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,
#2501
Arthur S Slutsky
#75863
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#2502
Giuseppe F. Italiano
#53275
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Giuseppe Francesco Italiano is an Italian computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at LUISS University in Rome. He is known for his work in graph algorithms, data structures and algorithm engineering.
Go to Profile#2503
David Forsyth
#48036
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David A. Forsyth is a South-African-born American computer scientist and the Fulton Watson Copp Chair in Computer Science the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Education Forsyth holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford for research supervisor J. Michael Brady in 1989.
Go to Profile#2504
Dave Cliff
#33775
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David T. Cliff is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and was formerly the Director of the UK Large-scale Complex IT Systems Initiative. Cliff is the inventor of the seminal "ZIP" trading algorithm, one of the first of the current generation of autonomous adaptive algorithmic trading systems, which was demonstrated to outperform human traders in research published in 2001 by IBM. He is also the inventor on multiple international patents from the early 2000s concerning his invention hpDJ, the world's first fully automated disk-jockey system for ele...
Go to Profile#2505
Bimal Kumar Roy
#13811
Overall Influence
Bimal Kumar Roy is a former Director of the Indian Statistical Institute. He is a cryptologist from the Cryptology Research Group of the Applied Statistics Unit of ISI, Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization in 1982 from the University of Waterloo under the joint supervision of Ronald C. Mullin and Paul Jacob Schellenberg.
Go to Profile#2506
Nikos Paragios
#58793
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Nikos Paragios is a distinguished professor of Applied mathematics at CentraleSupélec, the school of engineering of the Paris-Saclay_University and founder, president and chief executive officer of TheraPanacea, an information technology company targeting precision medicine in oncology, neurology and beyond through holistic treatment pathways optimization.
Go to Profile#2507
Nada Golmie
#36829
Overall Influence
Nada Taleb Golmie is an American computer scientist and engineer. She is chief of the wireless networks division in the Communications Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Go to Profile#2508
Mark Musen
#40189
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mark Alan Musen is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, and Division Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. Musen's research focuses on open science, data stewardship, intelligent systems, and biomedical decision support. Since the late 1980s, Musen has led the development of Protégé, which is currently the most "widely used domain-independent, freely available, platform-independent technology for developing and managing terminologies, ontologies, and knowledge bases" in a range of application domains.
Go to Profile#2509
Geoff Sutcliffe
#69101
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Geoff Sutcliffe is a US-based computer scientist working in the field of automated reasoning. He was born in the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia , grew up in South Africa, and earned his PhD in Australia. Sutcliffe currently works at the University of Miami, and is of both British and Australian nationality.
Go to Profile#2510
Lucy Sanders
#50914
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lucinda "Lucy" Sanders is the current CEO and a co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She is the recipient of many distinguished honors in the STEM fields, including induction into the US News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame in 2013.
Go to Profile#2511
Ned Freed
#43612
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Ned Freed was an IETF participant and Request for Comments author who contributed to a significant number of Internet Protocol standards, mostly related to email. He is best known as the co-inventor of email MIME attachments, with Nathaniel Borenstein.
Go to Profile#2512
Mark Bagley
#6166
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Mark Bagley is an American comics artist. He has worked for Marvel Comics on such titles as The Amazing Spider-Man, Thunderbolts, New Warriors, Venom and Ultimate Spider-Man and for DC Comics on Justice League of America, Batman and Trinity.
Go to Profile#2513
John Launchbury
#58516
Overall Influence
John Launchbury is an American and British computer scientist who is currently Chief Scientist at Galois, Inc. Previously, he directed one of DARPA’s technical offices, where he oversaw nation-scale scientific and engineering research in cybersecurity, data analysis, and artificial intelligence. He is known for research and entrepreneurship in the implementation and application of functional programming languages. In 2010, Launchbury was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#2514
Yoko Ono
#2051
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lenn...
Go to Profile#2515
Craig Nevill-Manning
#29870
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Craig Graham Nevill-Manning is a New Zealand computer scientist who founded Google's first remote engineering center, located in midtown Manhattan, where he was an Engineering Director. He also created Froogle , a product search engine. He is now Head of Engineering at Sidewalk Labs.
Go to Profile#2516
Kathleen Fisher
#64390
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Kathleen Shanahan Fisher is an American computer scientist who specializes in programming languages and their implementation. Professor Fisher is Chair of Computer Science at Tufts University and one of the authors of the PADS data description language and the Moby experimental concurrent programming language. She is a past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages and has chaired three of their major conferences, ICFP in 2004, OOPSLA in 2011, and PLDI in 2019. She co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop Series in an effort to increase the number o...
