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,
#2651
Herbert Hugh Thompson
#48576
Overall Influence
Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson is a computer security expert, an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and the Chief Technology Officer of Symantec. He is also the Program Chairman of RSA Conference the world's largest information security conference with over 25,000 attendees annually. Thompson is the co-author of a book on human achievement titled The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success published by Penguin in 2013 and has co-authored three books on information security including, How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Te...
Go to Profile#2652
Matthew Turk
#76857
Overall Influence
Matthew Turk is the President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and a professor emeritus and former department chair of the Department of Computer Science and the Media Arts and Technology Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, California. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for his contributions to computer vision and perceptual interfaces. In 2014, Turk was also named a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition for his contributions to computer vision and vision based interaction. In J...
Go to Profile#2653
Harald Haas
#45216
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Harald Haas FRSE is a German Professor of Mobile Communications at the University of Strathclyde and is the person who coined the term Li-Fi. In 2012 he was one of the co-founders of pureVLC . Haas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017.
Go to Profile#2654
Iain S. Duff
#75208
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Iain S. Duff is a British mathematician and computer scientist, known for his work in numerical methods and software for solving problem with sparse matrices, in particular the Harwell Subroutine Library. From 1986 to 2009, he was the Group Leader of Numerical Analysis at Harwell Laboratory, which has moved in 1990 to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is also the Project Leader for the Parallel Algorithms Group at CERFACS in Toulouse.
Go to Profile#2655
Alistair Cooke
#2388
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Alistair Cooke was a British-American writer whose work as a journalist, television personality and radio broadcaster was done primarily in the United States. Outside his journalistic output, which included Letter from America and America: A Personal History of the United States, he was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 to 1992. After holding the job for 22 years, and having worked in television for Cooke retired in 1992, although he continued to present Letter from America until shortly before his death. He was the father of author and folk sin...
Go to Profile#2656
Ivan Oseledets
#37557
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Ivan Oseledets is a Russian computer scientist and mathematician and professor at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. He is best known for the tensor train decomposition, which is more commonly called a matrix product state in the area of tensor networks.
Go to Profile#2657
Sariel Har-Peled
#75767
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sariel Har-Peled is an Israeli–American computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#2658
Sunita Sarawagi
#72834
Overall Influence
Sunita Sarawagi is an Indian computer scientist known for her research in databases, data mining, and machine learning, including the use of natural language processing to extract structured data from text. She is Institute Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay.
Go to Profile#2659
Luigi Racioppi
#79734
Overall Influence
#2660
Tieniu Tan
#79745
Overall Influence
#2661
Scott Bradner
#45865
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Scott Bradner is a senior figure in the area of Internet governance. He serves as the secretary to the Internet Society and was formerly a trustee. He was on the board of ARIN, the North American IP address registry. He has also held numerous senior leadership roles on the Internet Engineering Task Force which develops Internet standards. Until his retirement in July 2016, he was also University Technology Security Officer at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2662
Yizhak Marcus
#79780
Overall Influence
#2663
Kentaro Toyama
#59846
Overall Influence
Kentaro Toyama is a computer scientist and international development researcher, who works on the relationship of technology and global development. He is the W. K. Kellogg Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.
Go to Profile#2664
J.a.k. Suykens J. Vandewalle
#79823
Overall Influence
#2665
Nancy D. Erbe
#16412
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nancy Diane Erbe is an American negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills . Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with a wide spectrum of individuals and groups representing more than 80 countries, from colleagues and associates to clients and students, on these issues. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Senior Specialist in Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair . She has received four Fulbright Honors to date including two in the same year which is extremely rare. She is the recipient of the Presidential Outstanding Professor Award-2015.
Go to Profile#2666
Dave Taylor
#48381
Overall Influence
Dave D. Taylor is an American game programmer, best known as a former id Software employee and noted for his work promoting Linux gaming. Early life He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1993. Prior to working for id, he was a member of The Kernel Group, which worked on Unix kernel debugging.
