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,
#2451
Gail C. Murphy
#61709
Overall Influence
Gail C. Murphy is a Canadian computer scientist who specializes in software engineering and knowledge worker productivity. Murphy is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In 2016, she was named Associate Vice President Research pro tem and assumed the role of Vice-President, Research & Innovation on August 14, 2017. Murphy is co-founder and was Chief Scientist at Tasktop Technologies Incorporated.
Go to Profile#2452
Wolfgang Pree
#67848
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Wolfgang Pree is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Education and academic work Wolfgang Pree is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Salzburg, Austria since 2002. He studied computer science at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St Louis , a guest scientist at Siemens Munich , a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany , and spent sabbaticals at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#2453
Pedro Celis
#26043
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (123 years)
Pedro Celis is a retired Distinguished Engineer from Microsoft Corporation. He served at the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003 to 2005. PITAC advises the president on policies and investments that the federal government should pursue to enhance and maintain the preeminence of the U.S. in information technology.
Go to Profile#2454
Meredith Whittaker
#43906
Overall Influence
Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on their board of directors. She was formerly the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University , and the co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute. She also served as a senior advisor on AI to Chair Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission. Whittaker was employed at Google for 13 years, where she founded Google's Open Research group and co-founded the M-Lab. In 2018, she was a core organizer of the Google Walkouts and resigned from the company in July 2019.
Go to Profile#2455
M. Brian Blake
#34654
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
M. Brian Blake is an American computer scientist/software engineer and the eighth president of Georgia State University. He was previously the executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at George Washington University; executive vice president of academic affairs and the Nina Henderson Provost at Drexel University; the dean of the graduate school and vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Miami; an associate dean for research and professor at the College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame; and department chair and professor of computer science at Ge...
Go to Profile#2456
Alexander Galitsky
#44720
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alexander "Sasha" Galitsky is an international technology entrepreneur. He is the founder of ELVIS-PLUS and the founder and managing partner of Almaz Capital, and involved in many technology companies in Europe and the USA. In the Soviet years, he was a defense scientist in the Soviet space industry. Alexander Galitsky identities himself a Ukrainian.
Go to Profile#2457
Thorsten Joachims
#74672
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#2458
Lily Jan
#20975
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Lily Yeh Jan is a Taiwanese-American neuroscientist. She is the Jack and DeLoris Lange Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she collaborates with her husband Yuh Nung Jan as co-PIs of the Jan Lab.
Go to Profile#2459
Enrique Alba
#61990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Enrique Alba is a professor of computer science at the University of Málaga, Spain. Overview Alba achieved his Ph.D. degree on designing and analyzing parallel and distributed genetic algorithms. His current research interests involve the design and application of evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, and other bio-inspired systems to real problems including telecommunications, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, and bioinformatics among others. The main focus of all his work is on parallel metaheuristics and multiobjective optimization fo...
Go to Profile#2460
Jack Kirby
#7843
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before ultimately settling on Jack Kirby. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics.
Go to Profile#2461
Jim Waldo
#42301
Overall Influence
Jim Waldo is an American computer scientist and the Chief Technology Officer of Harvard University. He is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Technology and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he was lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java, and helped develop Project Darkstar. He was also involved in some of the early design and development of the Java programming language and e...
Go to Profile#2462
Bill Sienkiewicz
#4621
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Boleslav William Felix Robert Sienkiewicz is an American artist known for his work in comic books—particularly for Marvel Comics' New Mutants, Moon Knight, and Elektra: Assassin. He is the co-creator of the character David Haller / Legion, the basis for the FX television series Legion.
Go to Profile#2463
Liang-pei Zhang
#74927
Overall Influence
#2464
Daniel Jackson
#41571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Daniel Jackson is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is the principal designer of the Alloy modelling language, and author of the book Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis.
Go to Profile#2465
Kishor Shridharbhai Trivedi
#74981
Overall Influence
#2466
Axel Haverich
#26843
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Axel Haverich is a German cardiac surgeon. Biography Born in Lemgo, Haverich completed his Abitur at the Barntrup Gymnasium in 1972. He studied medicine at the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover and graduated in 1978. One year later he received his M.D. title . During his work as an assistant surgeon he spend time as a research assistant at the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery of the Stanford University. In 1985 he became Senior Surgeon at the Clinic for Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at the MHH. His habilitation was completed in 1987. From 1993 to 1996 he worked as the Director for heart and vascular surgery at the Kiel University.
Go to Profile#2467
Narsingh Deo
#46293
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Narsingh Deo was an Indian-American computer scientist. He served as a professor and the Charles N. Millican Endowed Chair of the Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida. Deo received his Ph.D. for his dissertation 'Topological Analysis of Active Networks and Generalization of Hamiltonian tree' from Northwestern University, IL., in 1965; S. L. Hakimi was his adviser. He was professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Deo died in Winter Park, Florida on January 13, 2023, at the age of 87.