Go to Profile#2517
Clyde Kruskal
#45674
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Clyde P. Kruskal is an American computer scientist, working on parallel computing architectures, models, and algorithms. As part of the ultracomputer project, he was one of the inventors of the read–modify–write concept in parallel and distributed computing. He is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Go to Profile#2518
Lincoln Wallen
#48355
Overall Influence
Lincoln Wallen is a British computer scientist and the Chief Technology Officer of Improbable. He is the former CTO of DreamWorks Animation. Wallen received a first-class degree in Mathematics and Physics from Durham University in 1982. He also holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Alan Bundy. He was subsequently an academic at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory.
Go to Profile#2519
Amy S. Bruckman
#40750
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Amy Susan Bruckman is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Reviews TR100 awardees, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
Go to Profile#2520
Marco Colonna
#76403
Overall Influence
#2521
Johan de Kleer
#66932
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Johan de Kleer is a computer scientist working as a Research Fellow at Xerox PARC. Education De Kleer earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science and mathematics from University of British Columbia, and Master of Science in computer science and electrical engineering and PhD in artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2522
Desmond Morris
#701
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Desmond John Morris FLS hon. caus. is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
Go to Profile#2523
Mikhail Donskoy
#46685
Overall Influence
1948 - 2009 (61 years)
Mikhail Vladimirovich Donskoy , was a Soviet and Russian computer scientist. In 1970 he graduated from Moscow State University and joined the Institute of Control Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he became one of the lead developers of Kaissa, a computer chess program that won the first World Computer Chess Championship in 1974.
Go to Profile#2524
Andrew Adamatzky
#41561
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Andrew Adamatzky is a British computer scientist, who is a Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory and Professor in Unconventional Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#2525
Alan Newell
#40842
Overall Influence
Alan Newell is an emeritus professor at Dundee University who has a long history of human-computer interaction research, with a focus on supporting the elderly and people with disabilities. He is also the founder of the School of computing at Dundee University, where he established one of the world's largest academic groups dedicated to researching and improving digital systems for the elderly and people with disabilities, the Queen Mother Research Centre.
Go to Profile#2526
David Leinweber
#53242
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Leinweber heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Computational Research Division's Center for Innovative Financial Technology, created to help build a bridge between the computational science and financial markets communities.
Go to Profile#2527
Wolf Vostell
#3049
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Wolf Vostell was a German painter and sculptor, considered one of the early adopters of video art and installation art and pioneer of Happenings and Fluxus. Techniques such as blurring and Dé-coll/age are characteristic of his work, as is embedding objects in concrete and the use of television sets in his works. Wolf Vostell was married to the Spanish writer Mercedes Vostell and has two sons, David Vostell and Rafael Vostell.
Go to Profile#2528
Ludwig Staiger
#57648
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ludwig Staiger is a German mathematician and computer scientist at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Jena in 1976; Staiger wrote his doctoral thesis, Zur Topologie der regulären Mengen, under the direction of and Rolf Lindner.
Go to Profile#2529
Mary Flanagan
#46464
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Mary Flanagan is an American artist, author, educator, and designer. She pioneered the field of game research with her ideas on critical play and has written several books. She is the founding director of the research laboratory and design studio Tiltfactor Lab and the CEO of the board game company Resonym. Flanagan's work as an artist has been shown around the world and won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in 2018.
Go to Profile#2530
Kevin J. Sullivan
#53159
Overall Influence
Kevin J. Sullivan is an American associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. He also holds the title of Virginia Engineering Foundation Endowed Faculty Fellow in computer science at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his work with ultra-large-scale systems.
Go to Profile#2531
William Lucas Root
#28069
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
William Lucas Root was a noted American information theorist. As an early pioneer in the field, Root was instrumental in providing a mathematical basis for statistical communication theory. Root was born in Iowa, receiving his bachelor's degree from Iowa State University in 1940 and master's degree from MIT in 1943, both in electrical engineering. He served as a Marine officer in World War II, in 1952 received his doctorate in mathematics from MIT, and subsequently joined Lincoln Laboratory, serving as head of its analysis group 1959–1961. From 1962 to 1987 he was Professor of Aerospace Engi...
Go to Profile#2532
Christopher Gutteridge
#27230
Overall Influence
Christopher Gutteridge is a Systems, Information and Web programmer, part of the IT Innovation team in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He is known for being the lead developer for GNU EPrints and for being an advocate for Open Data, Linked Data and the Open Web.
Go to Profile#2533
Roman Słowiński
#36970
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roman Słowiński is a Polish computer scientist and professor. Since 2019 he has been Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a Professor and Founding Chair of the Laboratory of Intelligent Decision Support Systems at the Institute of Computing Science, Poznań University of Technology, Poland. Since 2003 he is also a professor at the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#2534
Virgil D. Gligor
#54901
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Virgil Dorin Gligor is a Romanian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in the research of network security and applied cryptography. Education and Career Gligor was born in Zalău and lived in Bucharest, Romania, until his late teens. He received his high school degree and baccalaureate at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College. After completing the first year as a student in the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science at Politehnica University of Bucharest, he earned a national scholarship to study in the United States, where he received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D.
