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,
#251
Juris Hartmanis
#2960
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Juris Hartmanis was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".
Go to Profile#252
David S. Johnson
#5079
Overall Influence
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
David Stifler Johnson was an American computer scientist specializing in algorithms and optimization. He was the head of the Algorithms and Optimization Department of AT&T Labs Research from 1988 to 2013, and was a visiting professor at Columbia University from 2014 to 2016. He was awarded the 2010 Knuth Prize.
Go to Profile#253
David Liddle
#3465
Overall Influence
David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. While at Xerox PARC he was credited with heading development of the Xerox Star computer system. In 1982 he co-founded Metaphor Computer Systems. He has served on the board of many corporations. He was chair of the board of trustees of the Santa Fe Institute from 1994 to 1999. Liddle holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of Toledo, in Ohio.
Go to Profile#254
David Gries
#4283
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Gries is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, United States mainly known for his books The Science of Programming and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math . He was Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs at the Cornell University College of Engineering from 2003–2011. His research interests include programming methodology and related areas such as programming languages, related semantics, and logic. His son, Paul Gries, has been a co-author of an introductory textbook to computer programming using the language Python and is a teaching stream professor in the Departmen...
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Richard Rashid
#3884
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Richard Farris Rashid is the founder of Microsoft Research, which he created in 1991. Between 1991 and 2013, as its chief research officer and director, he oversaw the worldwide operations for Microsoft Research which grew to encompass more than 850 researchers and a dozen labs around the world.
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John Cocke
#3369
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
John Cocke was an American computer scientist recognized for his large contribution to computer architecture and optimizing compiler design. He is considered by many to be "the father of RISC architecture."
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Charles H. Moore
#3431
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Charles Havice Moore II , better known as Chuck Moore, is an American computer engineer and programmer, best known for inventing the Forth programming language in 1968. He cofounded FORTH, Inc., with Elizabeth Rather in 1971 and continued to evolve the language with an emphasis on simplicity. Beginning in the early 1980s, he shifted focus to designing stack machines in hardware conjoined with Forth-like languages to run on them. He developed the Novix NC4000 and Sh-Boom, then the minimal instruction set MuP21, and i21. In the 2000s he created a series of low-power chips containing up to 144 individual stack processors.
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Adele Goldberg
#4794
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Adele Goldberg is an American computer scientist. She was one of the co-developers of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and of various concepts related to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center , in the 1970s.
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Donald Michie
#3160
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Donald Michie was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher.
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Andy Hertzfeld
#1296
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Andrew Jay Hertzfeld is an American software engineer and innovator who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2...
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Matthias Felleisen
#4447
Overall Influence
Matthias Felleisen is a German-American computer science professor and author. He grew up in Germany and immigrated to the US in his twenties. He received his PhD from Indiana University under the direction of Daniel P. Friedman.
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Tom Duff
#4473
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff is a computer programmer. Early life Duff was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and was named for his putative ancestor, the fifth Earl of Selkirk. He grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math and, two years later, was awarded an M.Sc. from the University of Toronto.
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Oded Goldreich
#3215
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Oded Goldreich is a professor of computer science at the faculty of mathematics and computer science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017 and was selected in 2021 to receive the Israel Prize in mathematics.
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Peter Molyneux
#2835
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Douglas Molyneux is an English video game designer and programmer. He created the god games Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White, as well as Theme Park, the Fable series, Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?, and Godus. He currently works at 22cans.
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Andrew Donald Booth
#3584
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Andrew Donald Booth was a British electrical engineer, physicist and computer scientist, who was an early developer of the magnetic drum memory for computers. He is known for Booth's multiplication algorithm. In his later career in Canada he became president of Lakehead University.
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Michael J. Flynn
#4063
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Michael J. Flynn is an American professor emeritus at Stanford University. Early life and education Flynn was born in New York City. Career Flynn proposed Flynn's taxonomy, a method of classifying parallel digital computers, in 1966.
