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,

#2751

Cheng Xiang Zhai

#79516
Overall Influence
ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Biography Zhai received the BS , MS , and PhD in Computer Science from Nanjing University. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at Nanjing University's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University with David A. Evans. Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty.
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#2752

Elizabeth O'Neil

#69066
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Jean O'Neil is an American computer scientist known for her highly cited work in databases, including C-Store, the LRU-K page replacement algorithm, the log-structured merge-tree, and her criticism of the ANSI SQL 92 isolation mechanism. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
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#2753

Eric Feron

#39858
Overall Influence
Eric Marie Feron is a computer scientist and aerospace engineer. He has been the Dutton/Ducoffe Professor of Aerospace Software Engineering at Georgia Tech since 2005. He taught at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1993 until his appointment at Georgia Tech. He obtained his BS from Ecole Polytechnique in 1989, his MS from Ecole Normale Suprieure in 1990, and PhD from Stanford University in 1994. His particular research foci are aerobatic control of unmanned aerial vehicles, multi-agent operations, including air traffic control systems and aerospace software system certification.
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#2754

Henriette Avram

Henriette Avram
#27359
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Henriette Davidson Avram was a computer programmer and systems analyst who developed the MARC format , the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries. Avram's development of the MARC format in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the Library of Congress had a revolutionizing effect on the practice of librarianship, making possible the automation of many library functions and the sharing of bibliographic information electronically between libraries using pre-existing cataloging standards.
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#2755

Andreas Brandstädt

#58794
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andreas Brandstädt is a German mathematician and computer scientist. Life and work He graduated from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, with a Ph.D. in stochastics in 1976 and a habilitation in complexity theory in 1983. Since 1974 he worked there in the group of his academic teacher Gerd Wechsung.
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#2756

Javed Butler

#82665
Overall Influence
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#2757

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil
#48294
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition , text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence , transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
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#2758

Juliana Freire

#53119
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva is a Brazilian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University. She is known for her research in information visualization, data provenance, and computerized assistance for scientific reproducibility.
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#2759

Jeffrey Naughton

#68224
Overall Influence
Jeffrey Naughton is a computer scientist and former professor and department chair of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was one of the leaders of the Wisconsin Database Group. He was lead of Google's Madison office until 2022.
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#2760

Marieke Huisman

#58865
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Marieke Huisman is a Dutch Computer Scientist and a professor of Software Reliability at the University of Twente, where she leads the Formal Methods and Tools Group. Career Huisman graduated from Utrecht University in 1996. She obtained her PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen in 2001; her dissertation, entitled Reasoning about Java programs in higher order logic using PVS and Isabelle, was supervised by Henk Barendregt.
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#2761

Daniel I. A. Cohen

#63034
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Isaac Aryeh Cohen is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is now a professor emeritus at Hunter College. Cohen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1967 and already as an undergraduate published a research paper about Sperner's lemma, which he learned about from Hans Rademacher. He completed his doctorate in 1975 from Harvard University under the joint supervision of Andrew M. Gleason and Gian-Carlo Rota. He was a mathematician at Hunter College in 1981 when the computer science department was founded, and became one of five initial com...
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#2762

Margaret Hedstrom

#38931
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Margaret L. Hedstrom is an American archivist who is the Robert M. Warner Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. She has contributed to the field of digital preservation, archives, and electronic records management and holds a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin.
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#2763

Dan Gusfield

#49390
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Daniel Mier Gusfield is an American computer scientist, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Gusfield is known for his research in combinatorial optimization and computational biology.
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#2764

Dirkje Postma

Dirkje Postma
#80638
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dirkje Postma is professor at the University of Groningen and the University Medical Center Groningen. She focused her research career on asthma and COPD. Postma is a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands.
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#2765

Kimberly Keeton

#50519
Overall Influence
Kimberly Kristine Keeton is an American computer scientist specializing in databases and computer data storage. She worked at HP Labs as a Distinguished Technologist and is currently employed by Google as Principal Engineer, and was one of the designers of the Express Query metadata database used by Hewlett-Packard as part of their StoreAll large-scale data storage systems.
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#2766

Subhash Suri

#66407
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Subhash Suri is an Indian-American computer scientist, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is known for his research in computational geometry, computer networks, and algorithmic game theory.
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#2767

Ling. Shao

#82828
Overall Influence
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#2768

