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,
#3251
K. Mani Chandy
#94881
Overall Influence
#3252
Ian Milsom
#94883
Overall Influence
#3253
Stanley B. Lippman
#91828
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Stanley B. Lippman was a computer scientist and author. He is most widely known as an author of the C++ Primer book, which is currently published as 5th edition. Lippman has also authored the book Inside the C++ Object Model. He worked with Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Laboratories during early stages of C++ development. In 2001, Lippman became an architect for Visual C++. In 2007, he joined Emergent Game Technologies. He then worked for NASA, Pixar and at the time of his death was working at 2kQubits according to his LinkedIn page.
Go to Profile#3254
Scott C. Weaver
#94965
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Scott C. Weaver is an American virologist who is the research director of Galveston National Laboratory. External links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kMhCowCfg
Go to Profile#3255
Jyh-shing Roger Jang
#94977
Overall Influence
#3256
Andrea Grimes Parker
#26732
Overall Influence
Andrea Grimes Parker is an American computer scientist, researcher, and Associate Professor, known for her interdisciplinary study of human computer interaction and personal health informatics. Parker is currently an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing. She also currently serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
Go to Profile#3257
Ernesto Canalis
#94986
Overall Influence
#3258
Allan Bradley
#95010
Overall Influence
#3259
Mohan Manubhai Trivedi
#95024
Overall Influence
#3260
Michal Aharon
#70217
Overall Influence
Michal Aharon is an Israeli computer scientist known for her research on sparse dictionary learning, image denoising, and the K-SVD algorithm in machine learning. She is a researcher on advertisement ranking for Yahoo! in Haifa.
Go to Profile#3261
Hatsuo Ishida
#95042
Overall Influence
#3262
Yoshihiko Maehara
#95044
Overall Influence
#3263
Andrew Pickles
#92768
Overall Influence
Andrew Richard Pickles is an English biostatistician and Professor of Biostatistics and Psychological Methods in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2009. He became a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health Research in 2018 and was elected to the British Academy in 2020.
Go to Profile#3264
Stefano Ceri
#84807
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stefano Ceri is an Italian computer engineer and professor of database management at Politecnico di Milano. He has been visiting professor at Stanford University between 1983 and 1990, and received the ACM SIGMOD Edward Codd Innovations Award in 2013.
Go to Profile#3265
Andrew Sih
#95114
Overall Influence
#3266
Robert King Brayton
#95168
Overall Influence
#3267
Luay Nakhleh
#48995
Overall Influence
Luay K. Nakhleh : لؤي نخله; born May 8, 1974 Biography Nakhleh was born on May 8, 1974, to a Christian, Palestinian family in Israel. He currently lives with his Japanese wife and two children in Texas, and holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
Go to Profile#3268
Jiaya Jia
#95217
Overall Influence
#3269
Marc Stevens
#80126
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Dr. ir. Marc Stevens is a cryptology researcher most known for his work on cryptographic hash collisions and for the creation of the chosen-prefix hash collision tool HashClash as part of his master's degree thesis. He first gained international attention for his work with Alexander Sotirov, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger in creating a rogue SSL certificate which was presented in 2008 during the 25th annual Chaos Communication Congress warning of the dangers of using the MD5 hash function in issuing SSL certificates. Several years later in 2012...
Go to Profile#3270
Nicu Sebe
#95248
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
#3271
Paola Velardi
#82465
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paola Velardi is a full professor of computer science at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Her research encompasses natural language processing, machine learning, business intelligence and semantic web, web information extraction in particular. Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database "100esperte.it" . This online, open database champions the recognition of top-rated female scientists in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics areas.
Go to Profile#3272
Wenjing Lou
#91121
Overall Influence
Wenjing Lou, a professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Falls Church, Virginia campus since 2011, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to information and network security.
Go to Profile#3273
Tandy Warnow
#44604
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Tandy Warnow is an American computer scientist and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is known for her work on the reconstruction of evolutionary trees, both in biology and in historical linguistics, and also for multiple sequence alignment methods.
Go to Profile#3274
Rasim Alguliyev
#59515
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Rasim Mahammad Alguliyev — doctor of technical sciences, full member of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences . Vice-president of ANAS, director-general of the Institute of Information Technology of ANAS.
Go to Profile#3275
Richard Hunt
#9964
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Richard Hunt is an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the port of Savannah, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor in prominent locations in 24...
Go to Profile#3276
Cathy Price
#86914
Overall Influence
Catherine J. "Cathy" Price is a British neuroscientist and academic. She is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
Go to Profile#3277
Douglas Van Houweling
#59277
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Doug Van Houweling is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He is best known for his contributions to the development and deployment of the Internet. For these accomplishments, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. He is also the recipient of the EDUCAUSE 2002 Excellence in Leadership Award, the Iowa State University John V. Atanasoff Discovery Award, the Indiana University Thomas Hart Benton Mural Medallion, and an honorary Doctor of Science from Indiana University in May, 2017. Van Houweling was the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation from 2010 to 2014.
Go to Profile#3278
Giorgio Bernardi
#95346
Overall Influence
#3279
Lionel Briand
#93992
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lionel Claude Briand, born in Paris, France, on November 21, 1965, is a software engineer, and professor at the University of Ottawa and University of Luxembourg. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Canada Research Chair in Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance and a European Research Council Advanced grantee. His research foci are testing, verification, and validation of software systems; applying machine learning and evolutionary computation to software engineering; and software quality assurance, among others. He was vice-director of the University of Luxembourg's SnT - Interdisciplinary Ce...
