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,
#2301
Deng Julong
#18612
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Deng Julong was a professor of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. He is acknowledged as the founder of grey system theory, first proposed in 1982 with the publication of his paper “Control problems of grey systems,” in the international journal Systems and Control Letter, edited at the time by Roger W. Brockett, a professor at Harvard University. This theory underlies the theory of grey relational analysis. His theory inspired many noted scholars like Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest, Liu Sifeng, and Keith W. Hipel, recipient of Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize.
Go to Profile#2302
Luca Benini
#69584
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#2303
Len Shustek
#53261
Overall Influence
Leonard J. "Len" Shustek is a founder of networking companies Nestar Systems and Network General and a former chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, California.
Go to Profile#2304
Matthew Haughey
#21966
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Matthew Haughey is an American programmer, web designer, and blogger best known as the founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, where he is known as mathowie. Life and career Haughey grew up in Placentia, California. He graduated from the University of California, Riverside with a B.S. and M.S. in environmental science.
Go to Profile#2305
Oscar H. Ibarra
#46565
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Oscar H. Ibarra is a Filipino-American theoretical computer scientist, prominent for work in automata theory, formal languages, design and analysis of algorithms and computational complexity theory. He was a Professor of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California-Santa Barbara until his retirement in 2011. Previously, he was on the faculties of UC Berkeley and the University of Minnesota . He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCSB.
Go to Profile#2306
Sol LeWitt
#2113
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, installation, and artist's books. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965. The first biography of the artist, Sol LeWitt: A Life of Ideas, by Lary Bloom, was published by Wesleyan University Press in the spring of 2019.
Go to Profile#2307
Russell Greiner
#24293
Overall Influence
Russell Greiner is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a specialist in machine learning and bioinformatics. Greiner is one of the principal investigators at the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning and has published over 200 refereed papers and patents.
Go to Profile#2308
Jason Cong
#57282
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jingsheng Jason Cong is a Chinese-born American computer scientist, educator, and serial entrepreneur. He received his B.S. degree in computer science from Peking University in 1985, his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively. He has been on the faculty in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1990. Currently, he is a Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor and the director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing .
Go to Profile#2309
Ross Girshick
#69760
Overall Influence
#2310
Jorma Johannes Rissanen
#69778
Overall Influence
#2311
Amparo Alonso Betanzos
#46305
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Amparo Alonso-Betanzos is a Spanish computer scientist and president of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence. Career She is a professor at University of A Coruña, where she leads the Laboratory for the Investigation and Development of Artificial Intelligence . Originally a chemical engineer, her research now focuses on artificial intelligence, specifically its medical applications.
Go to Profile#2312
Aude Oliva
#21785
Overall Influence
Aude Oliva is a French professor of computer vision, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . Education Oliva has a dual French baccalaureate in mathematics and physics. She then earned a Masters of Science in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble and then a doctorate from the same university in 1995. She joined the MIT faculty in 2004 and CSAIL in 2012.
Go to Profile#2313
Jacob Abraham
#40883
Overall Influence
Jacob A. Abraham is an American computer scientist and engineer who is currently the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#2314
Hanna Wallach
#60384
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Hanna Wallach is a computational social scientist and partner research manager at Microsoft Research. Her work makes use of machine learning models to study the dynamics of social processes. Her current research focuses on issues of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics as they relate to AI and machine learning.
Go to Profile#2315
Steve Chen
#24513
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese computer engineer and internet entrepreneur. Chen was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 1991 for leadership in the development of super-computer architectures and their realization.
Go to Profile#2316
Sophia Drossopoulou
#44077
Overall Influence
Sophia Drossopoulou is a computer scientist, currently working at Imperial College London, where she is Professor in Programming Languages. She earned her Ph.D. from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2317
Terry Rudolph
#38737
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Terry Rudolph is a professor of quantum physics at Imperial College London. He co-founded quantum computing firm PsiQuantum. Research Terry Rudolph's research focuses on quantum information and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Notably, he is one of the discoverers of the PBR theorem, which allows for a formal and rigorous test on the ontology of quantum states. This discovery has been hailed as one of the most important in the foundations of quantum theory since Bell's theorem.
Go to Profile#2318
Robert Schifreen
#19224
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Robert Jonathan Schifreen is a former UK-based computer hacker and magazine editor, and the founder of IT security awareness training programme SecuritySmart.co.uk. He was the first person charged with illegally accessing a computer system, but was acquitted because there was no such specific criminal offence at the time. Later in life he became a computer security consultant, speaking at many conferences on information security and training banks, large companies and universities in the UK on IT security. In 2014 he began developing the software on which SecuritySmart runs from scratch which...
Go to Profile#2319
Eric Sink
#46143
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Eric Sink is an American software developer and writer. He is the author of Eric Sink on the Business of Software , a collection of essays from his blog and the "Business of Software" column for the Microsoft Developer Network. He founded SourceGear, which sells Vault source control software for Windows and started the AbiWord project. Before that, he led the browser team at Spyglass. His article "Exploring Micro-ISVs" is credited with introducing the term micro-ISV. He is also known for his spoof on a Microsoft ad campaign featuring "software legends", which is embodied in the site not a lege...
Go to Profile#2320
Piek Vossen
#26012
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Piek Th.J.M. Vossen , is professor of computational lexicology at the VU University Amsterdam, head of the Computational Lexicology & Terminology Lab, and founder and president of the Global WordNet Association.
Go to Profile#2321
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#687
Overall Influence
1919 - 2021 (102 years)
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind , which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
Go to Profile#2322
Dorothy Monekosso
#51217
Overall Influence
Dorothy N. Monekosso is a British academic. She is a professor of computer science in the Department of Computer Science at University of Durham. She researches ambient assisted living , intelligent environments, smart homes, and assistive robotics.
Go to Profile#2323
Rajive Bagrodia
#49326
Overall Influence
Rajive Bagrodia is an Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is the Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Scalable Network Technologies as well as an emeritus professor of computer science at UCLA.
Go to Profile#2324
Alyson Takaoka
#70256
Overall Influence
#2325
Alfons Kemper
#64455
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alfons Kemper is a German computer scientist and a full professor for database systems at the Technical University of Munich. Education and career Kemper studied computer science at the Technical University of Dortmund from 1977 to 1981 and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and finished his PhD in 1984 under the supervision of Ellis Horowitz. From 1984 to 1991 he worked with Peter Lockemann at the University of Karlsruhe and habilitated there. In 1991 he became associate professor at the Chair of Computer Science III at RWTH Aachen, and two years later he joined the University of Passau as a full professor.
Go to Profile#2326
Anders Krogh
#36872
Overall Influence
Anders Krogh is a bioinformatician at the University of Copenhagen, where he leads the university's bioinformatics center. He is known for his pioneering work on the use of hidden Markov models in bioinformatics , and is co-author of a widely used textbook in bioinformatics. In addition, he also co-authored one of the early textbooks on neural networks. His current research interests include promoter analysis, non-coding RNA, gene prediction and protein structure prediction.
Go to Profile#2327
C. Scott Jacobs
#14156
Overall Influence
Curtis Scott Jacobs, , is an American argumentation, communication, and rhetorical scholar. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD. He taught for many years at the University of Arizona. He is now professor of Communication at the University of Illinois. He has lectured in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. He has contributed to the field of argumentation theory.
Go to Profile#2328
Vincent Aleven
#57126
Overall Influence
Vincent Aleven is a professor of human-computer interaction and director of the undergraduate program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human–Computer Interaction Institute. In 1998, he co-founded Carnegie Learning, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based company that markets Cognitive Tutor math courses that include intelligent tutoring software. Aleven is also a co-founder of Mathtutor, a free website for middle-school math intelligent tutoring systems.
Go to Profile#2329
Zbyszek Darzynkiewicz
#40626
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Zbigniew Darzynkiewicz was a Polish-American cell biologist active in cancer research and in developing new methods in histochemistry for flow cytometry. Early life and education From 1945 to 1949, Darzynkiewicz attended a primary school in Dzierżoniów, Poland. He spent his high school years in Skarżysko-Kamienna, Poland. His application to the University of Warsaw's Department of Physics was denied by the communist Social Justice Committee, who viewed him as a "enemy of the people." However, following the intervention of Regina Uszyńska, his high school principal, Darzynkiewicz was permit...
Go to Profile#2330
Norman Fenton
#48460
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Norman E. Fenton is a British mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Professor of Risk Information Management in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. He is known for his work in software metrics and is the author of the textbook Software Metrics: A Rigorous Approach, as of 2014 in its third edition.
Go to Profile#2331
Simon S. Lam
#40674
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Simon S. Lam is an American computer scientist. He retired in 2018 from The University of Texas at Austin as Professor Emeritus and Regents' Chair Emeritus in Computer Science #1. He made seminal and important contributions to transport layer security, packet network verification, as well as network protocol design, verification, and performance analysis.
Go to Profile#2332
Michael Lynch
#70645
Overall Influence
#2333
Gerardo Beni
#21411
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Gerardo Beni is a professor of electrical engineering at University of California, Riverside who, with Jing Wang, is known as the originator of the term swarm intelligence in the context of cellular robotics and the concept of electrowetting, with Susan Hackwood. He also devised, with Xuan-Li Xie, the Xie–Beni index for measuring the validity of fuzzy clustering.