Fanya Montalvo

#59902
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Fanya S. Montalvo Received the Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976. Her dissentary was entitled Aftereffects, Adaptation, and Plasticity: A Neural Model for Tunable Feature Space. She was advised by Michael Anthony Arbib. Montalvo has been a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, HP, MIT, and Digital Equipment Corporation.
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#2769

Roderick Bronson

#82883
Overall Influence
Roderick T. Bronson, D.V.M. is an American pathologist and the director of the Rodent Pathology Core at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bronson has authored or co-authored more than 400 scientific articles and has been recognized by I.S.I. Thompson as a highly cited author.
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#2770

Mauro Pezzè

#47270
Overall Influence
Mauro Pezzè is an Italian computer scientist. He is a professor of the faculty of informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland where he had been the dean of the faculty of informatics from 2009 ti 2012. He is also a professor of software engineering at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. He has been co-chair of the International Conference on Software Engineering. Mauro is the co-author of Software testing and analysis: process, principles, and techniques published by Wiley in 2007. Since 2019 he is professor of software engineering at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology.
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#2771

Amir Lerman

#82931
Overall Influence
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#2772

Thomas R. Bruce

#19591
Overall Influence
Thomas R. "Tom" Bruce is an American academic and former software engineer who co-founded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School with Peter Martin in 1992. Education Bruce earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts in stage management from the School of Drama at Yale University.
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#2773

Padam Kafle

#82973
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
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#2774

Patrick F Sullivan

#82986
Overall Influence
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#2775

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning
#618
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
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#2776

Igor Sokolov

#40769
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Igor Sokolov is a Russian scientist, Dr. Sc., Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences professor at the MSU CMC and Moscow Technological University , director of the Institute for Informatics Problems. Acting Dean of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University .
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#2777

Faith Ellen

Faith Ellen
#83056
Overall Influence
Faith Ellen is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto who studies distributed data structures and the theory of distributed computing. She earned her bachelor's degree and master's from the University of Waterloo in 1977 and 1978, respectively, and doctorate in 1982 from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Richard Karp; her dissertation concerned lower bounds for cycle detection and parallel prefix sums. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1983, and moved to Toronto in 1986. From 1997 to 2001, she was the vice chair of SIGACT, the leading international society for theory of computation.
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#2778

Khaled El Emam

#41100
Overall Influence
Khaled El Emam is a co-founder and Director at Replica Analytics. El Emam is also a senior scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting academic research on de-identification and re-identification risk. As of 2022, El-Emam has served as Editor-in-Chief of JMIR AI, a journal focused on research and applications for the health AI community.
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#2779

Reynolds Paul Ross

#83183
Overall Influence
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#2780

M. Tamer Özsu

M. Tamer Özsu
#26390
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
M. Tamer Özsu, FRSC is a Turkish Canadian computer scientist working in the area of distributed and parallel data management. He is a University Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
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#2781

Lars Arge

#42982
Overall Influence
1967 - 2020 (53 years)
Lars Allan Arge was a Danish computer scientist, the head of the Center for Massive Data Algorithmics at Aarhus University, where he was also a professor of computer science. His research involved the study of algorithms and data structures for handling massive data, especially in graph algorithms and computational geometry.
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#2782

Asunción Gómez Pérez

#65533
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Asunción Gómez Pérez is a Spanish computer scientist, the Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Doctoral Studies and a Full Professor at the Technical University of Madrid. In 2015, she received National Prize of Informatics from Scientific Society of Informatics of Spain. She is also the recipient of the Ada Byron Prize. She is working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in semantic web and ontology engineering.
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#2783

Aboul Ella Hassanien

#83257
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
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#2784

Jonathan Grier

#64374
Overall Influence
Jonathan Grier is a computer scientist, consultant, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his work on stochastic forensics and insider data theft. He has also contributed to computer security, digital forensics, and software development.
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#2785

Hamid Arabnia

#83304
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Hamid Reza Arabnia is a professor of computer science at the University of Georgia, United States. He has been the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Supercomputing since 1997. External links
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#2786

Viswanathan Mohan

#83322
Overall Influence
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#2787

Teofilo F. Gonzalez

Teofilo F. Gonzalez
#66481
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Teofilo Francisco Gonzalez Arce is a Mexican-American computer scientist who is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1972, Gonzalez was one of the first students who earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in Mexico, at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. He completed his Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Sartaj Sahni. He taught at the University of Oklahoma from 1975 to 1976, at the Pennsylvania State University from 1976 to 1979, at the Monterrey Institute of Technolog...
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#2788

