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,
#2401
Jane Hillston
#36822
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jane Elizabeth Hillston is a British computer scientist who is professor of quantitative modelling and head of school in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Early life and education Hillston received a BA in Mathematics from the University of York in 1985, an MSc in Mathematics from Lehigh University in the United States in 1987 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1994, where she has spent her subsequent academic career. Her PhD thesis was awarded the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Awards in 1995 and has been published by Cambridg...
Go to Profile#2402
Alfred Inselberg
#45424
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Alfred Inselberg was an American-Israeli mathematician and computer scientist based at Tel Aviv University. Inselberg started his career at the Biological Computer Laboratory based at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was part of a cybernetics group working on biomathematics developing mathematical models of the ear, neural networks, and computer models for vision and non-linear analysis, gaining a PhD in mathematics and physics. During this period he participated in the Symposium on Principles of Self-Organization. He is particularly noted for his work on parallel coordinates ...
Go to Profile#2403
Vladimir Rokhlin Jr.
#34221
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. is a mathematician and professor of computer science and mathematics at Yale University. He is the co-inventor with Leslie Greengard of the fast multipole method in 1985, recognised as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#2404
Kristinn R. Thórisson
#63101
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kristinn R. Thórisson is an Icelandic artificial intelligence researcher, founder and Managing Director of the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines , and co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents at Reykjavik University. Thórisson is one of the leading proponents of unified theories of cognition.
Go to Profile#2405
Stanisław Radziszowski
#33710
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stanisław P. Radziszowski is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist, best known for his work in Ramsey theory. Radziszowski was born in Gdańsk, Poland, and received his PhD from the Institute of Informatics of the University of Warsaw in 1980. His thesis topic was "Logic and Complexity of Synchronous Parallel Computations". From 1976 to 1980 he worked as a visiting professor in various universities in Mexico City. In 1984, he moved to the United States, where he took up a position in the Department of Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2406
Frank Zhigang Wang
#47991
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Frank Zhigang Wang is a Chinese computer scientist and Professor of Future Computing and a former Head of the School of Computing at the University of Kent, England. He was previously Professor and Chair in e-Science and Grid Computing, Director of Centre for Grid Computing, Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility. In 1994, he invented spin-tunneling random access memory. In 2003, Frank proposed a new concept of Grid-oriented Storage architecture. In 2004, Frank and his colleagues launched the UK-first Masters Program in Grid Computing. In 2005, he was elected as the Chairman of UK & Republic of Ireland Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society.
Go to Profile#2407
Diane J. Cook
#63359
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Diane Joyce Cook is an American computer scientist whose research interests include artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, home automation, and smart environments. She is Regents Professor and Huie-Rogers Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.
Go to Profile#2408
Rasmus Pagh
#63063
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Rasmus Pagh is a Danish computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of Copenhagen. His main work is in algorithms and data structures, and he is particularly known for the cuckoo hashing algorithm and for co-founding the Basic Algorithms Research Center, BARC, in Copenhagen.
Go to Profile#2409
Zhengyou Zhang
#50978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Zhengyou Zhang is a Chinese professor of computer science, IEEE and ACM Fellow and a specialist in computer vision and graphics. He is also a recipient of the 2013 Helmholtz Test of Time Award which was awarded to him by the International Conference on Computer Vision.
Go to Profile#2410
Dieter Schmalstieg
#29479
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Dieter Schmalstieg is an Austrian computer scientist, full professor, and head of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision at Graz University of Technology. In 1993 he received a master of science diploma and in 1997 the degree of doctor of technical sciences. Currently he has over 300 peer-reviewed works which were cited over 20,000 times which brought him an h-index of 70.
Go to Profile#2411
Sundaraja Sitharama Iyengar
#29271
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sundaraja Sitharama Iyengar is an Indian-born American computer scientist and the Distinguished University Professor, Ryder Professor and Director of Computer Science at Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA. He also founded and directs the Robotics Research Laboratory at Louisiana State University . He has been a visiting professor or scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and has been awarded the Satish Dhawan Visiting Chaired Professorship at the Indian Institute of Science, the Homi Bhaba Visiting Chaired Professor...