Go to Profile#2468
Yaochu Jin
#73830
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Yaochu Jin was born in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, China in 1966. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996, respectively, and the Dr.-Ing. degree from Ruhr University Bochum , Germany, in 2001.
Go to Profile#2469
Mohamed Fayad
#63091
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mohamed Fayad is a professor of Computer Engineering at San Jose State University, and author of many publications in the area of software engineering. Biography Early life and education Fayad received his bachelor's degree in Agriculture Engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt. He received his Master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, where his research topic was Object Oriented Software Engineering: Problems & Perspectives. He lives in California.
Go to Profile#2470
Boaz Barak
#52824
Overall Influence
Boaz Barak is an Israeli-American professor of computer science at Harvard University. Early life and education He graduated in 1999 with a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University. In 2004, he received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science with thesis Non-Black-Box Techniques in Cryptography under the supervision of Oded Goldreich. Barak was at the Institute for Advanced Study for two years from 2003 to 2005. He was an assistant professor in the computer science department of Princeton University from 2005 to 2010 and an associate professor from 2010 to 2011.
Go to Profile#2471
Li Huatian
#46688
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Professor Li Huatian was one of the first few computer scientists in China and was well known for his early contributions to the areas of computer science and computer networks. Life and work He was born on Jan 29, 1922 in Songjiang, Jiangsu . He graduated from the National Southwestern Associated University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1943 and from Harvard University with a master's degree in 1948.
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Alf Brodal
#75127
Overall Influence
#2473
Vladimir Vovk
#56372
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Vladimir Vovk is a British computer scientist, and professor at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the co-inventor of Conformal prediction. He is the co-director of the Centre for Machine Learning at Royal Holloway University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
Go to Profile#2474
Jacques Stern
#19378
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jacques Stern is a cryptographer, currently a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. He received the 2006 CNRS Gold medal. His notable work includes the cryptanalysis of numerous encryption and signature schemes, the design of the Pointcheval–Stern signature algorithm, the Naccache–Stern cryptosystem and Naccache–Stern knapsack cryptosystem, and the block ciphers CS-Cipher, DFC, and xmx. He also contributed to the cryptanalysis of the SFLASH signature scheme.
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Michael Bletsas
#53870
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Michail Bletsas is a Greek research scientist and the Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab. Early life Bletsas was born in Chania, Crete. He studied at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received a master's degree in computer engineering from Boston University.
Go to Profile#2476
Fred Silverman
#31425
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
Fred Silverman was an American television executive and producer. He worked as an executive at all of the Big Three television networks, and was responsible for bringing to television such programs as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! , All in the Family , The Waltons , and Charlie's Angels , as well as the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man , Roots , and Shōgun . For his success in programming such successful shows, Time magazine declared him "The Man with the Golden Gut" in 1977.
Go to Profile#2477
Kathleen Nichols
#41342
Overall Influence
Kathleen Nichols is an American computer scientist and computer networking expert. Nichols is the founder and CEO of Pollere, Inc, a network architecture and performance company based in California, US. Before founding Pollere, Nichols was VP of Network Science at Packet Design, where she was part of the founding team. Prior to Packet Design she was director of advanced Internet architectures in the Office of CTO at Cisco Systems.
Go to Profile#2478
Alberto O. Mendelzon
#60275
Overall Influence
1951 - 2005 (54 years)
Alberto O. Mendelzon was an Argentine-Canadian computer scientist who died on June 16, 2005. Life Alberto Mendelzon was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1973. He then received a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1979, where his advisor was Jeffrey Ullman. After that he was a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for a year before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1980.
Go to Profile#2479
Alexander Tuzhilin
#55880
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alexander Sergei Tuzhilin is a Professor of Data Science and Information Systems and the Leonard N. Stern Endowed Professor of Business at New York University's Stern School of Business. He also serves as the Dean of Computer Science at the University of the People on the pro bono basis.
Go to Profile#2480
James E. Smith
#48873
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
James E. Smith is a computer engineer and an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Smith was awarded the 1999 Eckert–Mauchly Award "for fundamental contributions to high performance micro-architecture, including saturating counters for branch prediction, reorder buffers for precise exceptionss, decoupled access/execute architectures, and vector supercomputer organization memory, and interconnects."
Go to Profile#2481
J. Alan George
#47382
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
J. Alan George, is a computer scientist and university administrator. In the academic world, George is best known for his intensive research and wide-ranging contributions to the field of numerical linear algebra, specifically computation with sparse matrices. He is the author or coauthor of more than 100 research articles and two books, and co-editor of two other books. With his students, he has developed a widely used mathematical software package for solving sparse systems of equations and sparse least squares problems.
