Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#2601

Yiyu Yao

#78316

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

#2602

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram

#55935

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#2603

Vladlen Koltun

#75859

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Vladlen Koltun is an Israeli-American computer scientist and intelligent systemss researcher. He currently serves as distinguished scientist at Apple Inc. His main areas of research are artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. He also made a significant contribution to robotics and autonomous driving.

#2604

Carlisle Adams

#57119

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Carlisle M. Adams is a Canadian cryptographer and computer security researcher. Formerly senior cryptographer at Entrust, he is currently a professor at the University of Ottawa. His notable work includes the design of the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256, whose S-boxes are based on the non-linear properties of bent functions. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography workshop in 1994. He is also the security advisor of the Ottawa-based electronic signature company Signority.

#2605

Galina Kofman

#36585

Overall Influence

Galina Kofman is a computer scientist and business executive. She was the author of the Kerberos protocol for various IBM systems. Kofman also authored FTP for IBM VM/CMS and OS/2. She received two IBM CEO Outstanding Technical Achievements awards and holds a patent on grid applications. Kofman is an executive at Recyclebank, a green company that rewards people for recycling.

#2606

Gustavus Simmons

Gustavus Simmons

#20161

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Gustavus J. Simmons is a retired cryptographer and former manager of the applied mathematics Department and Senior Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. He worked primarily with authentication theory, developing cryptographic techniques for solving problems of mutual distrust and in devising protocols whose function could be trusted, even though some of the inputs or participants cannot be. Simmons was born in West Virginia and was named after his grandfather, a prohibition officer who was gunned down three years before Gustavus was born. He began his post-secondary education at Deep Spring...

#2607

Peter Baumann

#45090

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Peter Baumann is a German computer scientist and professor at Constructor University, Bremen, Germany, where he is head of the Large-Scale Scientific Information Systems research group in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

#2608

Dianne P. O'Leary

#46394

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Dianne Prost O'Leary is an American mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns scientific computing, computational linear algebra, and the history of scientific computing. She is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is the author of the book Scientific Computing with Case Studies .

#2609

Zenon Kulpa

#67911

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Zenon Kulpa is a Polish computer scientist, and Assistant Professor at Institute of Fundamental Technological Research of Polish Academy of Sciences, known for his work on diagrammatic representation and diagrammatic reasoning.

#2610

Martin P. Seah

#78508

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

#2611

Ming Jui Yang

#78523

Overall Influence

#2612

Ike Nassi

#55746

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Isaac Robert "Ike" Nassi, born 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, is the founder, and former CTO and chairman at TidalScale, Inc. before its acquisition by HPE, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is known for creating the highly influential Nassi–Shneiderman diagram notation. He also helped design the Ada programming language.

#2613

G. Mike Reed

#40912

Overall Influence

George Michael Reed is an American computer scientist. He has contributed to theoretical computer science in general and CSP in particular. Mike Reed has a doctorate in pure mathematics from Auburn University, United States, and a doctorate in computation from Oxford University, England. He has an interest in mathematical topology.

#2614

Adrian Kaehler

#41791

Overall Influence

Adrian Kaehler is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and author. He is best known for his work on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as two books on that library. Early life Adrian Kaehler was born in 1973. At the age of 14, he enrolled in UC Santa Cruz, studying mathematics, computer science, and Physics, graduating at 18 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1998 under professor Norman Christ for his work in lattice gauge theory and on the QCDSP supercomputer project.

#2615

Gene Tsudik

#78034

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Gene Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine . He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991. His PhD advisor was Deborah Estrin. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and USC/ISI . His research interests included many topics in security and applied cryptography. Gene Tsudik is a Fulbright Scholar, Fulbright Specialist , a fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS and IFIP as well as a foreign member of Academia Europaea. From 2009 to 2015 he served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and Sys...

#2616

Randy Bush

#47051

Overall Influence

Randy Bush is a member of technical staff at Arrcus and a research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan. He was among the inaugural inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, given by the Internet Society.

#2617

Rita Orji

#16644

Overall Influence

Rita Orji is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist who is a Canada Research Chair in Persuasive Technology and the Director of the Persuasive Computing Lab at Dalhousie University. Her work is in the area of human–computer interaction with a major focus on designing interactive systems to achieve health and well being objectives. She has won over 70 awards and recognitions from both national and international organizations. She has addressed a United Nations panel about the status of women and at the Parliament of Canada.

