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Assaf Schuster is an Israeli entrepreneur and professor of computer science whose works have been published in such journals as Computer Aided Verification and Journal of Systems and Software. Biography Schuster was born in 1958 in the Israeli kibbutz Givat Brenner to Tzipora and Yochanan Schuster. His family is of Ashkenazi-Jewish origin.

#2299

Ronald Cramer

#67645

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Ronald John Fitzgerald Cramer is a professor at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1997. Prior to returning to the Netherlands he was at the University of Aarhus.

#2300

Nuria Oliver

#57959

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist. She is the director of the ELLIS Alicante Foundation, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Vodafone Institute, and Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance. Previously, she was an independent director on the board of directors of Bankia, Commissioner of the Presidency of Valencia for AI and COVID-19, Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone, Scientific Director at Telefónica and researcher at Microsoft Research. She holds a PhD from the Media Lab at MIT, and is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, a member of the board of ELLIS, and elected permanent member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.

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