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,
#3701
Stéphane Bortzmeyer
#75259
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stéphane Bortzmeyer is a French engineer specialised in computer networks. Biography Stéphane Bortzmeyer is a research engineer at . He has worked mostly on DNS security. He is a member of Gitoyen and of the Board of France-IX, the main exchange for the Internet in France.
Go to Profile#3702
Yun Chan Kang
#103017
Overall Influence
#3703
Ashutosh Dutta
#34777
Overall Influence
Ashutosh Dutta is a computer scientist, engineer, academic, author, and an IEEE leader. He is currently a Senior Scientist, 5G Chief Strategist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, APL Sabbatical Fellow, Adjunct Faculty and ECE Chair for EP at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Chair of IEEE Industry Connection O-RAN Initiative and Co-Chair for IEEE Future Networks Initiative.
Go to Profile#3704
Martin Reck
#103018
Overall Influence
#3705
Jiannong Cao
#103025
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jiannong Cao is a computer scientist researching distributed computing, parallel computing, pervasive computing, mobile computing, and wireless networking. He is an IEEE fellow, the chair professor at Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was the head of Department of Computing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is also the director of PolyU Internet and Mobile Computing Lab.
Go to Profile#3706
George A. Mensah
#103032
Overall Influence
#3707
Alberto Briganti
#103053
Overall Influence
#3708
Keith Worden
#103112
Overall Influence
#3709
Pieter Mosterman
#78796
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Pieter Johannes Mosterman was Chief Research Scientist and Director of the MathWorks Advanced Research & Technology Office at MathWorks in Natick, Massachusetts. He also holds an Adjunct Professorship at the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His primary research interests are in Computer Automated Multiparadigm Modeling with principal applications in design automation, training systems, and fault detection, isolation, and reconfiguration.
Go to Profile#3710
Hugh Casson
#8499
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson was a British architect. He was also active as an interior designer, as an artist, and as a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 1976 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Academy.
Go to Profile#3711
Adam Wierman
#79865
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Adam Wierman is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on scheduling , heavy tails, green computing, queueing theory, and algorithmic game theory.
Go to Profile#3712
Jean-Marc Jézéquel
#47532
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Professor Jean-Marc Jézéquel is a French computer scientist. Professionally, Jean-Marc Jézéquel worked as a computer scientist at the University of Rennes 1, France. His research contributions have laid the foundations of the theory of Model-driven architecture. From January 2012 to December 2020, he was Director of IRISA and then Vice President of Informatics Europe.
Go to Profile#3713
Robert Bechtle
#28501
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.
Go to Profile#3714
Steve Ditko
#13467
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Stephen John Ditko was an American comics artist and writer best known for being co-creator of Marvel superhero Spider-Man and creator of Doctor Strange. He also made notable contributions to the character of Iron Man with the character's red and yellow design being revolutionized by Ditko.
Go to Profile#3715
Bernard Moret
#64364
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bernard M. E. Moret is a Swiss-American computer scientist, an emeritus professor of Computer Science at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He is known for his work in computational phylogenetics, and in particular for mathematics and methods for computing phylogenetic trees using genome rearrangement events.
Go to Profile#3716
Naoto Chatani
#103222
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#3717
Leon Golub
#12869
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Leon Golub was an American painter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, and his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively.
Go to Profile#3718
Kallol Ray Chaudhuri
#103234
Overall Influence
#3719
Sophie Calle
#7321
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like tendency to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.
Go to Profile#3720
Margaret Feldner
#63351
Overall Influence
Sr. Margaret Feldner, O.S.F., Ph.D., served as Quincy University's 21st president. Feldner assumed the post January 1, 2004. She was the first woman president appointed to the role at Quincy. On December 19, 2006, the university announced that Feldner had been excused from her duties following a vote of no confidence by the school's faculty, a move precipitated by a 30% decrease in freshmen enrollment over two years. Sr. Margaret earned the nickname "Head Nun" while occupying the office of President at Quincy University.
Go to Profile#3721
Robert J. Winchester
#103264
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
#3722
Andy Bechtolsheim
#74557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of September 2023, his net worth is $11.2 billion.
Go to Profile#3723
Fedor Fomin
#88297
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Fedor V. Fomin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Bergen. He is known for his work in algorithms and graph theory. He received his PhD in 1997 at St. Petersburg State University under Nikolai Nikolaevich Petrov.
Go to Profile#3724
Shmuel Sagiv
#89161
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mooly Sagiv is an Israeli computer scientist known for his work on static program analysis. He is currently Chair of Software Systems in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, and CEO of Certora, a startup company providing formal verification of smart contracts.
Go to Profile#3725
Solange Ghernaouti
#77544
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Solange Ghernaouti is a professor at the University of Lausanne and an international expert on cybersecurity and cyberdefence. She regularly collaborates with various United Nations, European and government institutions as well as with private corporations.
Go to Profile#3726
Silvio Savarese
#103346
Overall Influence
#3727
A. Richard Newton
#43816
Overall Influence
1951 - 2007 (56 years)
Arthur Richard Newton was the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Career Newton was educated at the University of Melbourne and received a BE in 1973 and MEng.Sci in 1975. He then went to Berkeley in 1975 to work on SPICE , a program initially developed by Larry Nagel and Donald Pederson to analyse and design complex electronic circuitry with speed and accuracy. It is claimed that nearly all electronic integrated circuits have been designed using SPICE or a derivative since the 1980s.