Dragan Gasevic

Dragan Gasevic
#49385
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Dragan Gašević is Professor of Learning Analytics at Monash University. He is a researcher in learning analytics and co-developed several software systems such as P3, rBPMN Editor, LOCO-Analyst, OnTask, OVAL, and ProSolo. He is recognized as Australia's field leader in educational technologies.
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#2789

Richard J. Mayer

#44660
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Richard J. Mayer is an American engineer, President of Knowledge Based Systems, Inc., known as lead engineer and principal investigator on the projects of developing part of the IDEF family of modeling languages in the field of software and systems engineering.
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#2790

Paul Sermon

#48824
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Paul Sermon was born 23 March 1966, in Oxford, England. Since September 2013 he has worked as Professor of Visual Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton. Biography Paul Sermon was born in Oxford, England in 1966. Studying for a B.A Hon's Fine Art Degree in the Newport School of Fine Art at Gwent College of Higher Education, under Professor Roy Ascott, he began to gain an interest and involve himself in Telematic art work. It was at Gwent College that he was first introduced to the possible ways that telecommunication networks and computer systems could be combined t...
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#2791

Muffy Calder

Muffy Calder
#47464
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dame Muffy Calder is a Canadian-born British computer scientist, Vice-Principal and Head of College of Science and Engineering, and Professor of Formal Methods at the University of Glasgow. From 2012 to 2015 she was Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government.
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#2792

Randy Farmer

Randy Farmer
#55987
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Frank Randall "Randy" Farmer is an American game developer, co-creator with Chip Morningstar of one of the first graphical online games, 1985's Habitat. In 2001 he and Morningstar were the first recipients of the Pioneer Award by the International Game Developers Association. Farmer was involved with the creation of Yahoo! 360 and Communities.com, and has published several works on web and game development, social media, and online communities.
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#2793

Christos Kozyrakis

#64893
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Christos Kozyrakis is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the multi-scale architecture & systems team . His current research interests are on resource efficient cloud computing, energy efficient compute and memory systems, and architectural support for security. Kozyrakis was the 2015 ACM Maurice Wilkes Award for outstanding contributions to transactional memory systems.
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#2794

Batya Friedman

#54048
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Batya Friedman is an American professor in the University of Washington Information School. She is also an adjunct professor in the Paul G. Allen School Computer Science and Engineering and adjunct professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering, where she directs the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab. She received her PhD in learning sciences from the University of California, Berkeley School of Education in 1988, and has an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in computer science and mathematics.
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#2795

Deborah McGuinness

#29901
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, exp...
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#2796

Mariarosaria Taddeo

#54542
Overall Influence
Mariarosaria Taddeo is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, and deputy director of the Digital Ethics Lab. Taddeo is also an associate scholar at Said Business School, University of Oxford.
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#2797

Pamela Zave

#71944
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Pamela Zave is an American computer scientist now working at Princeton University. She is known for her work on requirements engineering, telecommunication services, and protocol modeling and verification, and is now working on network architecture. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2002, and was the 2017 recipient of the Harlan D. Mills Award from the IEEE Computer Society.
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#2798

Genndy Tartakovsky

Genndy Tartakovsky
#42733
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gennady Borisovich "Genndy" Tartakovsky , commonly known as Tartakovsky , is a Russian-American animator, writer, producer, and director. He is best known as the creator of various animated television series on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, including Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Sym-Bionic Titan, Primal and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.
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#2799

Donald Haderle

#53765
Overall Influence
Donald Haderle is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for his work on relational database management systems . He led the architecture and design of DB2, one of the first commercial RDBMSs, which led to his moniker "Father of DB2." DB2 debuted on IBM's mainframe system MVS in 1983 and validated the applicability of relational databases for high performance transaction processing. With DB2 enterprises store, retrieve, and analyze their business transaction data. The cited reference describes the early technology hurdles, the shift from a monolithic architecture to a distr...
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#2800

Marian Petre

#61414
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marian Petre is a British computer scientist and Professor of Computing at the Open University and Director of its Centre for Research in Computing , known for her work on Visual Programming Environments, and co-developed the concept of cognitive dimensions of notations.
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