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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Computer Science,

#3101

Harry Bruce

#71520

Overall Influence

Harry Bruce is an Australian Professor and former Dean of the Information School at the University of Washington. His research interests focus on human information behavior, information seeking, personal information management, and networked information environments. He has authored, co-authored, or edited several books on information behavior and information science, and has published over 30 refereed journal articles and conference papers.

#3102

Arnaud Doucet

#91274

Overall Influence

#3103

Nancy R. Cook

#91281

Overall Influence

#3104

Forrest S. Mozer

#72477

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Forrest S. Mozer is an American experimental physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur known best for his pioneering work on electric field measurements in space plasma and for development of solid state electronic speech synthesizers and speech recognizers.

#3105

David Allen Patterson

#73749

Overall Influence

David Allen Patterson, Silver Wolf was a professor, researcher, author, and Native American advocate. He was the first American Indian professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his research and active involvement in Native American health, retention of Native American college students, treatment retention for alcohol and drug addiction, and finding solutions to barriers to best practices adoption in community-based organizations.

#3106

Horst O. Bunke

#91424

Overall Influence

#3107

Jessica Hammer

#48578

Overall Influence

Jessica Hammer is an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Early life and education Hammer, who was a finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, attended the Maimonides School, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

#3108

Wangmeng Zuo

#91462

Overall Influence

#3109

Dr. David B. Fogel

#91486

Overall Influence

#3110

Breyten Breytenbach

Breyten Breytenbach

#3499

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship.

#3111

Jorge Urrutia Galicia

Jorge Urrutia Galicia

#27418

Overall Influence

Jorge Urrutia Galicia is a Mexican mathematician and computer scientist in the Institute of Mathematics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico . His research primarily concerns discrete and computational geometry.

#3112

Jasvinder Singh

#91553

Overall Influence

#3113

Alex Verrijn Stuart

Alex Verrijn Stuart

#67257

Overall Influence

1922 - 2004 (82 years)

Adolf Alexander Verrijn Stuart was a Dutch computer scientist, and the first Professor in computer science at the Leiden University from 1969 tot 1991. Biography Alex Verrijn Stuart was born in Rotterdam, where his father was professor in economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His grandfather was the economist Coenraad Alexander Verrijn Stuart, who in 1899 was the first president of the Statistics Netherlands.

#3114

Juhani Karhumäki

Juhani Karhumäki

#77717

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Eero Urho Juhani Karhumäki is a Finnish mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to automata theory. He is a professor at the University of Turku. Biography Karhumäki earned his doctorate from the University of Turku in 1976. In 1980–1985, he was a junior researcher of Academy of Finland. Since 1986, he has held teaching positions at the University of Turku, attaining full professorship in 1998. In 1998–2015, Karhumäki was the head of the mathematics department at the University of Turku. He has authored altogether around 200 research papers.

#3115

Roberta Sinatra

#16730

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Roberta Sinatra is an Italian scientist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is known for her work in network science and conducts research on quantifying success in science.

#3116

Alexander Zelikovsky

#82817

Overall Influence

Alexander Zelikovsky is a professor of computer science at Georgia State University. He is known for an approximation algorithm for the minimum Steiner tree problem with an approximation ratio 1.55, widely cited by his peers and also widely held in libraries.

#3117

Elliot Koffman

#72670

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Elliot Bruce Koffman is a noted computer scientist and educationist. He is the author of numerous widely used introductory textbooks for more than 10 different programming languages, including Ada, BASIC, C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, Modula-2, and Pascal. Since 1974, he has been a professor of computer and information sciences at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

#3118

Gershom Zajicek

#91684

Overall Influence

#3119

Rishi Raj

#87528

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Rishi Raj is an Indian university professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the pioneer of flash sintering technology and research. Academic background Raj left India at the age of eighteen after completing a two years program in mathematics, chemistry and physics at Allahabad University. He proceeded to the University of Durham in England where he obtained a bachelor of science degree in Electrical Engineering with First Class Honors.