Go to Profile#3728
Radovan Kovacevic
#49630
Overall Influence
Radovan Kovacevic is a Serbian-American university professor. He is the director of the Southern Methodist University Research Center for Advanced Manufacturing. He holds several U.S. patents.
Go to Profile#3729
Francis Y. L. Chin
#63235
Overall Influence
Francis Yuk Lun Chin Academic career Chin graduated from the University of Toronto in 1972 and received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1976. Before his appointment in Hong Kong, he held a variety of teaching positions in a number of universities in the US and Canada.
Go to Profile#3730
Jan Lenica
#18759
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Jan Lenica was a Polish graphic designer and cartoonist. A graduate of the Architecture Department of Warsaw Polytechnic, Lenica became a poster illustrator and a collaborator on the early animation films of Walerian Borowczyk. From 1963 – 1986 he lived and worked in France, while from 1987 he lived and worked in Berlin. He was a professor of graphic, poster, animated cartoon for many years at German high schools and the first professor of the animation class at the University of Kassel, Germany, in 1979. He used cut-out stop motion animation in his numerous films, which included two feature...
Go to Profile#3731
Nicola Luigi Bragazzi
#103489
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
#3732
Gad Landau
#77523
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gad Menahem Landau is an Israeli computer scientist noted for his contributions to combinatorial pattern matching and string algorithms and is the founding department chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Haifa.
Go to Profile#3733
S. Peter Gary
#103506
Overall Influence
#3734
Richard F. Ericson
#23478
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Richard Ferdinand Ericson was an American organizational theorist, professor emeritus of management and director of the Interdisciplinary Systems and Cybernetics Project, Program of Policy Studies in Science and Technology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#3735
Olu Oguibe
#25833
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Olu Oguibe is a Nigerian-born American artist and academic. Professor of Art and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Oguibe is a senior fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is also an art historian, art curator, and leading contributor to post-colonial theory and new information technology studies. Oguibe is also known to be a well respected scholar and historian of contemporary African and African American art and was honoured with the State of Connecticut Gov...
Go to Profile#3736
Marie-Claude Gaudel
#67880
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marie-Claude Gaudel is a French computer scientist. She is a professor emerita at the University of Paris-Sud. She helped develop PLUSS language for software specifications and was involved in both theoretical and applied computer science. Gaudel is still active in professional societies.
Go to Profile#3737
Ken Coar
#62112
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ken Coar is an American software developer known for his participation in the creation of The Apache Software Foundation. Open source Coar has been active in open software projects, and lectures internationally about open development methodologies and distributed collaboration.
Go to Profile#3738
Grayson Perry
#5897
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Grayson Perry is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
Go to Profile#3739
Jean Ponce
#103666
Overall Influence
#3740
Jack Tu
#66559
Overall Influence
1965 - 2018 (53 years)
Jack Ven Tu was a Taiwanese-born Canadian cardiologist. Born in Taipei on 1 March 1965, he graduated from the University of Western Ontario Medical School, then obtained a M.Sc at the University of Toronto. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Harvard University, was titled Quality of Cardiac Surgical Care in Ontario, Canada. Upon earning his Ph.D in 1996, Tu began working for Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre while teaching at the University of Toronto. He was later named a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research at the University of Toronto and made a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Go to Profile#3741
Ina Wagner
#42185
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ina Wagner is an Austrian physicist, computer scientist and social scientist. She is an emeritus professor of computer science at TU Wien , where she was active from 1987 until 2011. Wagner completed a doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Vienna in 1972. In 1979 she received her habilitation in education sciences from the University of Klagenfurt, and in 1998 completed a second habilitation in "multidisciplinary design and computer-supported cooperative work" in Vienna. In 1987 she became the TU Wien's second ever female professor and the first to be appointed from outside the un...
Go to Profile#3742
Andrew H Paterson
#103693
Overall Influence
#3743
Thomas P Davis
#103717
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#3744
Moira Burke
#90924
Overall Influence
Moira Burke is an American computer scientist working in the field of human-computer interaction. She currently works as a data scientist for Facebook. Education Burke received her bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 2001 and her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 under the supervision of Robert E. Kraut.
Go to Profile#3745
Graham Kendall
#89157
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Graham Kendall, FORS, FBCS is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is currently the Provost and CEO of University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He is also a Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University.
Go to Profile#3746
Giampaolo Merlini
#103886
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#3747
Chris Rowen
#75141
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Chris Rowen is an American entrepreneur and technologist. Rowen is one of the founders of MIPS Computer Systems, Inc in 1984, of Tensilica Inc. in 1997 and of Babblelabs, Inc in 2017. Rowen was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for leadership in the development of microprocessors and reduced instruction set computers.
Go to Profile#3748
Anicia Peters
#74089
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Anicia Peters is a Namibian computer scientist specializing in human–computer interaction . She is the CEO of the National Commission of Research, Science and Technology . Early life and education Peters was born in Rehoboth, Namibia, and attended Origo Primary School. Her family moved to the Khomasdal suburb of Windhoek when she was about 8; there, she attended M.H. Greeff Primary School and later Concordia College.
Go to Profile#3749
Moyra Davey
#34144
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Moyra Davey is an artist based in New York City. Davey works across photography, video, and writing. Early life Moyra Davey was born in 1958 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She grew up in Montreal, where she studied photography and received a BFA from Concordia University in 1982. She then achieved an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. In 1989, she attended The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Go to Profile#3750
Peter M. Atkinson
#103940
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
