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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#2551
Arthur ter Hofstede
#65969
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Arthur Harry Maria ter Hofstede is a Dutch computer scientist, and professor of information systems at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, known for his work in workflow patterns, YAWL, and business process management.
Go to Profile#2552
Linda Petzold
#43403
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Linda Ruth Petzold is a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also listed as affiliated faculty in the department of mathematics. Her research concerns differential algebraic equations and the computer simulation of large real-world social and biological networks.
Go to Profile#2553
Aggelos Kiayias
#52129
Overall Influence
Aggelos Kiayias FRSE is a Greek cryptographer and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Edinburgh and the Chief Science Officer at Input Output Global , the company behind Cardano.
Go to Profile#2554
Roger Wattenhofer
#77018
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Roger Wattenhofer, born in 1969, is a Swiss computer scientist, active in the field of distributed computing, networking, and algorithms. He is a professor at ETH Zurich since 2001. He has published numerous research articles in computer science and a book on Bitcoin.
Go to Profile#2555
Minoru Yoshida
#77029
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#2556
Ihab Ilyas
#68474
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Ihab Francis Ilyas is a computer scientist who works in data science. He is currently a professor of computer science in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He also leads the Knowledge Platform team at Apple Inc. Ihab is the holder of the Thomson Reuters-NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning at the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#2557
Sylvia Ratnasamy
#63513
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Sylvia Ratnasamy is a Belgian–Indian computer scientist. She is best known as one of the inventors of the distributed hash table . Her doctoral dissertation proposed the content-addressable networks, one of the original DHTs, and she received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014 for this work. She is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2558
Ronald Deibert
#24010
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ronald James Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, philosopher, founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. He is a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects. Deibert was one of the founders and former VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon.
Go to Profile#2559
Mendel Friedman
#77122
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
#2560
Sushil Jajodia
#72423
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sushil Jajodia is an American computer scientist known for his work on cyber security and privacy, databases, and distributed systems. Career Sushil Jajodia is University Professor, BDM International Professor, and the founding director of Center for Secure Information Systems in the Volgenau School of Engineering at the George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. He is also the director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Cybersecurity Analytics and Automation . He joined Mason after serving as the director of the Database and Expert Systems Program within the Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#2561
Khaled Ben Letaief
#77182
Overall Influence
#2562
Fulufhelo Nelwamondo
#54824
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Fulufhelo Vincent Nelwamondo is an electrical engineer by training, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa. He is the youngest recipient of the Harvard-South Africa Fellowship Programme amongst other honours. His research and practical experience has covered a wide spectrum of areas, including software engineering and computational intelligence. His interests include biometrics-based systems, data mining and machine learning tools.
Go to Profile#2563
Roger Dean
#3056
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
William Roger Dean is an English artist, designer, and publisher. He began painting posters and album covers for musicians in the late 1960s. The groups for whom he did the most art are the English rock bands Yes and Asia.
Go to Profile#2564
Kevin Mitnick
#22204
Overall Influence
1963 - 2023 (60 years)
Kevin David Mitnick was an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile 1995 arrest and five years in prison for various computer and communications-related crimes. Mitnick's pursuit, arrest, trial, and sentence along with the associated journalism, books, and films were all controversial. After his release from prison, he ran his own security firm, Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC, and was also involved with other computer security businesses.
Go to Profile#2565
Maja Pantić
#67587
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Maja Pantić is a Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing at Imperial College London and an AI Scientific Research Lead in Facebook London. She was previously Professor of Affective and Behavioural Computing University of Twente and Research Director of the Samsung AI lab in Cambridge, UK. She is an expert in machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection and tracking of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals and affective states.
Go to Profile#2566
Massoud Pedram
#48644
Overall Influence
Massoud Pedram is an Iranian American computer engineer noted for his research in green computing, energy storage systems, low-power electronics and design, electronic design automation and quantum computing. In the early 1990s, Pedram pioneered an approach to designing VLSI circuits that considered physical effects during logic synthesis. He named this approach layout-driven logic synthesis, which was subsequently called physical synthesis and incorporated into the standard EDA design flows. Pedram's early work on this subject became a significant prior art reference in a litigation between Synopsys Inc.
Go to Profile#2567
Osmar R. Zaiane
#41717
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Osmar R. Zaiane is a researcher, computer scientist, professor at the University of Alberta specializing in data mining and machine learning. He was the secretary treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining from 2009 to 2012 and treasurer of the ACM Special Interest Group on Health Informatics. He served as the editor-in-chief of the SIGKDD Explorations publication from 2008 to 2010. He was also the associate editor of the same publication from 2004 to 2007.