Go to Profile#2667
J. Eliot B. Moss
#73804
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
J. Eliot B. Moss is a computer scientist active in the fields of garbage collection and multiprocessor synchronization. He is co-inventor with Maurice Herlihy of transactional memory. He is currently a Professor of computer science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has served on the executive committee of SIGPLAN, the Special Interest Group for programming languages for the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2007 he was inducted as Fellow of the ACM, and in 2008 as a Fellow of the IEEE. In 2012, his paper on transactional memory was recognized with a Dijkstra Prize, shared with ...
Go to Profile#2668
Catherine G. Wolf
#54462
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Catherine Gody Wolf was an American psychologist and expert in human-computer interaction. She was the author of more than 100 research articles and held six patents in the areas of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and collaboration. Wolf was known for her work at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where she was a 19-year staff researcher.
Go to Profile#2669
Max A. Viergever
#80010
Overall Influence
#2670
Mark Kryder
#22161
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mark Howard Kryder was Seagate Corp.'s senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. Kryder holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#2671
Roy H. Campbell
#74335
Overall Influence
Roy H. Campbell is a computer scientist and the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and director of the Assured Cloud Computing University Center of Excellence. Campbell is best known for his work in operating systems, parallel computing, and multimedia on the internet.
Go to Profile#2672
Scott Hudson
#71572
Overall Influence
Scott E. Hudson is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously an associate professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and prior to that, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Arizona. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Colorado in 1986.
Go to Profile#2673
John Lansdown
#56461
Overall Influence
1929 - 1999 (70 years)
Robert John Lansdown was a British computer graphics pioneer, polymath and Professor Emeritus at Middlesex University Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, which was renamed in his honour in 2000. Lansdown was born in Cardiff. As early as 1960, when he was a successful architect with offices in Russell Square, central London, Lansdown was a believer in the potential for computers for architecture and other creative activities. He pioneered the use of computers as an aid to planning; making perspective drawings on an Elliott 803 computer in 1963, modelling a building's lifts and services, plott...
Go to Profile#2674
Muhammad Bilal
#80181
Overall Influence
#2675
Naomi Sager
#16469
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Naomi Sager is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.
Go to Profile#2676
Wang Xiaoyun
#41053
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Wang Xiaoyun is a Chinese cryptographer, mathematician, and computer scientist. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and System Science of Shandong University and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#2677
Kevin P Campbell
#80342
Overall Influence
#2678
Chrisanthi Avgerou
#53861
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Chrisanthi Avgerou FBCS FAIS is a Greek-born British scholar in the field of the Social Study of Information Systems, focusing on Information Technology in developing countries. She is currently Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Go to Profile#2679
David Mayne
#64799
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
David Quinn Mayne, FRS, FIEEE, FREng is a British academic, engineer, teacher and author. Career Mayne began his career in 1950 as a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand . He lectured at Imperial College London from 1959-67 and also received his PhD in 1967 at the University of London under John Westcott. He was a Research Fellow at Harvard . At Imperial College he was professor of control theory as well as concurrently heading the Department of Electrical Engineering .
Go to Profile#2680
Vijay Kumar
#80417
Overall Influence
#2681
Lale Akarun
#23886
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lale Akarun is a Turkish electrical engineer and computer scientist researching sign language and gesture recognition, human–computer interaction, and biometrics. She is a professor in the computer engineering department and ex-vice rector at Boğaziçi University.
Go to Profile#2682
Michael Dinneen
#60351
Overall Influence
Michael J. Dinneen is an American-New Zealand mathematician and computer scientist working as a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is co-director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. He does research in combinatorial algorithms, distributive programming, experimental graph theory, and experimental algorithmic information theory.
Go to Profile#2683
Anastasia Ailamaki
#72534
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Anastasia Ailamaki is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the Director of the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems lab. She is also the co-founder of RAW Labs SA, a Swiss company developing real-time analytics infrastructures for heterogeneous big data. Formerly, she was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#2684
Kenny Paterson
#66424
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Kenneth G. "Kenny" Paterson is a professor in the Institute of Information Security at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Group. Before joining ETH Zurich in April 2019, he was a professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and an EPSRC Leadership Fellow. He is a cryptographer with a focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice and recently became the Editor in Chief for the IACR's Journal of Cryptology and a 2017 fellow of the IACR.