#2618

Amine Bensaid

#50566

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Amine Bensaid is a Moroccan computer scientist and academic, president of Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane. His areas of specialization have included pattern recognition, machine learning, image processing, fuzzy logic, neural networks and genetic algorithms, and their applications to magnetic resonance imaging, data mining, web mining, and Arabic IT, fields in which he is author of influential publications. He was also president of Université Mundiapolis in Casablanca between 2011 and 2019. Since 2017, he has also been chairman of the board of the Moroccan-American Commission for Educational...

#2619

Kees van Hee

#50177

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kees Max van Hee is a Dutch computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, known for his development of the process modelling tool ExSpecT, and his seminal work on workflow management.

#2620

Ralph-Johan Back

#68122

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ralph-Johan Back is a Finnish computer scientist. Back originated the refinement calculus, an important approach to the formal development of programs using stepwise refinement, in his 1978 PhD thesis at the University of Helsinki, On the Correctness of Refinement Steps in Program Development. He has undertaken much subsequent research in this area. He has held positions at CWI Amsterdam, the Academy of Finland and the University of Tampere.

#2621

William McCune

#23462

Overall Influence

1953 - 2011 (58 years)

William Walker McCune was an American computer scientist and logician working in the fields of automated reasoning, algebra, logic, and formal methods. He was best known for the development of the Otter, Prover9, and Mace4 automated reasoning systems, and the automated proof of the Robbins conjecture using the EQP theorem prover.

#2622

Frode Fonnum

#78663

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

#2623

Martin Vechev

#29730

Overall Influence

Martin Vechev is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich working in the fields of programming languages, machine learning, and security. He leads the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab , part of the Department of Computer Science. He is known for his pioneering works in machine learning for code , where he introduced statistical programming engines trained on large codebases, reliable and trustworthy artificial intelligence, where he introduced abstract interpretation methods for reasoning about deep neural networks to enable the verification of large machine...

#2624

Nathanial Owen Rosenberg

#78773

Overall Influence

#2625

Roberto Cipolla

#60199

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Roberto Cipolla , FREng, is a British researcher in computer vision and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Education Cipolla was born in Solihull, England and attended Langley School in Solihull and Solihull Sixth Form College. He studied engineering at Queens' College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1984. He obtained an Master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and then was a visiting researcher at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, studied Japanese at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, and gained a second master's degree from the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo.

#2626

Carlos Gershenson

#34933

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Carlos Gershenson is a Professor at SUNY, Binghamton University. He used to be a tenured professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México . His academic interests include self-organizing systems, complexity, and artificial life.

#2627

Clive Osmond

#78869

Overall Influence

#2628

Gabriel Peyré

#45679

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Gabriel Peyré is a French mathematician. Most of his work lies in the field of transportation theory. He is a CNRS senior researcher and a Professor in the mathematics and applications department of the École normale supérieure in Paris. He was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2021.

#2629

Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar

#78925

Overall Influence

#2630

Andrew Childs

#70040

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Andrew MacGregor Childs is an American computer scientist and physicist known for his work on quantum computing. He is currently a professor in the department of computer science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. He also co-directs the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

#2631

Ruby B. Lee

#49261

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media. At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security. Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".

#2632

Moustafa Youssef

#11221

Overall Influence

Moustafa Youssef is an Egyptian computer scientist who was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2019 for contributions to wireless location tracking technologies and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2019 for contributions to location tracking algorithms. He is the first and only ACM Fellow in the Middle East and Africa.

#2633

Mary Lou Soffa

#64602

Overall Influence

Mary Lou Ehnot Soffa is an American computer scientist noted for her research on compilers, program optimization, system software and system engineering. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. She is on the CRA-W Board and was co-chair from 2000 to 2003. With Jan Cuny, she founded the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Program and the CRA-W Associate Professor Program.

#2634

Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli

#26298

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian and French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris, and a former Debian Project Leader. Debian involvement Zacchiroli became a Debian Developer in 2001. After attending LinuxTag in 2004, he became more involved in the Debian community and the project itself, eventually being elected as DPL in 2010, succeeding Steve McIntyre, a position in which he served from April 2010 to April 2013. In April 2011, he was re-elected unopposed as project leader. He was himself succeeded by Lucas Nussbaum in an election where he himself was no longer a cand...