Go to Profile#2568
Tingwen Huang
#75453
Overall Influence
Tingwen Huang , a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences and a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Southwest University, China, in 1990, an M.S. degree in Mathematics from Sichuan University in 1993, and his Doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics at Texas A&M University in 2002.
Go to Profile#2569
Anthony Finkelstein
#20804
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Sir Anthony Charles Wiener Finkelstein is a British engineer and computer scientist. He is the President of City, University of London. He was Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security to HM Government until 2021.
Go to Profile#2570
Hans‐peter Kriegel
#77530
Overall Influence
#2571
Gary M. Olson
#60145
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gary M. Olson is an American professor and researcher, specializing in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. He has published over 120 research articles and book chapters, and is one of the authors of Working Together Apart: Collaboration over the Internet .
Go to Profile#2572
Peri Tarr
#59009
Overall Influence
Peri Tarr received her BS in Zoology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986, and her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Between her BS and MS/PhD, she worked full-time at the University of Massachusetts Physical Plant, attempting to introduce an automated system to help with the Plant's operations. After receiving her PhD, she joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in 1996, where she worked on and led various projects relating to issues of software composition, morphogenic software, and aspect-oriented...
Go to Profile#2573
Valerie Aurora
#54372
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative c...
Go to Profile#2574
Kavita Bala
#71357
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kavita Bala is an Indian computer scientist, academic and entrepreneur. She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. After serving as department chair from 2018–2020, she was appointed Dean of the Faculty for Computing and Information Science, now known as the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
Go to Profile#2575
Leonid Libkin
#60508
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Leonid Libkin is a computer scientist who works in data management, in particular in database theory, and in logic in computer science. Libkin is a professor at the University of Edinburgh, where he is chair of Foundations of Data Management in the School of Informatics, He previously worked at Bell Labs, at the University of Toronto, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Go to Profile#2576
Tom Hull
#13140
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tom Hull is an American music critic, web designer, and former software developer. Hull began writing criticism for The Village Voice in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income. In the 2000s, he returned to music reviewing and wrote a jazz column for The Village Voice in the manner of Christgau's "Consumer Guide", alongside contributions to Seattle Weekly, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, NPR Music, and the we...
Go to Profile#2577
Stephen Slade
#63848
Overall Influence
Stephen Slade is an American eye surgeon who performed the first LASIK in the United States in 1991 along with Dr. Stephen Brint. He was a lead investigator for panel approval at the FDA for both the Crystalens and the implantable contact lens. Slade performed the first laser cataract surgery in the United States in 2010. He also performed the first Raindrop Corneal Inlay in the United States in both the clinical trials and commercially. He continues to participate in and consult for many FDA clinical trials.
Go to Profile#2578
Munish Chander Puri
#23912
Overall Influence
1939 - 2005 (66 years)
Munish Chander Puri was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at IIT Delhi. He was Organizing Chair, Asia Pacific Operational Research Societies . He was killed in Bangalore in the 2005 Indian Institute of Science shooting.
Go to Profile#2579
Peter Brusilovsky
#65382
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Brusilovsky is a professor of information science and intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh. He is known as one of the pioneers of adaptive hypermedia, adaptive web design, and web-based adaptive learning. He has published numerous articles in user modeling, personalization, educational technology, intelligent tutoring systems, and information access. Brusilovsky was ranked as #1 in the world in the area of computer education and #21 in the world in the area of World Wide Web by Microsoft Academic Search. According to Google Scholar , he has over 33,000 citations and h-index of 77.
Go to Profile#2580
Annie Antón
#45147
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Annie Antón is an academic and researcher in the fields of computer science, mathematical logic, and bioinformatics. She is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, within its College of Computing. She is the founder and director of ThePrivacyPlace.org, a research center devoted to issues of privacy protection in information systems. She has also held advisory positions in industry and government.
Go to Profile#2581
Aslak Tveito
#59182
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Aslak Tveito is a Norwegian scientist in the field of numerical analysis and scientific computing. Tveito is the Managing Director of the Simula Research Laboratory, a Norwegian research center owned by the Norwegian Government, and is Professor of Scientific Computing at the University of Oslo.
Go to Profile#2582
Evgeniy Gabrilovich
#68271
Overall Influence
Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a research director at Facebook Reality Labs where he conducts research on neuromotor interfaces. Prior to that, he was a Principal Scientist/Director at Google, specializing in Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Computational Linguistics, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , and an ACM Fellow. In 2010, he received the Karen Spärck Jones Award from the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group.