#3120

Klaus Dittrich

#46703

Overall Influence

1950 - 2007 (57 years)

Klaus R. Dittrich was a German computer scientist. Biography After his high school graduation at Gymnasium Münchberg he studied at University of Karlsruhe where he received his diploma degree in Computer Science.

#3121

Elias Koutsoupias

#42723

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Education Elias Koutsoupias is a Greek computer scientist working in algorithmic game theory. Koutsoupias received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and his doctorate in computer science in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego under the supervision of Christos Papadimitriou. He subsequently taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Athens, and is now a professor at the University of Oxford.

#3122

Tim Smith

#38729

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tim Smith is an English broadcaster and radio personality in the UK. He is best known as being part of the team for Steve Wright in the Afternoon on BBC Radio 2. On 1 July 2022 Wright announced that his afternoon show would end in Autumn 2022, after 23 years. It was also announced that Smith would be leaving BBC Radio 2, together with Janey Lee Grace.

#3123

Petra Mutzel

#76926

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Petra Mutzel is a German computer scientist, a University Professor of computer science at the University of Bonn. Her research is in the areas of algorithm engineering, graph drawing and combinatorial optimization.

#3124

Mark Billinghurst

#90448

Overall Influence

Mark Nathan Billinghurst is a computer interface technology researcher. His work focuses on augmented reality technology. Billinghurst was made a Fellow of the IEEE in 2023. Education Billinghurst completed his school education at the New Plymouth Boys' High School. He received Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Science and Master of Philosophy degrees in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Both degrees are from Waikato University. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory in 2002. His dissertation was Shared Space: Explorations in Collaborative Augmented Reality.

#3125

Bette Korber

#35529

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed heavily to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine. She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa. The database contains thousands of HIV genome sequences and related data.

#3126

Alessandra Carbone

#68745

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Alessandra Carbone is an Italian mathematician and computer scientist. She is a professor in the computer science department of the Pierre and Marie Curie University. Since 2009 she has headed the laboratory of computational and quantitative biology. This laboratory studies the function and evolution of biological systems. She is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and received the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in 2010.

#3127

Ravishankar K. Iyer

#74583

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ravishankar K. Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a specialist in reliable and secure networks and systems.

#3128

Mik Kersten

#79795

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Mik Kersten is a Polish- Canadian computer specialist who created and leads the open-source Eclipse Mylyn project. Kersten invented the Task-Focused Interface technology underlying Mylyn while working on his PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. While completing his PhD, Kersten and his PhD supervisor, Gail C. Murphy, founded Tasktop Technologies, which provided productivity software built on the Mylyn technology, but now focuses on providing Value stream management software around Mik's book Project to Product.

#3129

Jean-Éric Pin

#48394

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jean-Éric Pin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to the algebraic automata theory and semigroup theory. He is a CNRS research director. Biography Pin earned his undergraduate degree from ENS Cachan in 1976 and his doctorate from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1981. Since 1988 he has been a CNRS research director at Paris Diderot University. In the years 1992–2006 he was a professor at École Polytechnique.

#3130

Christian Borgs

#51689

Overall Influence

Christian Borgs is a German-American computer scientist and mathematical physicist. Biography He is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was the deputy managing director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which he co-founded in 2008. Borgs' research includes developing the theory of graphons, computational analyses of the folk theorem , the planted clique, and the partition problem. For prior work on phase transitions, he was awarded the Karl Scheel Prize.

#3131

Donald Maxwell Parkin

#91840

Overall Influence

#3132

David C. Parkes

#60793

Overall Influence

David C. Parkes is a British-American computer scientist. He is the George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science and Co Faculty Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. From 2013–17, he was Area Dean for Computer Science. Parkes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery .

#3133

Bernhard Steffen

#88820

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Bernhard Steffen is a German computer scientist and professor at the TU Dortmund University, Germany. His research focuses on various facets of formal methods ranging from program analysis and verification, to workflow synthesis, to test-based modeling, and machine learning.

