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,
#3301
Martin Puryear
#14273
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Martin L. Puryear is an American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in wood and bronze, among other media, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist's Liberty/Libertà exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Go to Profile#3302
Nikolaos Mavridis
#66916
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Nikolaos Mavridis is the founder and director of the Interactive Robots and Media Lab , and a PhD graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology He is also an assistant professor of research at the Computer Science department, New York University Poly, and adjunct researcher at NCSR Demokritos. Before his PhD, he was awarded an M.Sc. from the University of California Los Angeles, and a M. Eng. from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His research interests include human–robot interaction, and especially verbal and non-verbal communication with robots, artificial intelligence, ...
Go to Profile#3303
Kristina Lerman
#87413
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kristina Lerman is an American network scientist whose research concerns the spread of information on social networks, and fairness in machine learning. She is a research professor at the University of Southern California, in the Computer Science Department of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and a principal scientist in the Information Sciences Institute.
Go to Profile#3304
Jaishankar Menon
#64330
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jaishankar Menon is an Indian-American computer scientist and researcher. Life and career Menon joined IBM's research team in San Jose, California, in 1982, where he developed RAID technology. Awards IBM Fellow, 2001IEEE FellowWinner of the 2002 IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award2006 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems AwardIBM Master Inventor
Go to Profile#3305
Xiaogang Qu
#95921
Overall Influence
#3306
Petros Drineas
#76322
Overall Influence
Petros Drineas is a Greek-American computer scientist known for his contributions to the theory of data science and the development of Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra . In a 2012 paper Michael W. Mahoney and Drineas introduced CUR matrix approximation for improved big data analysis. Drineas' work on the application of principal component analysis to population genetics disproved the long-standing hypothesis that the Minoan civilization had North African origins.
Go to Profile#3307
Judith Donath
#19779
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Judith Stefania Donath is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.
Go to Profile#3308
Bilal U. Haq
#22914
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Bilal U. Haq is a Pakistani-American geoscientist who is currently affiliated with and divides his time between the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Sorbonne University's Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris, France. He is best known for his work on the Phanerozoic sea-level fluctuations and eustatic curves that are widely used in the academia and industry as the basis for global stratigraphy and in exploration geology. He is a laureate of the Prestwich Prize for geosciences from France.
Go to Profile#3309
Martin Heimann
#95993
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#3310
Roberto Ferrari
#96005
Overall Influence
#3311
Jang-Kyo Kim
#96014
Overall Influence
#3312
Oded Regev
#64541
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Oded Regev is an Israeli-American theoretical computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor of computer science at the Courant institute at New York University. He is best known for his work in lattice-based cryptography, and in particular for introducing the learning with errors problem.
Go to Profile#3313
Yuying Li
#86621
Overall Influence
Yuying Li is a Chinese-Canadian professor of computer science in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her research interests include mathematical optimization, scientific computing, data mining, and tail risk in computational finance.
Go to Profile#3314
Amnon Sonnenberg
#96028
Overall Influence
#3315
Monique Teillaud
#72579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Monique Teillaud is a French researcher in computational geometry at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Nancy, France. She moved to Nancy in 2014 from a different INRIA center in Sophia Antipolis, where she was one of the developers of CGAL, a software library of computational geometry algorithms.
Go to Profile#3316
Carl Potts
#15698
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Carl Potts is an American comics artist, writer, teacher, and editor best known for creating the series Alien Legion for the Marvel Comics imprint Epic Comics. Early life Born in Oakland, California, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Hawaii, Potts received an associate degree in commercial art from Chabot College in Hayward, California. He received his bachelor's degree in creative writing and editing from SUNY – Empire State College.
Go to Profile#3317
Andrew Wyeth
#3836
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. The son of N. C. Wyeth and father of Jamie Wyeth, he was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. James H. Duff explores the art and lives of the three men in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade inspired him intellectually and artistically.
Go to Profile#3318
Desney Tan
#80849
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Desney Tan is vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures, a cross-organizational incubation group that serves as Microsoft's Health and Life Science "moonshot factory". He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, serves on the Board of Directors for ResMed , is senior advisor and chief technologist for Seattle-based life science incubator IntuitiveX, advises multiple startup companies , and is an active startup and real estate investor.
Go to Profile#3319
Leon van der Torre
#48080
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Leendert van der Torre is a professor of computer science at the University of Luxembourg and head of the Individual and Collective Reasoning group, part of the Computer Science and Communication Research Unit. Leon van der Torre is a prolific researcher in deontic logic and multi-agent systems, a member of the Ethics Advisory Committee of the University of Luxembourg and founder of the CSC Robotic research laboratory. Since March 2016 he is the head of the Computer Science and Communication Research Unit.