Go to Profile#2535
John Briggs
#11872
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Briggs is an American author and co-author of general audience nonfiction books in the fields of holistic physics; aesthetics in the arts; creativity, creative process, and consciousness studies. Emeritus Distinguished CSU Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at Western Connecticut State University, Briggs lives in Granville, Massachusetts, where he has served as a Selectman and a police officer.
Go to Profile#2536
Martyn Thomas
#41260
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martyn Thomas CBE FREng FIET FRSA is a British independent consultant and software engineer. Overview Martyn Thomas founded the software engineering company Praxis in 1983, based in Bath, southern England. He has a special interest in safety-critical systems and other high integrity applications. He has acted as an expert witness involving complex software engineering issues.
Go to Profile#2537
Toniann Pitassi
#52601
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Toniann Pitassi is a Canadian-American mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational complexity theory. She is currently Jeffrey L. and Brenda Bleustein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and was Bell Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2538
John Koza
#73271
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John R. Koza is a computer scientist and a former adjunct professor at Stanford University, most notable for his work in pioneering the use of genetic programming for the optimization of complex problems. Koza co-founded Scientific Games Corporation, a company which builds computer systems to run state lotteries in the United States. John Koza is also credited with being the creator of the 'scratch card' with the help of retail promotions specialist Daniel Bower.
Go to Profile#2539
Sean Murphy
#52770
Overall Influence
Sean Murphy is a cryptographer, currently a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. He worked on the NESSIE and ECRYPT projects. His notable research includes the cryptanalysis of FEAL and the Advanced Encryption Standard, and the use of stochastic and statistical techniques in cryptology. With Donald Davies he also developed Davies' attack on DES.
Go to Profile#2540
James John Miles
#55044
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
James John Miles is a retired Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester where he previously was head of the school and a member of the Nano Engineering & Storage Technology Research Group .
Go to Profile#2541
Christof Teuscher
#38361
Overall Influence
Christof Teuscher is an author and editor who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States. Teuscher obtained MSc and PhD degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. For his PhD, he explored Alan Turing's ideas on artificial intelligence and neural networks.
Go to Profile#2542
Aaron Halfaker
#52964
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Aaron Halfaker is a principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research. He previously served as a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation until 2020. Education Halfaker earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the College of St. Scholastica in 2006, where he started off as a physical therapy major but switched to computer science after taking a programming class with Diana Johnson. He subsequently earned a PhD in computer science from the GroupLens Research lab at the University of Minnesota in 2013.
Go to Profile#2543
Michel Raynal
#72007
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michel Raynal is a French informatics scientist, professor at IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is known for his contributions in the fields of algorithms, computability, and fault-tolerance in the context of concurrent and distributed systems. Michel Raynal is also Distinguished Chair professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and editor of the “Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory” published by Morgan & Claypool. He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France and a member of Academia Europaea.
Go to Profile#2544
Beng Chin Ooi
#76727
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Beng Chin Ooi is a Singaporean computer scientist, currently a Distinguished Professor at National University of Singapore and also the Chang Jiang Professor at Zhejiang University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery and Singapore National Academy of Science. He did his BSc and PhD at Monash University.
Go to Profile#2545
Jean Cadet
#76747
Overall Influence
#2546
Kanchana Kanchanasut
#53224
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Kanchana Kanchanasut is a Thai computer science professor at the Asian Institute of Technology who became the first Thai person to use email. She hosted the first server in Thailand connected to the Internet and registered Thailand's country code top-level domain .th in 1988. Kanchanasut was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.
Go to Profile#2547
Valerie Barr
#49473
Overall Influence
Valerie Barr is an American computer scientist, and is the Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Bard College. She formerly held the Jean Sammet endowed chair in the department of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is known for her work with women in computing.
Go to Profile#2548
Lisa Strausfeld
#44915
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Lisa Strausfeld is an American design professional and information architect. Education Strausfeld studied art history and computer science and earned a Bachelor of Arts at Brown University. She went on to study at Harvard University, where she earned a Master of Architecture. She later studied media arts and sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , earning a Master of Science degree.
Go to Profile#2549
Marion Créhange
#43872
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Marion Créhange was a French computer scientist. She was one of the first persons in France to get a PhD in Computer Science in 1961. A pioneer of computer science at the University of Nancy, she was one of the first to write a PhD in computer science in France in 1961, under the direction of Jean Legras. The title of her thesis is Structure du code de programmation, which deals with the definition and realization of a macro-assembler and a programming tool.
Go to Profile#2550
Sethu Vijayakumar
#60310
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and a judge on the BBC2 show Robot Wars. He is the Programme co-Director for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with the responsibility for defining and driving the institute's Robotics and Autonomous Systems agenda. He co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics in 2015 and was instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where is it a focus of research at the School of Informatics.
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