Go to Profile#2482
Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog
#34855
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog is a German computer scientist. He is a full professor at the University of Oldenburg in Oldenburg, northern Germany. He heads the Correct Systems Design group whose research is focused on programming language theory. Their research goal is methods for the systematic development of correct software for parallel and distributed systems under real-time constraints. In 1994, Prof. Olderog was awarded the Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation for his work. He authored a number of scientific books and served as editor-in-chief of the journal Acta Informatica and as chairman of the IFIP Working Group 2.2 on Formal Description of Programming Concepts.
Go to Profile#2483
Alistair Sutcliffe
#57691
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alistair G. Sutcliffe is a British scientist and Emeritus Professor of Systems Engineering at the School of Informatics of the University of Manchester, specialized in requirements engineering, user interface design and safety-critical systems.
Go to Profile#2484
Krysta Svore
#69798
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Krysta Marie Svore is an American computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. She leads the Azure Quantum software team for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, where she is Distinguished Scientist and Vice President of Quantum Software. Beyond quantum computing, she has also worked on research in machine learning.
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Flaviu Cristian
#59691
Overall Influence
1951 - 1999 (48 years)
Flaviu Cristian was a Romanian-American computer scientist noted for his work in distributed systems and, in particular, the development of a method for clock synchronisation which bears his name, Cristian's algorithm.
Go to Profile#2486
Joe Ybarra
#38541
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Joseph Ybarra is an American producer and designer of video games. He left Apple Computer in 1982 to work at the new Electronic Arts that was founded by his fellow ex-employee Trip Hawkins. He was the original producer of the first Madden NFL.
Go to Profile#2487
Pankaj K. Agarwal
#50850
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pankaj Kumar Agarwal is an Indian computer scientist and mathematician researching algorithms in computational geometry and related areas. He is the RJR Nabisco Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University, where he has been chair of the computer science department since 2004. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1989 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, under the supervision of Micha Sharir.
Go to Profile#2488
Venu Govindaraju
#29875
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Venu Govindaraju is an Indian-American whose research interests are in the fields of document image analysis and biometrics. He presently serves as the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. He is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Go to Profile#2489
Enrique Herrera Viedma
#75225
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Enrique Herrera Viedma is the Vice-Rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Granada , Spain. He is also Professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the same university since 1994.
Go to Profile#2490
Robert van de Geijn
#39372
Overall Influence
Robert A. van de Geijn is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. His areas of interest include numerical analysis and parallel processing.
Go to Profile#2491
Craig Gotsman
#22430
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Craig Gotsman is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology . He was the Dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing at NJIT between 2017-2023. He was the Founding Director of the joint Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at Cornell Tech prior to joining NJIT.
Go to Profile#2492
Tal Rabin
#54045
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tal Rabin is a computer scientist and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously the head of research at the Algorand Foundation and the head of the cryptography research group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Go to Profile#2493
Foster Provost
#60823
Overall Influence
Foster Provost is an American computer scientist, information systems researcher, and Professor of Data Science and Information Systems and Ira Rennert Professor of Entrepreneurship at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is also the Director for the Data Science and AI Initiative at Stern's Fubon Center for Technology, Business and Innovation. Professor Provost has a Bachelor of Science from Duquesne University in physics and mathematics and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#2494
Mark Lawson
#3648
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Gerard Lawson is an English journalist, broadcaster and author. Specialising in culture and the arts, he is best known for presenting the flagship BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row between 1998 and 2014. He is also a Guardian columnist, and presented Mark Lawson Talks To... on BBC Four from 2006 to 2015.
Go to Profile#2495
Kristen Grauman
#70056
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Kristen Lorraine Grauman is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin on leave as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research . She works on computer vision and machine learning.
Go to Profile#2496
Denny Vrandečić
#55703
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Zdenko "Denny" Vrandečić is a Croatian computer scientist. He was a co-developer of Semantic MediaWiki and Wikidata, the lead developer of the Wikifunctions project, and an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation as a Head of Special Projects, Structured Content. He published modules for the German role-playing game The Dark Eye.
Go to Profile#2497
Bill T. Jones
#4724
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Tass Jones, known as Bill T. Jones , is an American choreographer, director, author and dancer. He is the co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. The company's home in Manhattan. Jones is Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, whose activities encompass an annual presenting season together with allied education programming and services for artists. Independently of New York Live Arts and his dance company, Jones has choreographed for major performing arts ensembles, contributed to Broadway and other theatrical productions, and collaborated on projects with a range of fellow artists.
Go to Profile#2498
Wendy Lehnert
#49903
Overall Influence
Wendy Grace Lehnert is an American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing and known for her pioneering use of machine learning in natural language processing. She is a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#2499
Nigel Smart
#39955
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Chief Academic Officer at Zama. He is a cryptographer with interests in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.
Go to Profile#2500
Francine Berman
#62495
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Francine Berman is an American computer scientist, and a leader in digital data preservation and cyber-infrastructure. In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE/ACM-CS Ken Kennedy Award "for her influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her exemplary service to the high performance community". In 2004, Business Week called her the "reigning teraflop queen".
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