Go to Profile#3320
Leif Wide
#96111
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
#3321
Kannan Ramchandran
#96121
Overall Influence
#3322
Ian David Brown
#96161
Overall Influence
#3323
Stefan Schaal
#96175
Overall Influence
#3324
Murray Grossman
#96179
Overall Influence
#3325
Gary Williamson
#96212
Overall Influence
#3326
Tao Mei
#96213
Overall Influence
#3327
Ruth Aylett
#59819
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ruth S. Aylett is a British author, computer scientist, professor, poet, and political activist. She is a professor of computer science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she specialises in affective computing, social computing, software agents, and human–robot interaction.
Go to Profile#3328
Nadia Magnenat‐thalmann
#96222
Overall Influence
#3329
Yury Matveyevich Bayakovsky
#66647
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Yury Matveyevich Bayakovsky was a Soviet and Russian scientist in the field of Computer graphics, Candidate of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1928 in the Lobva. In 1960 he graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, Faculty of Automation and Computer Engineering. After graduation I went to work at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the position of computer engineer "M-20".
Go to Profile#3330
Hideaki Nagase
#96279
Overall Influence
#3331
Werner Zorn
#57051
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Werner Zorn is a German computer scientist and Internet pioneer. From 2001 to 2007, he was a professor of communication systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, previously working at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology as the head of a computer center and a professor.
Go to Profile#3332
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
#39835
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Harald Tveit Alvestrand is a Norwegian computer scientist. He was chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force from 2001 until 2005, succeeding Fred Baker. Within the IETF, Alvestrand was earlier the chair of the Areas for Applications from 1995 until 1997, and of Operations and Management in 1998.
Go to Profile#3333
Yuriy Polyakov
#59165
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Yuriy Sergeyevich Polyakov is a Russian-American scientist at Duality Technologies. He is best known for his work in cryptography , chemical engineering , and physics . Biography Polyakov wrote his first scientific paper when he was a freshman student at the Moscow State University of Environmental Engineering. In April 1998, he moved to the United States. Polyakov received a Bachelor of Science in computer information systems summa cum laude from Excelsior College in 2002 and Master of Science in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2003, where he carried out scientific research in computer science and computational mathematics.
Go to Profile#3334
William James Nelson
#96345
Overall Influence
#3335
Victor M. Markowitz
#66841
Overall Influence
Victor M. Markowitz is chief informatics officer and associate director at DOE Joint Genome Institute , and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Biological Data Management and Technology Center.
Go to Profile#3336
Jiang He
#96392
Overall Influence
#3337
Greet Van den Berghe
#91760
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Greet Van den Berghe is an intensive care specialist and since 2002 head of the Department of Intensive Care of the University Hospital of Leuven and head of the Laboratory of Intensive Care Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven.
Go to Profile#3338
Bob Löwenberg
#92592
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bob Löwenberg is a clinical hematologist/investigator. He is Professor of Hematology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Education He graduated as MD at the University of Groningen , completed a PhD in Experimental Hematology at Erasmus University and Radiobiological Institute TNO, Rijswijk under the supervisorship of Dirk W. van Bekkum and completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Hematology, University Hospital Rotterdam, .
Go to Profile#3339
Carlo Adamo
#96430
Overall Influence
#3340
David Maher
#47709
Overall Influence
David Maher is a computer scientist and the chief technology officer and executive vice president of Intertrust Technologies. He is also a Bell Labs Fellow and was chief architect for AT&T's STU-III secure voice, data and video products used by the White House and the United States Department of Defense.
Go to Profile#3341
Jaan Priisalu
#55461
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jaan Priisalu is an Estonian cyber security official. 2011–2015, he was the Director General of Estonian Information System Authority . In 2014, he was awarded by Order of the White Star, III class.
Go to Profile#3342
John F Thompson
#96486
Overall Influence
#3343
Donald J. Patterson
#76790
Overall Influence
Donald J. Patterson is a professor of computer science at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is an expert on topics including cryptocurrency, health technology, and technology in the context of civilizational collapse.
Go to Profile#3344
Leif Hertz
#96505
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
#3345
Permanand Mohan
#32110
Overall Influence
Permanand Mohan is a senior Computer Science lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of the West Indies, an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of the West Indies. He is the Chief Examiner for the Caribbean Examinations Council’s CAPE Examinations in Computer Science.
Go to Profile#3346
Ursula von Rydingsvard
#28066
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Go to Profile#3347
Cecilia Mascolo
#83398
Overall Influence
Cecilia Mascolo is a Professor of Mobile Systems at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Education Mascolo received her Bachelors, Masters and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna, Italy. Her PhD, completed in 2001, was supervised by .
Go to Profile#3348
Eugene J. Keogh Keogh
#96577
Overall Influence
#3349
Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt
#96609
Overall Influence
#3350
Carme Torras
#74618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Carme Torras Genís is a Spanish computer scientist who has contributed to research on robotics and artificial intelligence. A member of Academia Europaea since 2010, she writes technical works in English and fiction in Catalan.
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