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,
#351
Douglas Crockford
#4733
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer who is involved in the development of the JavaScript language. He specified the data format JSON , and has developed various JavaScript related tools such as the static code analyzer JSLint and minifier JSMin. He wrote the book JavaScript: The Good Parts, published in 2008, followed by How JavaScript Works in 2018. He was a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal until 2019, and is also a writer and speaker on JavaScript, JSON, and related web technologies.
Go to Profile#352
Edmund M. Clarke
#3820
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Edmund Melson Clarke, Jr. was an American computer scientist and academic noted for developing model checking, a method for formally verifying hardware and software designs. He was the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Clarke, along with E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis, received the 2007 ACM Turing Award.
Go to Profile#353
Jan van Leeuwen
#5905
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jan van Leeuwen is a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus professor of computer science at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University. Education and career Van Leeuwen completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics at Utrecht University in 1967 and received a PhD in mathematics in 1972 from the same institution under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen. After postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty positions at SUNY at Buffalo and the Pennsylvania State University, he returned to Utrecht as a faculty member in 1977. He was head of his department from 1977 to 1983, and again from 1991 to 1994, and dean from 1994 to 2009.
Go to Profile#354
Erich Gamma
#6667
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Erich Gamma is a Swiss computer scientist and one of the four co-authors of the software engineering textbook, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Gamma is an expert in the Eclipse Java development editor, and with Kent Beck he co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework which helped create Test-Driven Development and influenced the whole software industry. He also led the design of the Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools , and worked on the IBM Rational Jazz project.
Go to Profile#355
John F. Sowa
#3104
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Florian Sowa is an American computer scientist, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer design, and the inventor of conceptual graphs. Biography Sowa received a BS in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1966, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1999 with a dissertation titled "Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations".
Go to Profile#356
Mike Paterson
#6394
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#357
Paul Cockshott
#2541
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Paul Cockshott is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics. He is a Reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993 he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientific socialism, most notably Towards a New Socialism and How the World Works.
Go to Profile#358
Andrew Tridgell
#5620
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell is an Australian computer programmer. He is the author of and a contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm. He has analysed complex proprietary protocols and algorithms, to allow compatible free and open source software implementations.
Go to Profile#359
Alex Krizhevsky
#6597
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Alex Krizhevsky is a Ukrainian-born Canadian computer scientist most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. Shortly after having won the ImageNet challenge in 2012 with AlexNet, he and his colleagues sold their startup, DNN Research Inc., to Google. Krizhevsky left Google in September 2017 after losing interest in the work, to work at the company Dessa in support of new deep-learning techniques. Many of his numerous papers on machine learning and computer vision are frequently cited by other researchers. He is the creator of the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.
Go to Profile#360
Tom Gruber
#3222
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Thomas Robert Gruber is an American computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing and collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology engineering and is well known for his definition of ontologies in the context of artificial intelligence.
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Alan Cooper
#3380
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Alan Cooper is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of ...
Go to Profile#362
Carl Kesselman
#6288
Overall Influence
Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. He and Foster are winners of the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal for their grid work. He is institute fellow at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and a professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, at the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#363
Trygve Reenskaug
#6252
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Trygve Mikkjel Heyerdahl Reenskaug is a Norwegian computer scientist and professor emeritus of the University of Oslo. He formulated the model–view–controller pattern for graphical user interface software design in 1979 while visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center . His first major software project, "Autokon," produced a successful computer-aided design – computer-aided manufacturing program which was first used in 1963, and continued in use by shipyards worldwide for more than 30 years.
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Manfred K. Warmuth
#6999
Overall Influence
Manfred Klaus Warmuth is a computer scientist known for his pioneering research in computational learning theory. He is a Distinguished Professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Brad A. Myers
#6794
Overall Influence
Brad Allan Myers is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 1987, under Bill Buxton.
Go to Profile#366
Thad Starner
#5496
Overall Influence
Thad Eugene Starner is a founder and director of the Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, where he is a full professor. He is a pioneer of wearable computing as well as human-computer interaction, augmented environments, and pattern recognition. Starner is a strong advocate of continuous-access, everyday-use systems, and has worn his own customized wearable computer continuously since 1993. His work has touched on handwriting and sign-language analysis, intelligent agents and augmented realities. He also helped found Charmed Technology.