Go to Profile#3280
Tongwen Chen
#95381
Overall Influence
#3281
Reza Zadeh
#37050
Overall Influence
Reza Zadeh is an American-Canadian-Iranian computer scientist and technology executive working on machine learning. He is adjunct professor at Stanford University and CEO of Matroid. He has served on the technical advisory boards of Databricks and Microsoft. His work focuses on machine learning, distributed computing, and discrete applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#3282
Shuchi Chawla
#78351
Overall Influence
Shuchi Chawla is an Indian computer scientist who works in the design and analysis of algorithms, and is known for her research on correlation clustering, information privacy, mechanism design, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, and algorithmic bias. She works as a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#3283
Stefan Szeider
#85905
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Stefan Szeider is an Austrian computer scientist who works on the areas of algorithms, computational complexity, theoretical computer science, and more specifically on propositional satisfiability, constraint satisfaction problems, and parameterised complexity. He is a full professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology , the head of the Algorithms and Complexity Group, and co-chair of the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms of TU Wien.
Go to Profile#3284
Martha Palmer
#64962
Overall Influence
Martha Palmer is an American computer scientist. She is best known for her work on verb semantics, and for the creation of ontological resources such as PropBank and VerbNet. Education Palmer received a Master of Arts in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin in 1976, advised by Robert Simmons.
Go to Profile#3285
Eric Widmer
#19153
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dr. Eric Widmer is an American scholar and educator. He was born in Lebanon where his American mother was on the faculty of the American University in Beirut. He was educated at Deerfield, Williams, and Harvard. After finishing his Ph.D, he joined the faculty at Brown teaching Chinese History and would then go on to spend much of his career there as a dean. He then served as Deerfield Academy's 54th Headmaster from 1994 to 2006, and was succeeded in that post by Margarita O'Byrne Curtis. He left the school to assume the position of founding headmaster at King's Academy in Madaba, Jordan, which began its first academic year in fall 2007.
Go to Profile#3286
Steve Wozniak
#38529
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Gary Wozniak , also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American technology entrepreneur, electrical engineer, computer scientist, computer programmer, philanthropist, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his business partner Steve Jobs, which later became the world's largest technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
Go to Profile#3287
Robert Everett
#32667
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Robert Rivers Everett was an American computer scientist. He was an honorary board member of the MITRE Corporation. He was born in Yonkers, New York. In 1945 he worked with Jay Forrester on the Whirlwind project, one of the first real time electronic computers. In 1958 he was a founding member of the MITRE Corporation, and was its president from 1969 to 1986.
Go to Profile#3288
Robert Gilbert
#68026
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Goulston Gilbert is a polymer chemist whose most significant contributions have been in the field of emulsion polymerisation. In 1970, he gained his PhD from the Australian National University, and worked at the University of Sydney from then until 2006. In 1982, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute; in 1994, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 1992, he was appointed full professor, and in 1999 he started the Key Centre for Polymer Colloids, funded by the Australian Research Council, the University and industry. He has served i...
Go to Profile#3289
Oscar Castillo
#95551
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#3290
Tsuneo Tamagawa
#11895
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Tsuneo Tamagawa was a mathematician. He worked on the arithmetic of classical groups. Tamagawa received his PhD in 1954 at the University of Tokyo under Shōkichi Iyanaga. Tamagawa was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1955/6, 1958, and 1970. He has been on the Yale University faculty since 1963, and became emeritus in 1996.
Go to Profile#3291
Chen Change Loy
#95566
Overall Influence
#3292
Andrew W. Young
#95582
Overall Influence
#3293
N'irwan Ansari
#95599
Overall Influence
#3294
Ian Bayley
#52484
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ian Bayley is a British quiz player who has won several medals in quizzing, both in singles and as a member of a team. He won the European Championships three times straight from 2007 to 2009 with "Broken Hearts" , and in 2004 in the England national team. With his partner Pat Gibson he also won the European pair championships in 2005 and the IQA British Quiz Championship in 2006. In individual competitions he won the British Championship in 2001 to take the Mark Bytheway trophy.
Go to Profile#3295
Joyce C. H. Liu
#24530
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joyce Chi-Hui Liu is Professor of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Liu is the Chair of the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies that she founded in 2002. She is also the director of the International Center for Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan.
Go to Profile#3296
Gonzalo Frasca
#45654
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Gonzalo Frasca is a game designer and academic researcher focusing on serious and political videogames. His blog, Ludology.org, was cited by NBC News as a popular designation for academic researchers studying video games. For many years, Frasca also co-published Watercoolergames with Ian Bogost, a blog about serious games.
Go to Profile#3297
Mark Amerika
#22935
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mark Amerika is an American artist, theorist, novelist and professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts program at Brown University, where he received his MFA in creative writing in 1997.
Go to Profile#3298
Nina Amenta
#80992
Overall Influence
Annamaria Beatrice "Nina" Amenta is an American computer scientist who works as the Tim Bucher Family Professor of Computer Science and the chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in computational geometry and computer graphics, and is particularly known for her research in reconstructing surfaces from scattered data points.
Go to Profile#3299
Barry H.V. Topping
#79816
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Barry H.V. Topping FIMA is a British authority on computational mechanics. He was Professor of Computational Mechanics at the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University where his work was mainly concerned with parallel computing, genetic algorithms, neural networks, finite element methods and fluid-structure interaction. He is now Emeritus Professor at Heriot-Watt University and an Honorary Professor at the University of Pécs in Hungary.
Go to Profile#3300
In So Kweon
#95762
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