Go to Profile#2412
David Peleg
#50495
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
David Peleg is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, holding the Norman D. Cohen Professorial Chair of Computer Sciences, and the present dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science in Weizmann Institute. His main research interests are algorithms, computer networks, and distributed computing. Many of his papers deal with a combination of all three.
Go to Profile#2413
Boris Nuraliev
#26674
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Boris Georgievich Nuraliev — is a Soviet and Russian entrepreneur, billionaire, one of the founders of the 1C company and scientist, who heads the «Corporate Information Systems» department at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the «1С» specialised department at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics.
Go to Profile#2414
Albert Paley
#29078
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Albert Paley is an American modernist metal sculptor. Initially starting out as a jeweler, Paley has become one of the most distinguished and influential metalsmiths in the world. Within each of his works, three foundational elements stay true: the natural environment, the built environment, and the human presence. Paley is the first metal sculptor to have received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Architects. He lives and works in Rochester, New York with his wife, Frances.
Go to Profile#2415
Veronica Dahl
#43504
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Verónica Dahl is an Argentine/Canadian computer scientist, who is recognized as one of the 15 founders of the field of logic programming. Early life Dahl attended college at Buenos Aires University, and graduated from there with a degree in computer science in 1974. As the political conflict in Argentina increased, Dahl attended graduate school in France. In 1977, she was the first graduate at the Université d'Aix-Marseille to receive a doctorate in Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#2416
Anna Goldenberg
#62183
Overall Influence
Anna Goldenberg is a Russian-born computer scientist and a full professor at University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children's Research Institute and the Associate Research Director for health at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She is the first chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Go to Profile#2417
Geoff Collyer
#42092
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Geoff Collyer is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of C News, a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database used by all modern newsreaderss. He contributed the code that allowed to convert the Bourne Shell from using the non-portable sbrk to a portable malloc based implementation. In the past he worked as a Unix system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on Plan 9 while working at Bell Laboratories.
Go to Profile#2418
Syed Akhter Hossain
#30265
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Syed Akhter Hossain is a computer scientist, educator, columnist and technology consultant from Bangladesh. Currently, he is a professor and head of Computer Science and Engineering department at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh .
Go to Profile#2419
Pål Spilling
#19760
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Pål Spilling was a Norwegian Internet pioneer and professor at the University of Oslo and the UNIK Graduate Center at Kjeller in Norway. He obtained his cand.real. degree in physics from the University of Oslo in 1963. In January 1964 he started on a PhD program at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and finished his degree in summer 1968 in experimental low-energy neutron physics. Subsequently he joined the nuclear physics group at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. In January 1972 Spilling joined the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment at Kjeller in Norway, and ...
Go to Profile#2420
Hean Tat Keh
#11159
Overall Influence
Hean Tat Keh is a professor and chair of the Department of Marketing at the Monash University Faculty of Business and Economics. He is known for his work on services marketing, consumer behavior, brand management, and marketing strategy. In particular, his research on services marketing addresses the limitations of the concepts of service inseparability and service intangibility. Keh has also published on the antecedents and consequences of brand equity. More recently, he has conducted research on sustainable marketing and healthcare marketing. His works have been cited over 10,000 times acco...
Go to Profile#2421
Geoff Walsham
#55711
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Geoff Walsham is an English scholar in the Social Study of Information Systems. He has done much to establish the value and legitimacy of interpretive research in the field of Information Systems, particularly through his book Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations . He has also written extensively about IT in developing countries, including the book Making a World of Difference: IT in a Global Context .
Go to Profile#2422
James J. Cimino
#54020
Overall Influence
James J. "Jim" Cimino is an American physician-scientist and biomedical informatician. He is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Informatics Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#2423
Gloria Mark
#64754
Overall Influence
Gloria Janet Mark is an American psychologist. She is Chancellor's professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Attention Span, has published over 200 scientific research articles and is noted for her research on Social computing and the social impacts of Digital media. In 2017, she was inducted into the CHI Academy for her contributions to the field of Human-computer interaction.
Go to Profile#2424
Richard Serra
#708
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Richard Serra is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site. Since the mid-1960s, Serra has worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his large-scale steel works.
Go to Profile#2425
Dominic Giampaolo
#56634
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dominic P. Giampaolo is a software developer who helped develop the Be File System for the Be Operating System and currently works at Apple Inc. After graduating from Lewiston High School in Lewiston, Maine in 1987, he started studying political science at American University in Washington, D.C., but changed to computer science after one semester. After completing his bachelor's degree, he did a master's degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Go to Profile#2426
James L. Mohler
#15288
Overall Influence
James Larue Mohler is a professor in the department of computer graphics technology at Purdue University, where he received his B.S. in technical graphics, M.S. in industrial technology and Ph.D. in education. Dr. Mohler has been an associate professor since 1996, and since 2002 he has also served as senior research scientist and acting director of informatics. In these capacities, he has received several major grants.
Go to Profile#2427
Peter Landrock
#28080
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter Landrock is a Danish cryptographer and mathematician. He is known for his contributions to data encryption methods and codes. Landrock has been active since the 1970s as research scientist and faculty member for Cambridge University and the University of Aarhus and others, and was active for Microsoft and Cryptomathic. He has been visiting professor at Oxford University, Leuven University and Princeton University.
Go to Profile#2428
C. Pandu Rangan
#58158
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Chandrasekaran Pandurangan is a computer scientist and academic professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology - Madras . He mainly focuses on the design of pragmatic algorithms, graph theory and cryptography.
Go to Profile#2430
Alexandra Silva
#56651
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Alexandra Silva is a Portuguese computer scientist and Professor at Cornell University. She was previously Professor of Algebra, Semantics, and Computation at University College London. Awards and honours Silva won a Philip Leverhulme Prize in engineering in 2016. She won the Presburger Award, awarded each year to "a young scientist for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers", in 2017, and the Roger Needham Award in 2018.
Go to Profile#2431
Matthew B Ruby
#73888
Overall Influence
#2432
George Coulouris
#49629
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George F. Coulouris is a British computer scientist and the son of actor George Coulouris. He is an emeritus professor of Queen Mary, University of London and is currently Visiting Professor in Residence at University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He is co-author of a textbook on distributed systems. He was instrumental in the development of ICL's Content Addressable File Store and he developed em, the Unix editor, which inspired Bill Joy to write vi.
Go to Profile#2433
Antony Gormley
#2235
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sir Antony Mark David Gormley is a British sculptor. His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City , São Paulo, Brazil , and Hong Kong .
Go to Profile#2434
Judit Bar-Ilan
#62606
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Judit Bar-Ilan was an Israeli computer scientist known for her research in informetrics and scientometrics. She was a professor of information science and head of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University.
Go to Profile#2435
Alex Snoeren
#55895
Overall Influence
Alex Snoeren is a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997. Snoeren was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "innovative approaches to measuring, managing and detecting network traffic". In 2019, he was elected as an IEEE Fellow for "contributions to management and security of networked systems."
Go to Profile#2436
Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi
#34254
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi is a computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan. He is a researcher in the field of machine learning, and co-author of the books "Prediction, Learning, and Games" with Gabor Lugosi and "Regret analysis of stochastic and nonstochastic multi-armed bandit problems"
Go to Profile#2437
Janis Bubenko
#45585
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Janis Askolds Bubenko junior was a Swedish computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer and Systems Science, Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University. Biography Born 1935 in Riga, Latvia, Bubenko fled with his family to Sweden at the end of World War II in 1944. He received his MSc in civil engineering from the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1958, his Licentiate of Technology in structural mechanics also from the Chalmers University of Technology in 1958. In 1973 he received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Royal In...