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Peter J. Weinberger
#4441
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Peter Jay Weinberger is a computer scientist best known for his early work at Bell Labs. He now works at Google. Weinberger was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1964. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley under Derrick Henry Lehmer for a thesis entitled "Proof of a Conjecture of Gauss on Class Number Two". After holding a position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he continued his work in analytic number theory, he moved to AT&T Bell Labs.
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Rajeev Motwani
#3965
Overall Influence
1962 - 2009 (47 years)
Rajeev Motwani was an Indian American professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.
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Philip S. Yu
#6172
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Philip S. Yu is an American computer scientist and professor of information technology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a prolific author, holds over 300 patents, and is known for his work in the field of data mining.
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Marshall Kirk McKusick
#4734
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".
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Leonidas J. Guibas
#5435
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leonidas John Guibas is the Paul Pigott Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He heads the Geometric Computation group in the Computer Science Department. Guibas obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976. That same year, he was program chair for the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry in 1996. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Guibas is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was awarded the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award for 2007 "for his pioneering contributions in applying algorithms to a wide range of computer science disciplines." In 2018 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Brian Cantwell Smith
#3354
Overall Influence
Brian Cantwell Smith is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working in the fields of cognitive science, computer science, information studies, and philosophy, especially ontology. His research has focused on the foundations and philosophy of computing, both in the practice and theory of computer science, and in the use of computational metaphors in other fields, such as philosophy, cognitive science, physics, and art. He is currently professor of information, computer science, and philosophy at University of Toronto.
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Hideo Kojima
#905
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
is a Japanese video game designer. He is regarded as an auteur of video games. He developed a strong passion for action/adventure cinema and literature during his childhood and adolescence. In 1986, he was hired by Konami, for which he designed and wrote Metal Gear for the MSX2, a game that laid the foundations for stealth games and the Metal Gear series, his best known and most appreciated works. At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as wrote and designed Snatcher and Policenauts , graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.
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Nils John Nilsson
#3594
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Nils John Nilsson was an American computer scientist. He was one of the founding researchers in the discipline of artificial intelligence. He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering in computer science at Stanford University from 1991 until his retirement. He is particularly known for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics.
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Andrew Zisserman
#4714
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andrew Zisserman is a British computer scientist and a professor at the University of Oxford, and a researcher in computer vision. As of 2014 he is affiliated with DeepMind. Education Zisserman received the Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, and his PhD in theoretical physics from the Sunderland Polytechnic.
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Ray Tomlinson
#1591
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a com...
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David J. Malan
#3668
Overall Influence
David Jay Malan is an American computer scientist and professor. Malan is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and is best known for teaching the course CS50, which is the largest open-learning course at Harvard University and Yale University and the largest Massive Open Online Course at EdX, with lectures being viewed by over a million people on the edX platform up to 2017.
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Alex Graves
#5169
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Alex Graves is a computer scientist. Before working as a research scientist at DeepMind, he earned a BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in artificial intelligence under Jürgen Schmidhuber at IDSIA. He was also a postdoc under Schmidhuber at the Technical University of Munich and under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
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Franklin C. Crow
#5069
Overall Influence
Franklin C. Crow is a computer scientist who has made important contributions to computer graphics, including some of the first practical spatial anti-aliasing techniques. Crow also proposed the shadow volume technique for generating geometrically accurate shadows.
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Joseph Halpern
#4867
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Joseph Yehuda Halpern is an Israeli-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. Most of his research is on reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty. Biography Halpern graduated in 1975 from University of Toronto with a B.S. in mathematics. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1981 under the supervision of Albert R. Meyer and Gerald Sacks. He has written three books, Actual Causality, Reasoning about Uncertainty, and Reasoning About Knowledge and is a winner of the 1997 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize i...
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Hans-Paul Schwefel
#5839
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Hans-Paul Schwefel is a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at University of Dortmund , where he held the chair of systems analysis from 1985 until 2006. He is one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation and one of the authors responsible for the evolution strategies . His work has helped to understand the dynamics of evolutionary algorithms and to put evolutionary computation on formal grounds.