Go to Profile#367
Richard Helm
#7533
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Richard Helm is one of the "Gang of Four" who wrote the influential Design Patterns book. In 2006 he was awarded the Dahl–Nygaard Prize for his contributions to the state of the art embodied in that book.
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Jamie Zawinski
#3990
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jamie Werner Zawinski , commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.
Go to Profile#369
Gérard Huet
#6099
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gérard Pierre Huet is a French computer scientist, linguist and mathematician. He is senior research director at INRIA and mostly known for his major and seminal contributions to type theory, programming language theory and to the theory of computation.
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Udi Manber
#5047
Overall Influence
Udi Manber is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. After a career in engineering and management, he worked on medical research. Education He earned both his bachelor's degree in 1975 in mathematics and his master's degree in 1978 from the Technion in Israel. At the University of Washington, he earned another master's degree in 1981 and his PhD in computer science in 1982.
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Bernhard Schölkopf
#5724
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Bernhard Schölkopf is a German computer scientist known for his work in machine learning, especially on kernel methods and causality. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he heads the Department of Empirical Inference. He is also an affiliated professor at ETH Zürich, honorary professor at the University of Tübingen and the Technical University Berlin, and chairman of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems .
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Jeff Bonwick
#6913
Overall Influence
Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the ZFS file system, which was used in Oracle Corporation's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto, Inc. Bonwick is also the inventor of slab allocation, which is used in many operating systems including MacOS and Linux, and the LZJB compression algorithm.
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Yoram Moses
#5743
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Yoram Moses is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Yoram Moses received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1986. Moses is a co-author of the book Reasoning About Knowledge, and is a winner of the 1997 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
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Alan Emtage
#6259
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Alan Emtage is a Bajan-Canadian computer scientist who conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web Internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives. It is widely considered the world's first Internet search engine.
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Russ Salakhutdinov
#8141
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ruslan "Russ" Salakhutdinov is a Canadian researcher of Tatar origin working in the field of artificial intelligence. He specializes in deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, and large-scale optimization.
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Henry Fuchs
#5619
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Henry Fuchs is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Computing Machinery and the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He is also an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering.
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Richard E. Ladner
#5289
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Richard Emil Ladner is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to both theoretical computer science and assistive technology. Ladner is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
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John Guttag
#4229
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
John Vogel Guttag is an American computer scientist, professor, and former head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Education and career John Guttag was raised in Larchmont, New York, the son of Irwin Guttag and Marjorie Vogel Guttag.
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László Babai
#2852
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
László "Laci" Babai is a Hungarian professor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, and finite groups, with an emphasis on the interactions between these fields.
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Robert Schapire
#8186
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Robert Elias Schapire is an American computer scientist, former David M. Siegel '83 Professor in the computer science department at Princeton University, and has recently moved to Microsoft Research. His primary specialty is theoretical and applied machine learning.
Go to Profile#381
Michael A. Jackson
#6650
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Michael Anthony Jackson is a British computer scientist, and independent computing consultant in London, England. He is also a visiting research professor at the Open University in the UK. Biography Born in Birmingham to Montagu M. Jackson and Bertha Jackson, Jackson was educated at Harrow School in Harrow, London, England. There he was taught by Christopher Strachey and wrote his first program under Strachey's guidance. From 1954 to 1958, he studied classics at Merton College, Oxford; a fellow student, two years ahead of him, was C. A. R. Hoare. They shared an interest in logic, which was ...
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Daniel G. Bobrow
#6673
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Daniel Gureasko Bobrow was an American computer scientist who created an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD., worked at BBN Technologies , then was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center.
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Yee Whye Teh
#6974
Overall Influence
Yee-Whye Teh is a professor of statistical machine learning in the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford. Prior to 2012 he was a reader at the Gatsby Charitable Foundation computational neuroscience unit at University College London. His work is primarily in machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics and computer science.
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Alick Glennie
#6765
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Alick Edwards Glennie was a British computer scientist, most famous for having developed Autocode, which many people regard as the first ever computer compiler. Glennie worked with Alan Turing on several projects, including the Manchester Mark 1.