#2635

Krishnendu Chakrabarty

#74591

Overall Influence

Krishnendu Chakrabarty is an Indian-American electrical and computer engineer. He is the Fulton Professor of Microelectronics at Arizona State University Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Before joining Arizona State, he was the John Cocke Distinguished Professor and was the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University Pratt School of Engineering.

#2636

William E.M. Lands

#57121

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

William E.M. Lands is an American nutritional biochemist who is among the world's foremost authorities on essential fatty acids. Biography Lands graduated from University of Michigan in 1951 and served on the faculty there from 1955 to 1980. He then moved to University of Illinois Chicago and subsequently the National Institutes of Health , where he served as the senior scientific advisor to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He was named a Fellow by the American Society for Nutrition, Society for Redox Biology and Medicine, International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

#2637

Guy Blelloch

#72764

Overall Influence

Guy Edward Blelloch is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work in parallel programming and parallel algorithms. He teaches the 15-853: Algorithms in the Real World course, the 15-492: Parallel Algorithms course, and the 15-210: Parallel and Sequential Data Structure and Algorithms course at the Carnegie Mellon University. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

#2638

Finn Kjærsdam

#24275

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Finn Kjærsdam is a Danish Land Surveyor and former rector and professor of Urban Planning at Aalborg University . Finn Kjærsdam is born in Roskilde in 1943, but grew up most of his childhood in Køge. He graduated from Roskilde Cathedral School as a mathematical and natural science high school student in 1963. He subsequently studied at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University and became a Land Surveyor in 1969.

#2639

Lionel Ni

#35564

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Lionel Ming-shuan Ni , is serving as the provost of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and concurrently the Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior that, he was the vice rector at the University of Macau from January 2015 to 2019. Before joining UM, he was also the Chair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology , where he now returns to.

#2640

Victor W. Marek

#24479

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Victor Witold Marek, formerly Wiktor Witold Marek known as Witek Marek is a Polish mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. Biography Victor Witold Marek studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Warsaw. Supervised by Andrzej Mostowski, he received both a magister degree in mathematics in 1964 and a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1968. He completed habilitation in mathematics in 1972.

#2641

Josh Wardle

#15943

Overall Influence

Josh Wardle is a Welsh software engineer who developed the viral web-based word game Wordle. The New York Times Company acquired Wordle from Wardle in late January 2022. Wardle lives in Brooklyn, New York.

#2642

Ahmed Sameh

#29401

Overall Influence

Ahmed Hamdy Mohamed Sameh is the Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. He is known for his contributions to parallel algorithms in numerical linear algebra. Biography Sameh received his BSc in civil engineering from the University of Alexandria, Egypt in 1961, MS in civil engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1964 and PhD in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1968 under the supervision of Alfredo Hua-Sing Ang.

#2643

Nancy M. Amato

#45922

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP , of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.

#2644

Masaru Kitsuregawa

#40780

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Masaru Kitsuregawa is a Japanese computer scientist. Currently he is a professor at the University of Tokyo. Biography Education 1978: Graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Tokyo1983: Received the degree of Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo

#2645

Ron Shamir

#42883

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Ron Shamir is an Israeli professor of computer science known for his work in graph theory and in computational biology. He holds the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics, and is the founder and former head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University.

#2646

Konrad Zuse

#43782

Overall Influence

1910 - 1995 (85 years)

Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.

#2647

Ben Langmead

#42124

Overall Influence

Ben Langmead is a computational biologist and associate professor in the Computational Biology & Medicine Group at Johns Hopkins University. Education Langmead gained his Bachelor of Arts degree in computer science from Columbia College, Columbia University in 2003. He gained both his Master of Science and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, supervised by Steven Salzberg, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

#2648

Puneet Sharma

#65908

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Puneet Sharma is a Distinguished Technologist from the Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA where he heads the Networked Systems group. He started his research career as Research Scientist at HP Labs in September 1998.

#2649

Peter Pirolli

#57001

Overall Influence

Peter Pirolli is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition . His research involves a mix of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction, with applications in digital health, sensemaking, and information foraging, among other things. Previously he was at the Palo Alto Research Center and he was a tenured professor in the school of education at the University of California Berkeley in the Education, Math, Science and Technology Department .

#2650

Ramesh Jain

#78389

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ramesh Chandra Jain is a scientist and entrepreneur in the field of information and computer science. He is a Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine.

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