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Gordon Bell
#2550
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Chester Gordon Bell is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research, 1995–2015.
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Raphael Finkel
#4698
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Raphael Finkel is an American computer scientist and a retired professor at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. He is the author of An Operating Systems Vade Mecum, a textbook on operating systems, and Advanced Programming Language Design, an introductory book on programming paradigms. Finkel and J.L. Bentley created the data structure called the quadtree.
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Steve Furber
#2300
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Byram Furber is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, and Emeritus ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing his education at the University of Cambridge , he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. , over 250 billion arm chips have been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile computing and embedded systems, everything from sensors to smartphones to servers.
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Dimitri Bertsekas
#3018
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also a Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, Tempe.
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Craig Larman
#6294
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Craig Larman is a Canadian computer scientist, author, and organizational development consultant. With Bas Vodde, he is best known for formulating LeSS , and for several books on product and software development.
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Ralph Johnson
#5738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ralph E. Johnson is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, for which he won the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. In 2006 he was awarded the Dahl–Nygaard Prize for his contributions to the state of the art embodied in that book as well.
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Marco Dorigo
#5286
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Marco Dorigo is a research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research and a co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence lab of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He received a PhD in System and Information Engineering in 1992 from the Polytechnic University of Milan with a thesis titled Optimization, learning, and natural algorithms. He is the leading proponent of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic , and one of the founders of the swarm intelligence research field. Recently he got involved with research in swarm robotics: he is the coordinator of Swarm-bots: Swarms o...
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Lov Grover
#6181
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lov Kumar Grover is an Indian-American computer scientist. He is the originator of the Grover database search algorithm used in quantum computing. Grover's 1996 algorithm won renown as the second major algorithm proposed for quantum computing , and in 2017 was finally implemented in a scalable physical quantum system. Grover's algorithm has been the subject of numerous popular science articles.
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Karl Steinbuch
#3509
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Karl W. Steinbuch was a German computer scientist, cyberneticist, and electrical engineer. He was an early and influential researcher of German computer science, and was the developer of the Lernmatrix, an early implementation of artificial neural networks. Steinbuch also wrote about the societal implications of modern media.
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Marcus Hutter
#4599
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Marcus Hutter is a professor and artificial intelligence researcher. A Senior Scientist at DeepMind, he is researching the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence. He is on leave from his professorship at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Hutter studied physics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2000 he joined Jürgen Schmidhuber's group at the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale in Manno, Switzerland. He developed a mathematical theory of artificial general intelligence.
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David Patterson
#3000
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Andrew Patterson is an American computer pioneer and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
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Frieder Nake
#3223
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Frieder Nake is a mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer art. He is best known internationally for his contributions to the earliest manifestations of computer art, a field of computing that made its first public appearances with three small exhibitions in 1965.
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Tony Brooker
#5002
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Ralph Anthony Brooker , was a British computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode. He was educated at Emanuel School and graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as assistant lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by Sid Michaelson and K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then Brooker had moved to the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to work for Maurice Wilk...
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Fred Cohen
#4386
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Frederick B. Cohen is an American computer scientist and best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques. He gave the definition of "computer virus". Cohen is best known for his pioneering work on computer viruses, the invention of high integrity operating system mechanisms now in widespread use, and automation of protection management functions.
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Roy Ascott
#1460
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Roy Ascott FRSA is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.
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Charles H. Bennett
#4601
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Charles Henry Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum i...
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Ilya Sutskever
#5299
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist working in machine learning. He is a co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. In 2023, Sutskever and the OpenAI board fired CEO Sam Altman, who returned a week later. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.
Go to Profile#299
Yale Patt
#4098
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. He is a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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Felix Gers
#5419
Overall Influence
Felix Gers is a professor of computer science at Berlin University of Applied Sciences Berlin. With Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fred Cummins, he introduced the forget gate to the long short-term memory recurrent neural network architecture. This modification of the original architecture has been shown to be crucial to the success of the LSTM at such tasks as speech and handwriting recognition.
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