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,
#301
Timnit Gebru
#4545
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Timnit Gebru is an Eritrean Ethiopian-born political activist and computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black researchers working in artificial intelligence . She is the founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute .
Go to Profile#302
Neeraj Kayal
#4639
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Neeraj Kayal is an Indian computer scientist and mathematician noted for development of the AKS primality test, along with Manindra Agrawal and Nitin Saxena. Kayal was born and raised in Guwahati, India.
Go to Profile#303
Ken Arnold
#3751
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game Rogue, for his contributions to the original Berkeley distribution of Unix, for his books and articles about C and C++ , and his high-profile work on the Java platform.
Go to Profile#304
Stephen Warshall
#6393
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Stephen Warshall was an American computer scientist. During his career, Warshall carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design, and operations research. Warshall died on December 11, 2006 of cancer at his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Dunlap, and two children, Andrew D. Warshall and Sophia V. Z. Warshall.
Go to Profile#305
David E. Shaw
#2337
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David Elliot Shaw is an American billionaire scientist and former hedge fund manager. He founded D. E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund company which was once described by Fortune magazine as "the most intriguing and mysterious force on Wall Street". A former assistant professor in the computer science department at Columbia University, Shaw made his fortune exploiting inefficiencies in financial markets with the help of state-of-the-art high speed computer networks. In 1996, Fortune magazine referred to him as "King Quant" because of his firm's pioneering role in high-speed quantitative trading. In ...
Go to Profile#306
Donald D. Chamberlin
#3492
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donald D. Chamberlin is an American computer scientist who is one of the principal designers of the original SQL language specification with Raymond Boyce. He also made significant contributions to the development of XQuery.
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John G. Kemeny
#1870
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
John George Kemeny was a Hungarian-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. Kurtz. Kemeny served as the 13th President of Dartmouth College from 1970 to 1981 and pioneered the use of computers in college education. Kemeny chaired the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.
Go to Profile#308
Samson Abramsky
#4249
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Samson Abramsky is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2021. His early work included profound contributions to domain theory and the connections thereof with geometric logic. Since then, his work has covered the lazy lambda calculus, strictness analysis, concurrency theory, interaction categories and geometry of interaction, game semantics and quantum computing. Notably, he co-pioneered categorical quantum mechanics. More recently, he has been applying methods fr...
Go to Profile#309
David D. Clark
#2482
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Dana "Dave" Clark is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .
Go to Profile#310
Vaughan Pratt
#3416
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Vaughan Pratt is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, who was an early pioneer in the field of computer science. Since 1969, Pratt has made several contributions to foundational areas such as search algorithms, sorting algorithms, and primality testing. More recently, his research has focused on formal modeling of concurrent systems and Chu spaces.
Go to Profile#311
Michael Kölling
#5950
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Michael Kölling is a German computer scientist, currently working at King's College London, best known for the development of the BlueJ and Greenfoot educational development environments and as author of introductory programming textbooks. In 2013 he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education for the development of the BlueJ.
Go to Profile#312
Simon Marlow
#6222
Overall Influence
Simon Marlow is a British computer scientist, programmer, author, and co-developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler for the programming language Haskell. He and Simon Peyton Jones won the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award in 2011 for their work on GHC. Marlow's book Parallel and Concurrent Programming in Haskell was published in July 2013.
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Hironobu Sakaguchi
#2169
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hironobu Sakaguchi is a Japanese game designer, director, producer, and writer. Originally working for Square from 1983 to 2003, he departed the company and founded independent studio Mistwalker in 2004. He is known as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, in addition to other titles during his time at Square. At Mistwalker, he is known for creating the Blue Dragon and Terra Battle series among several standalone titles, moving away from home consoles and creating titles for mobile platforms.
Go to Profile#314
Robert Sedgewick
#4479
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Sedgewick is an American computer scientist. He is the founding chair and the William O. Baker Professor in Computer Science at Princeton University and was a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems . He previously served on the faculty at Brown University and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, Institute for Defense Analyses, and INRIA. His research expertise is in algorithm science, data structures, and analytic combinatorics. He is also active in developing the college curriculum in computer science and in harnessing technology to make that curriculum avail...
Go to Profile#315
Peter H. Salus
#5053
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Peter Henry Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages.
Go to Profile#316
Vikram Adve
#6295
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Vikram Adve is the Donald B. Gillies professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Academia In 2020, Vikram Adve became a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Digital Agriculture and leads AIFARMS, a $20M National Artificial Intelligence Research Institute funded by NIFA and NSF at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#317
David Blei
#5287
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
David Meir Blei is a professor in the Statistics and Computer Science departments at Columbia University. Prior to fall 2014 he was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. His work is primarily in machine learning.