Go to Profile#385
Scott Ambler
#4947
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant and author. He is an author of books about the Disciplined Agile Delivery toolkit, the Unified process, Agile software development, the Unified Modeling Language, and Capability Maturity Model development.
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Yuri Gurevich
#4888
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Yuri Gurevich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is an American computer scientist and mathematician and the inventor of abstract state machines. Gurevich was born and educated in the Soviet Union. He taught mathematics there and then in Israel before moving to the United States in 1982. The best-known work of his Soviet period is on the classical decision problem. In Israel, Gurevich worked with Saharon Shelah on monadic second-order theories. The Forgetful Determinacy Theorem of Gurevich–Harrington is of that period as well.
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Jürg Gutknecht
#6620
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jürg Gutknecht is a Swiss computer scientist. He developed, with Niklaus Wirth, the programming language Oberon and the corresponding operating system Oberon. Biography Jürg Gutknecht was full professor in the computer science department at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule until April 2014.
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Shmuel Winograd
#5867
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Shmuel Winograd was an Israeli-American computer scientist, noted for his contributions to computational complexity. He has proved several major results regarding the computational aspects of arithmetic; his contributions include the Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm and an algorithm for the fast Fourier transform which transforms it into a problem of computing convolutions which can be solved with another Winograd's algorithm.
Go to Profile#389
Martin Richards
#6529
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Martin Richards is a British computer scientist known for his development of the BCPL programming language which is both part of early research into portable software, and the ancestor of the B programming language invented by Ken Thompson in early versions of Unix and which Dennis Ritchie in turn used as the basis of his widely used C programming language.
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Xavier Leroy
#7893
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the OCaml system. He is Professor of software science at Collège de France. Before his appointment at Collège de France in 2018, he was senior scientist at the French government research institution Inria.
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Maurice Nivat
#6587
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Maurice Paul Nivat was a French computer scientist. His research in computer science spanned the areas of formal languages, programming language semantics, and discrete geometry. A 2006 citation for an honorary doctorate called Nivat one of the fathers of theoretical computer science. He was a professor at the University Paris Diderot until 2001.
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David Chaum
#2926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", a...
Go to Profile#393
Stephen J. Mellor
#5019
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Stephen J. Mellor is an American computer scientist, developer of the Ward–Mellor method for real-time computing, the Shlaer–Mellor method, and Executable UML, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.
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Steve Omohundro
#6458
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Stephen Malvern Omohundro is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.
Go to Profile#395
Les Earnest
#6135
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Lester Donald Earnest is an American computer scientist. Education and career After receiving his B.S. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, he began his career as a computer programmer in 1954 during a stint as a U.S. Navy Aviation Electronics Officer & Digital Computer Project Officer at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. In 1956, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Lincoln Laboratory to help design the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense system.
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Anant Agarwal
#4279
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Anant Agarwal is an Indian computer architecture researcher. He is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he led the development of Alewife, an early cache coherent multiprocessor, and also has served as director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the founder and CTO of Tilera, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on scalable multicore embedded processor design. He also serves as the CEO of edX, a joint partnership between MIT and Harvard University that offers free online learni...
Go to Profile#397
Sartaj Sahni
#6397
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Professor Sartaj Kumar Sahni is a computer scientist based in the United States, and is one of the pioneers in the field of data structures. He is a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida.
Go to Profile#398
Shriram Krishnamurthi
#7835
Overall Influence
Shriram Krishnamurthi is a computer scientist, currently a professor of computer science at Brown University and a member of the core development group for the Racket programming languages, responsible for creation of software packages including the Debugger, the FrTime package, and the networking library. Since 2006, Krishnamurthi has been a leading contributor to the Bootstrap curriculum, a project to integrate computer science education into grades 6–12.
Go to Profile#399
Michael Burrows
#6186
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michael Burrows, FRS is a British computer scientist and the creator of the Burrows–Wheeler transform, currently working for Google. Born in Britain, as of 2018 he lives in the United States, although he remains a British citizen.
Go to Profile#400
Luca Maria Gambardella
#6354
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Luca Maria Gambardella is an Italian computer scientist and author. He is the former director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Manno, in the Ticino canton of Switzerland.
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