Go to Profile#2685
Lorenzo Moretta
#80568
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#2686
Gilles Van Assche
#63921
Overall Influence
Gilles Van Assche is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. The SHA-3 standard was released by NIST on August 5, 2015.
Go to Profile#2687
Paul van Oorschot
#67024
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Authentication and Computer Security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . He is best known as co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography , together with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone. Van Oorschot was awarded the 2000 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography workshop in 1994.
Go to Profile#2688
Clemens Kirschbaum
#80687
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#2689
Poom Kumam
#80766
Overall Influence
#2690
Alexander J. Wulf
#39091
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexander Johannes Wulf is a professor of business law at the SRH Hochschule Berlin, visiting researcher at the University of Kyōto, and lecturer at the Bucerius Law School. Academic development He was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley , West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences and the University of Oxford . From 2003 to 2008, he studied research methods, business and law at various universities, including the London School of Economics, the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Bucerius Law School and the SRH Hochschule Berlin. In 2013, he obtained...
Go to Profile#2691
Dharmendra Modha
#46885
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dharmendra S. Modha is an Indian American manager and lead researcher of the Cognitive Computing group at IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his pioneering works in Artificial Intelligence and Mind Simulation. In November 2009, Modha announced at a supercomputing conference that his team had written a program that simulated a cat brain. He is the recipient of multiple honors, including the Gordon Bell Prize, given each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high-performance computing applications. In November 2012, Modha announced on his blog that using 96 Blue Gene/Q racks of ...
Go to Profile#2692
Andrew Glassner
#56665
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Andrew S. Glassner is an American expert in computer graphics, well known in computer graphics community as the originator and editor of the Graphics Gems series, An Introduction to Ray Tracing, and Principles of Digital Image Synthesis. His later interests include interactive fiction, writing and directing and consulting in computer game and online entertainment industries. He worked at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab.
Go to Profile#2693
Ricky J. Sethi
#26913
Overall Influence
Ricky J. Sethi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Fitchburg State University and the Director of Research for The Madsci Network. He was appointed as a National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Fellow by the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association. He has contributed significantly in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, social computing, and science education/eLearning.
Go to Profile#2694
Wendi Heinzelman
#68769
Overall Influence
Wendi Beth Rabiner Heinzelman is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist specializing in wireless networks, cloud computing, and multimedia. She is dean of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester, and the former dean of graduate studies for arts, sciences, and engineering at Rochester.
Go to Profile#2695
Vijay Kumar Thakur
#49731
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Vijay Kumar Thakur is an Indian chemist, material scientist and Professor known for his research in the field of polymers, nanotechnology, manufacturing engineering, sustainable chemistry and materials science. He has published over 300 SCI journal articles, 52 Books and two USA patents. He sits on the editorial board of several SCI journals.
Go to Profile#2696
Masahiro Mori
#27422
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
is a Japanese roboticist noted for his pioneering work in the fields of robotics and automation, his research achievements in humans' emotional responses to non-human entities, as well as for his views on religion. The ASIMO robot was designed by one of Masahiro's students.
Go to Profile#2697
Daniel Buren
#3224
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He has won numerous awards including the Golden Lion for best pavilion at the Venice Biennale , the International Award for best artist in Stuttgart and the prestigious Premium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo in 2007. He has created several world-famous installations, including "Les Deux Plateaux" in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais-Royal, and the Observatory of the Light in Fondation Louis Vuitton. He is one of the most active and recognised artists on the international scene, and his work has been welcomed by the most impor...
Go to Profile#2698
Walter Daelemans
#67727
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Walter Daelemans is professor in computational linguistics at the University of Antwerp. He is also a research director of the Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Center . Education and career Daelemans holds a Ph.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Go to Profile#2699
William Newman
#64828
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
William Maxwell Newman was a British computer scientist. With others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s Newman demonstrated the advantages of the raster display technology first deployed in the Xerox Alto personal workstation, developing interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. With Bob Sproull he co-authored the first major textbook on interactive computer graphics.
Go to Profile#2700
Koichiro Tamura
#81033
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