Go to Profile#318
Jeannette Wing
#5463
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jeannette Marie Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, where she is also a professor of computer science. Until June 30, 2017, she was Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research with oversight of its core research laboratories around the world and Microsoft Research Connections. Prior to 2013, she was the President's Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. She also served as assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF from 2007 to 2010. She was a...
Go to Profile#319
Diane Greene
#2523
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Diane B. Greene is an American technology entrepreneur and executive. Greene started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was a founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She was a board director of Google and CEO of Google Cloud from 2015 until 2019. She was also the co-founder and CEO of two startups, Bebop and VXtreme, which were acquired by Google and Microsoft, for $380 million and $75 million.
Go to Profile#320
Lawrence J. Fogel
#5038
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Dr. Lawrence Jerome Fogel was a pioneer in evolutionary computation and human factors analysis. He is known as the inventor of active noise cancellation and the father of evolutionary programming. His scientific career spanned nearly six decades and included electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, communication theory, human factors research, information processing, cybernetics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and computer science.
Go to Profile#321
Samy Bengio
#6233
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, and a former long-time scientist at Google known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired his report, Timnit Gebru, without first notifying him. At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru. He is also among the three authors who developed Torch in 2002, the ancestor of PyTorch, one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.
Go to Profile#322
Paul Vixie
#4462
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open source software principles and methodology. He also created and launched the first successful commercial anti-spam service. He authored the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises.
Go to Profile#323
David E. Goldberg
#4950
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Edward Goldberg is an American computer scientist, civil engineer, and former professor. Until 2010, he was a professor in the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was noted for his work in the field of genetic algorithms. He was the director of the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory and the co-founder & chief scientist of Nextumi, which later changed its name to ShareThis. He is the author of Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning, one of the most cited books in computer scienc...
Go to Profile#324
Avrim Blum
#6260
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Avrim Blum is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blum attended MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991 under professor Ron Rivest. He was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University from 1991 to 2017.
Go to Profile#325
Rakesh Agrawal
#6583
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Rakesh Agrawal is a computer scientist who until recently was a Technical Fellow at the Microsoft Search Labs. Rakesh is well known for developing fundamental data mining concepts and technologies and pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. IBM's commercial data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew out of his work. His research has been incorporated into other IBM products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server and WebSphere Commerce Server, and has influenced several other commercial and academic products, prototypes and applications.
Go to Profile#326
Karl Sims
#4946
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Karl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation. Biography Sims received a B.S. from MIT in 1984, and a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab in 1987. He has worked for supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines as an artist-in-residence, for Whitney/Demos Productions as a researcher, and co-founded Optomystic. Sims was the founder and CEO of GenArts, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that developed special effects plugins used in film and video production. In 2008 he m...
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Amir Pnueli
#2218
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Amir Pnueli was an Israeli computer scientist and the 1996 Turing Award recipient. Biography Pnueli was born in Nahalal, in the British Mandate of Palestine and received a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Technion in Haifa, and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science . His thesis was on the topic of "Calculation of Tides in the Ocean". He switched to computer science during a stint as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. His works in computer science focused on temporal logic and model checking, particularly regarding fairness properties of con...
Go to Profile#328
Martin Odersky
#7370
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He spearheaded the design of Scala and Generic Java .
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Daniel P. Friedman
#5752
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Daniel Paul Friedman is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field. With David Wise, Friedman wrote a highly influential paper on lazy programming, specifically on lazy streams . The paper, entitled "Cons should not evaluate its arguments," is one of the first publications pushing for the exploration of a programming style with potentially infinite data structures and a form of programming that employs no computational effects . Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explor...
Go to Profile#330
Tomasz Imieliński
#6638
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Tomasz Imieliński is a Polish-American computer scientist, most known in the areas of data mining, mobile computing, data extraction, and search engine technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, United States.
Go to Profile#331
Guy L. Steele Jr.
#5691
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri and graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1972. He received a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics from Harvard University and a Master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer science . He then worked as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a compiler implementer at Tartan Laboratories.
Go to Profile#332
Mark Overmars
#5326
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Markus Hendrik Overmars is a Dutch computer scientist and teacher of game programming known for his game development application GameMaker. GameMaker lets people create computer games using a drag-and-drop interface. He is the former head of the Center for Geometry, Imaging, and Virtual Environments at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. This research center concentrates on computational geometry and its application in areas like computer graphics, robotics, geographic information systems, imaging, multimedia, virtual environments, and games.