Go to Profile#2438
Brenda Romero
#48702
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Brenda Louise Romero , previously known as Brenda Brathwaite, is an American game designer and developer in the video game industry. She was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University. Romero is best known for her work on the Wizardry series of role-playing video games and, more recently, the non-digital series The Mechanic is the Message. She has worked in game development since 1981 and has credits on 49 game titles.
Go to Profile#2439
Risto Miikkulainen
#60607
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Risto Miikkulainen is a Finnish-American computer scientist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an AVP of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant. In 2023, he was elected an AAAI Fellow "for significant contribution to neuroevolution techniques and applications", and in 2016, named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers "for contributions to techniques and applications for neural and evolutionary computation". Born in Helsinki, Finland, Miikkulainen has lived in the United States since 1986.
Go to Profile#2440
Antonia J. Jones
#50278
Overall Influence
1943 - 2010 (67 years)
Antonia Jane Jones was a British mathematician and computer scientist. Her research considered number theory and computer science. Early life and education Jones was born in 1943 in Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital. She was the first member of her family to attend university. Jones contracted polio as a child and lost both of her legs at the age of ten. Jones attended the University of Reading, where she studied mathematics and physics and graduated both with first class honours. She was a doctoral student in number theory at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD in 1969.
Go to Profile#2441
Shepard Fairey
#1451
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary artist, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing who emerged from the skateboarding scene. In 1989 he designed the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design .
Go to Profile#2442
Orr Dunkelman
#63777
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Orr Dunkelman is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst, currently a professor at the University of Haifa Computer Science department. Dunkelman is a co-director of the Center for Cyber Law & Privacy at the University of Haifa and a co-founder of Privacy Israel, an Israeli NGO for promoting privacy in Israel.
Go to Profile#2443
John L. Hennessy
#60502
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
John Leroy Hennessy is an American computer scientist, academician and businessman who serves as chairman of Alphabet Inc. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems Inc. as well as Atheros and served as the tenth President of Stanford University. Hennessy announced that he would step down in the summer of 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."
Go to Profile#2444
Johnny Lee
#51272
Overall Influence
Johnny Chung Lee is an American computer engineer known for his inventions related to the Wii Remote. He is involved with human-computer interaction. Education Lee earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering at the University of Virginia in 2001 and a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University's Human–Computer Interaction Institute.
Go to Profile#2445
Bdale Garbee
#46533
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bdale Garbee is an American computer specialist who works with Linux particularly Debian. He is also an amateur radio hobbyist , and a member of AMSAT, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio , and the American Radio Relay League.
Go to Profile#2446
Mike Jackson
#14468
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Christopher Jackson OBE is a British systems scientist, consultant and Emeritus Professor of Management Systems and former Dean of Hull University Business School, known for his work in the field of systems thinking and management.
Go to Profile#2447
Yusuf A. Hannun
#65044
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Yusuf Awni Hannun is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and clinician. He is known for the discovery that sphingolipids have signaling functions. Early life Yusuf Awni Hannun was born in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian parents, Mrs. Aida Ashur-Hannun and Dr. Awni Hannun. He received his early education in Beirut at the International College and earned a Bachelor of Science at the American University of Beirut in 1977. Following his undergraduate degree, Hannun continued at the American University of Beirut, obtaining an MD with distinction in 1981 and completing his internship and a res...
Go to Profile#2448
Phokion G. Kolaitis
#58954
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Phokion G. Kolaitis ACM is a computer scientist who is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at UC Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include principles of database systems, logic in computer science, and computational complexity.
Go to Profile#2449
Jesper Juul
#43579
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jesper Juul is a Danish game designer, educator, and theorist in the field of video game studies. He is an associate professor at the Danish Design School. Juul is co-editor, with William Uricchio and Geoffrey Long, of the MIT Press Playful Thinking series.
Go to Profile#2450
J. J. Abrams
#10061
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is an American filmmaker and composer. He is best known for his works in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. Abrams wrote and produced such films as Regarding Henry , Forever Young , Armageddon , Cloverfield , Star Trek , Star Wars: The Force Awakens , and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker .
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