Go to Profile#2334
Pierre Wolper
#28367
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Pierre Wolper is a Belgian computer scientist at the University of Liège. His research interests include verification methods for reactive and concurrent programs, as well as temporal databases. He is the co-recipient of the 2000 Gödel Prize, along with Moshe Y. Vardi, for his work on temporal logic with finite automata. He also received the 2005 Paris Kanellakis Award for this work.
Go to Profile#2335
Ajith Abraham
#70748
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
#2336
Scott Fisher
#19462
Overall Influence
Scott Fisher is the Professor and Founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Mobile and Environmental Media Lab there. He is an artist and technologist who has worked extensively on virtual reality, including pioneering work at NASA, Atari Research Labs, MIT's Architecture Machine Group and Keio University.
Go to Profile#2337
Ernesto Morgado
#37907
Overall Influence
Ernesto M. Morgado is a Portuguese computer scientist and software entrepreneur. He has served as Associate Professor of computer science and engineering in Instituto Superior Técnico since 1992. He was one of the people behind the creation of the Computer Science and Engineering degree of Instituto Superior Técnico , in 1988, and one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering there in 1998.
Go to Profile#2338
Julian Seward
#52690
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Julian Seward is a British compiler writer and Free Software contributor who lives in Stuttgart. He is commonly known for creating the bzip2 compression tool in 1996, as well as the valgrind memory debugging toolset founded in 2000. In 2006, he won a second O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on Valgrind.
Go to Profile#2339
Manfred Pinkal
#24171
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Manfred Pinkal is a German computational linguist. He is a senior professor at the Saarland University. Education and career Manfred Pinkal studied Linguistics, Philosophy, German Language and Literature, and Computer Science at the University of Bochum and University of Stuttgart. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Stuttgart.
Go to Profile#2340
Jacek M. Zurada
#56413
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jacek M. Zurada is a Polish engineer who serves as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from Politechnika Gdaṅska ranked as #1 among Polish universities of technology. He has held visiting appointments at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Princeton, Northeastern, Auburn, and at overseas universities in Australia, Chile, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Poland, Singapore, Spain, and South Africa. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of International Neural Networ...
Go to Profile#2341
John P. Hayes
#44352
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Patrick Hayes is an Irish-American computer scientist and electrical engineer, the Claude E. Shannon Chair of Engineering Science at the University of Michigan. He supervised over 35 doctoral students, coauthored seven books and over 340 peer-reviewed publications. His Erdös number is 2.
Go to Profile#2342
Mohammad S. Obaidat
#44710
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mohammad Salameh Obaidat is a Jordanian American Academic/ Computer Engineer/computer Scientist and Founding Dean of College of Computing and Informatics at the University of Sharjah, UAE. He is the Past President & Chair of Board of Directors of and a Fellow of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International , and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to adaptive learning, pattern recognition and system simulation . He was born in Jordan to The Obaidat known Family. He is the cousin of the Former Prime Minister of Jordan, Ahmed Obaidat and received his M.S.
Go to Profile#2343
Alan L. Davis
#34755
Overall Influence
Alan "Al" Lynn Davis is an American computer scientist and researcher, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and served as the associate director of the University of Utah School of Computing.
Go to Profile#2344
Joachim Hagenauer
#40570
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Joachim Hagenauer is an information theorist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich. He pioneered the use of soft bits , a coding theory technique that contributes to the high performance of the turbo codes.
Go to Profile#2345
Victor R. Lesser
#70431
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Victor R. Lesser is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Director of Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory. He is widely considered as the founding father of multi-agent systems. He received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 2009.
Go to Profile#2346
Andrew Vickers
#59425
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Andrew Julian Vickers is a biostatistician and attending research methodologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Since 2013, he has also been professor of public health at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is the statistical editor for the peer-reviewed journal European Urology.
Go to Profile#2347
Heng Tao Shen
#71184
Overall Influence
#2348
Manuel Felguérez
#16718
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Manuel Felguérez Barra was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century. Early life Felguérez was born in the state of Zacatecas in 1928, but political instability caused his family to lose their land there and move to Mexico City. In 1947, he had the chance to travel to Europe and, impressed with the art there, decided to dedicate himself to the vocation. Unhappy with the education at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, he did most of his studies in France, where he specialized in abstract art .
Go to Profile#2349
Aapo Hyvärinen
#65920
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Aapo Johannes Hyvärinen is a Finnish professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki and known for his research in independent component analysis. Education and career Hyvärinen was born in Helsinki and studied mathematics at the University of Helsinki and received his Doctor of Technology in information science in 1997 at the Helsinki University of Technology under the supervision of Erkki Oja. His doctoral thesis is titled Independent component analysis: A neural network approach. Since then, Hyvärinen has conducted research especially in relation to the independent component analysis.
Go to Profile#2350
Michael J Black
#71304
Overall Influence