Go to Profile#333
Harlan Mills
#5805
Overall Influence
1919 - 1996 (77 years)
Harlan D. Mills was Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology and founder of Software Engineering Technology, Inc. of Vero Beach, Florida . Mills' contributions to software engineering have had a profound and enduring effect on education and industrial practice. Since earning his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Iowa State University in 1952, Mills led a distinguished career.
Go to Profile#334
Mendel Rosenblum
#3736
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mendel Rosenblum is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-founder of VMware. Early life Mendel Rosenblum was born in 1962. He attended the University of Virginia, where he received a degree in mathematics. While at UVA, he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa.
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Latanya Sweeney
#4629
Overall Influence
Latanya Arvette Sweeney is an American computer scientist. She is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She is the founder and director of the Public Interest Tech Lab, founded in 2021 with a $3 million grant from the Ford Foundation as well as the Data Privacy Lab. She is the current Faculty Dean in Currier House at Harvard.
Go to Profile#336
Dina Katabi
#5052
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Wireless Center. Academic biography Katabi received a bachelor's degree from the University of Damascus in 1995 and M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1998 and 2003 respectively. In 2003, Katabi joined MIT, where she holds the title of Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the co-director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science a...
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George Cybenko
#5556
Overall Influence
George V. Cybenko is the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth and a fellow of the IEEE and SIAM. Education Cybenko obtained his BA in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1974 and received his PhD from Princeton in applied mathematics of electrical and computer engineering in 1978 under Bede Liu.
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David Karger
#6202
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
David Ron Karger is an American computer scientist who is professor and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Education Karger received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#339
John C. Mitchell
#5547
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
John Clifford Mitchell is professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. He has published in the area of programming language theory and computer security. John C. Mitchell was the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Computer Security Lab, and Professor of Education. He is a member of the steering committee for Stanford University's Cyber Initiative. Mitchell has been Vice Provost at Stanfor...
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Michael L. Scott
#7517
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michael Lee Scott is a professor of computer science at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Education and teaching Scott received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985. He joined the faculty at Rochester the same year as an assistant professor of computer science. Scott was chair of the computer science department from 1996 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Mitsunori Ogihara. He served again as interim chair from July to December 2007 and from July to December 2017.
Go to Profile#341
Pattie Maes
#6238
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Pattie Maes is an American scientist. She is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She served for several years as both the head and associate head of the Media Lab's academic program. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
Go to Profile#342
Michael Dertouzos
#3797
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Michael Leonidas Dertouzos was a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science from 1974 to 2001.
Go to Profile#343
Norman Abramson
#3122
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Norman Manuel Abramson was an American engineer and computer scientist, most known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication. Early life Abramson was born on April 1, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to immigrant Jewish parents Edward and Esther. His father was born in Lithuania, and worked in commercial photography. His mother was born in Ukraine, and managed the house.
Go to Profile#344
Van Jacobson
#4800
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. He is one of the primary contributors to the TCP/IP protocol stack—the technological foundation of today’s Internet. Since 2013, Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles working on Named Data Networking.
Go to Profile#345
S. Rao Kosaraju
#5669
Overall Influence
Sambasiva Rao Kosaraju is an Indian-American professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and division director for Computing & Communication Foundations at the National Science Foundation. He has done extensive work in the design and analysis of parallel and sequential algorithms.
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Corinna Cortes
#7144
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Corinna Cortes is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to machine learning. She is a Vice President at Google Research in New York City. Cortes is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Award for her work on theoretical foundations of support vector machines.
Go to Profile#347
Jacob T. Schwartz
#1822
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Jacob Theodore "Jack" Schwartz was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the designer of the SETL programming language and started the NYU Ultracomputer project. He founded the New York University Department of Computer Science, chairing it from 1964 to 1980.
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Gerhard Weikum
#7261
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of knowledge bases. He is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science .
Go to Profile#349
Thomas M. Cover
#3506
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Thomas M. Cover [ˈkoʊvər] was an American information theorist and professor jointly in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Statistics at Stanford University. He devoted almost his entire career to developing the relationship between information theory and statistics.
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Thomas Sterling
#6489
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Thomas Sterling is a full professor for the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. At IU, he is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Computing Systems Laboratory . He received his Ph.D in 1984 at MIT. For more than four decades, Thomas Sterling has dedicated his professional contributions to research for advancements in parallel high-performance computing. Dr. Sterling is best known as the “father of Beowulf” clusters. Among his other early accomplishments, Dr. Sterling was Principal investigator for the multi-agency multi-institution Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded Project for advanced research on Petaflops computing systems.
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