Go to Profile#2583
Dwijesh Dutta Majumdar
#19750
Overall Influence
Dwijesh Kumar Dutta Majumder INSA was a Professor Emeritus in the Computer and Communication Sciences Division of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and Honorary Director-Secretary of the Institute of Cybernetics Systems and Information Technology in the same city. He is also an Emeritus Scientist of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, operated by the Government of India.
Go to Profile#2584
Wu Zhaohui
#35446
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Wu Zhaohui is a Chinese computer scientist. He is a professor who had served as president of Zhejiang University from 2015 to 2022. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017. Early life and education Wu was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang in December 1966. His father Wu Xuequan was academic director of Wenzhou No. 7 High School. He has a younger sister. He entered Zhejiang University in 1984, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1993.
Go to Profile#2585
Zhengyou Zhang
#77766
Overall Influence
#2586
Tova Milo
#63018
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Tova Milo is a full Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and the Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2011 to 2014. Milo is the head of the data management group in Tel Aviv University, and her research focuses on Web data management. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 1992 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and INRIA, France, prior to joining Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#2587
Forman S. Acton
#33323
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Forman Sinnickson Acton was an American computer scientist, engineer, educator and author. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Education Acton began his education in the Salem City School system. He left at the end of 9th grade to attend boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1939. He then attended Princeton University, obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943, and his Master of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1944.
Go to Profile#2588
Ken Lunde
#36509
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ken Roger Lunde is an American specialist in information processing for East Asian languages. Academic Background Ken majored in linguistics at University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987, Master of Arts degree in 1988, and graduated with a doctoral thesis on the simplification of Japanese characters in 1994, titled "Prescriptive Kanji Simplification", which was written under the supervision of Professor Andrew Sihler.
Go to Profile#2589
Sandra Wachter
#49836
Overall Influence
Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute.
Go to Profile#2590
Alan W. Paeth
#68688
Overall Influence
1956 - 2018 (62 years)
Alan W. Paeth was a Canadian computer scientist and author. Life and education Alan William Paeth was born on May 11, 1956, in Seattle, Washington. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Caltech and his PhD at the University of Waterloo in 1994. His doctoral advisor was William B. Cowan and his doctoral dissertation was on Linear Models of Reflective Colour. He married Catherine Anne Person in 1983; she predeceased him in 2008.
Go to Profile#2591
Patricia Flatley Brennan
#14646
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received a Master of Science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as chair of University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering's Department of Industrial Engineering from 2007 to 2010.
Go to Profile#2592
John Baldessari
#3785
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He created thousands of works which demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S.
Go to Profile#2593
Robert L. Constable
#53251
Overall Influence
Robert Lee Constable is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and first and former dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. He is known for his work on connecting computer programs and mathematical proofss, especially the Nuprl system. Prior to Nuprl, he worked on the PL/CV formal system and verifier. Alonzo Church was supervising the junior thesis of Robert while he was studying in Princeton. Constable received his PhD in 1968 under Stephen Kleene and has supervised over 40 students, including Edmund M. Clarke, Robert Harper, Kurt Mehlhorn, Steven Muchnick, Pavel Naumov, and Ryan Stansifer.
Go to Profile#2594
Mark Gasson
#22840
Overall Influence
Mark N. Gasson is a British scientist and visiting research fellow at the Cybernetics Research Group, University of Reading, UK. He pioneered developments in direct neural interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, has developed brain–computer interfaces and is active in the research fields of human microchip implants, medical devices and digital identity. He is known for his experiments transmitting a computer virus into a human implant, and is credited with being the first human infected with a computer virus.
Go to Profile#2595
René Vidal
#51052
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
René Vidal is a Chilean electrical engineer and computer scientist who is known for his research in machine learning, computer vision, medical image computing, robotics, and control theory. He is the Herschel L. Seder Professor of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the founding director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science .
Go to Profile#2596
Judy Chicago
#2097
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers.
Go to Profile#2597
Muriel Médard
#44171
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Muriel Médard is an information theorist and electrical engineer. She is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her research in network coding.
Go to Profile#2598
Karl Lieberherr
#66542
Overall Influence
Karl J. Lieberherr is a professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, in Boston. He did his studies at ETH Zurich, obtaining an M.S. in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1977. He wrote the first book about adaptive programming. The work on this theme was one of several secondary influences on the development of aspect-oriented programming.
Go to Profile#2599
Ran Canetti
#64301
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ran Canetti is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University. and the director of the Check Point Institute for Information Security and of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. He is also associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. His main areas of research span cryptography and information security, with an emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols.
Go to Profile#2600
William Cook
#68286
Overall Influence
1963 - 2021 (58 years)
William Randall Cook was an American computer scientist, who was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Early life and education Cook was born on November 21, 1963. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1989.
Go to Profile