#3134

Thomas Sederberg

#68932

Overall Influence

Thomas W. Sederberg is the associate dean of the college of physical and mathematical sciences and professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His research involves computer graphics and computer aided design. He helped invent free-form deformation and T-splines.

#3135

Gregory D. Hager

Gregory D. Hager

#83795

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Gregory D. Hager is the Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University. His principal areas of research are collaborative and vision-based robotics, time-series analysis of image data, and medical applications of image analysis and robotics. Hager develops real-time computer vision algorithms for robotic systems. His work offers novel applications for automated surgical training, medical imaging and diagnostics, and computer-enhanced interventional medicine.

#3136

Jason Healey

#43203

Overall Influence

Jason Healey is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He is also a senior fellow with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, where he was the program's founding director. He has published many academic articles, essays, and books on the topic of cyber security and has advised on security measures for corporate, government, and military institutions. He has been identified as the first historian of cyber conflict.

#3137

Anthony Hill

#22854

Overall Influence

1930 - 2020 (90 years)

Anthony Hill was an English artist, painter and relief-maker, originally a member of the post-World War II British art movement termed the Constructionist Group whose work was essentially in the international constructivist tradition.

#3138

James Thorpe

#65734

Overall Influence

1915 - 2009 (94 years)

James Thorpe was the director of the Huntington Library, and a professor of English at Princeton University. He was the author of a biography of the library namesake, Henry Edwards Huntington. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1965. In 1976, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was later elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1982.

#3139

Daniel Cohen‐or

#92025

Overall Influence

#3140

Steven E. Kahn

#92035

Overall Influence

#3141

Xuerong Mao

#92038

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

#3142

John R Reynolds

#92040

Overall Influence

#3143

Otfried Cheong

#69345

Overall Influence

Otfried Cheong is a German computational geometer working in South Korea at KAIST. He is known as one of the authors of the widely used computational geometry textbook Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications and as the developer of Ipe, a vector graphics editor.

#3144

Markandeya

#3894

Overall Influence

Markandeya is a rishi featured in Hindu literature. He is the son of the sage Mrikanda and his wife, Manasvini. The Markandeya Purana, attributed to the sage, comprises a dialogue between Markandeya and a sage called Jaimini. A number of chapters in the Bhagavata Purana are dedicated to his conversations and prayers. He is also mentioned in the Mahabharata. Markandeya is venerated within all mainstream Hindu traditions.

#3145

Tore Dybå

#81520

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tore Dybå is a Norwegian scientist and software engineer in the fields of information systems and computer science. He has been a Chief Scientist at SINTEF ICT since 2003. Career Dybå received his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1987. In 2001 he received his Doctoral degree in Computer and Information Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

#3146

Ian Pratt

#67218

Overall Influence

Ian Pratt is a British computer scientist. He was the chief architect of the open-source Xen project, and chairman of Xen.org. He was also the founder of XenSource, the company behind Xen project. After XenSource was acquired by Citrix, he became vice president of Advanced Virtualization Products at this company, until leaving in 2011. He then became the CEO of Bromium. Bromium was eventually acquired by HP Inc in 2019 and he became the Global Head of Security at HP.

#3147

Elizabeth Mynatt

#86196

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Elizabeth D. "Beth" Mynatt is the Dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. She is former executive director of the Institute for People and Technology, director of the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and Regents' and Distinguished Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, all at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

#3148

Stephen F. King

#92114

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

#3149

Andrea Morello

#64406

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Andrea Morello is the Scientia Professor of quantum engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications at the University of New South Wales, and a Program Manager at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology . Morello is the head of the Fundamental Quantum Technologies Laboratory at UNSW.

#3150

Stafford Tavares

#66394

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Stafford Emanuel Tavares is a Canadian cryptographer, professor emeritus at Queen's University. His notable work includes the design of the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography workshop in 1994. Since 2003, SAC has included an invited lecture in his honor, the Stafford Tavares Lecture.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions