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,
#3801
Jeff Easley
#11721
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jeff Easley is an oil painter who creates fantasy artwork for role-playing games, comics, and magazines, as well as non-fantasy commercial art. Early life Easley was born in Nicholasville, Kentucky in 1954. He spent time drawing as a child, particularly creatures such as ghosts and monsters. "I watched lots of monster movies on the late show, and built every monster model kit I could get my hands on," he said. He attended high school in Nicholasville, and then earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Murray State University in Kentucky.
Go to Profile#3802
David Hanson
#76987
Overall Influence
David R. Hanson is a software engineer who worked at Google until he retired in January 2012, working in programming languages, compilers, software tools, and programming environments. Before joining Google, he was with Microsoft Research, Princeton, University of Arizona, and Yale. He has written many journal and conference papers and two books: A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation with Christopher Fraser, which describes lcc, a widely used compiler for Standard C, and C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software.
Go to Profile#3803
Lourdes Agapito
#76449
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Lourdes de Agapito Vicente is the Professor of 3D Vision in the department of computer science at University College London where she leads a research group with a focus on 3D dynamic scene understanding from video. Agapito is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the British Machine Vision Association. Furthermore, she is the co-founder of the software company Synthesia.
Go to Profile#3804
Akihiko Yoshimura
#104819
Overall Influence
#3805
Per Davidsson
#90873
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Per Davidsson is an entrepreneurship professor that holds Swedish and Australian citizenship. He is currently a professor of entrepreneurship at Jönköping International Business School and Queensland University of Technology Business School where he served as the Talbot Family Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship and Founding Director of the Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research during 2010–2018. He serves on the editorial boards for several journals and has participated in many research programs including the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence. On March 22...
Go to Profile#3806
Leon Shklar
#85952
Overall Influence
Leon Shklar had been a part time lecturer in the computer science department at Rutgers University, where he taught a senior level course in advanced web application development. He is also the co-author of the popular textbook Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices. He was formerly Head of Technology at Thomson Reuters Media. Prior to that he was the director of software development at Dow Jones.
Go to Profile#3807
Vineet Bafna
#76448
Overall Influence
Vineet Bafna is an Indian bioinformatician and professor of computer science and director of bioinformatics program at University of California, San Diego. He was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2019 for outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. He has also been a member of the Research in Computational Molecular Biology conference steering committee.
Go to Profile#3808
Peter D. Kwong
#104893
Overall Influence
#3809
Tinne Tuytelaars
#104923
Overall Influence
#3810
Krishnendu Chatterjee
#79642
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Krishnendu Chatterjee is an Indian computer scientist who is currently a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria . He is known for his contributions to theoretical computer science, especially in algorithmic game theory, evolutionary game theory, logics and automata theory.
Go to Profile#3811
Ragunathan Rajkumar
#80303
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ragunathan "Raj" Rajkumar is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also affiliated with the Robotics Institute and the Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as the Director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute and as the Director of the Mobility21 USDOT National University Transportation Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also leads the General Motors-CMU Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Laboratory ,...
Go to Profile#3812
Eugene Fasullo
#47257
Overall Influence
Eugene Fasullo was the Chief Engineer of Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He graduated with BS from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute MS from University of Illinois. He was also a professor at NYU Poly.
Go to Profile#3813
Albert W Wu
#105068
Overall Influence
#3814
Dana G. Hoyt
#23704
Overall Influence
Dana Gibson Hoyt was the thirteenth president of Sam Houston State University. She was appointed on September 1, 2010, following unanimous approval by The Texas State University System. She is the first female president in the university’s history.
Go to Profile#3815
Mario Kovač
#68008
Overall Influence
Mario Kovač is a Croatian computer engineering professor and inventor. He is a professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb who specialized in VLSI and was also involved in the creation of the early AMP MP3 player.
Go to Profile#3816
Daniel Povey
#86995
Overall Influence
Daniel Povey is a British researcher in the fields of speech recognition and artificial intelligence. After graduating from Cambridge University, he held research positions at Microsoft and IBM from 2003 to 2012. He worked at Johns Hopkins University as a nontenured associate research professor in the Whiting School of Engineering prior to being fired in August 2019. Later in August 2019, after being fired by Johns Hopkins, Povey was slated to begin working for Facebook, but he rejected Facebook's conditions of employment just days before he would have begun working for them. He was appointed ...
Go to Profile#3817
David E. Kuhl
#105164
Overall Influence
#3818
Christian Berggren
#34142
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christian Berggren is a Swedish professor of Industrial Management at Linköping University. Berggren was born in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1990 he obtained a doctorate in industrial management at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. During the following years he was a senior visiting fellow at AGSM, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales at Sydney, Australia in 1991–1992, a guest researcher at Okayama University, Japan in 1993 and at Université Évry in Paris in 1994. In 1999 he was appointed professor of industrial management at Linköping Univers...
Go to Profile#3819
Isabel Cruz
#69729
Overall Influence
Isabel Cruz was an American Portuguese computer scientist known for her research on databases, knowledge representation, geographic information systems, AI, visual languages, graph drawing, user interfaces, multimedia, information retrieval, and security. She was a University of Illinois Chicago Distinguished Professor and a Professor Computer Science in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#3820
Matthias Niessner
#76658
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Matthias Nießner is a professor of computer science and entrepreneur from Germany, working in the fields of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision. He is a professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich and leads the Visual Computing Lab. As a member of the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication Junior Research Group Program, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University, working in the lab of Pat Hanrahan.
Go to Profile#3821
Wendy Mackay
#86813
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Wendy Elizabeth Mackay is a Canadian researcher specializing in human-computer interaction. She has served in all of the roles on the SIGCHI committee, including Chair. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced grant. She has been a visiting professor in Stanford University between 2010 and 2012, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2014.
Go to Profile#3822
Kevin Skadron
#93548
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kevin Skadron is an American computer scientist, the Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor of Computer Science. He served as department chair and served as Director of the SRC JUMP Center for Research on Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory , and the Center for Automata Processing , at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. His research focuses on computer processor design under physical constraints such as temperature, power, and reliability. He and his colleagues have contributed numerous tools now widely used in the research community, including the HotSpot family of tools and the Rodinia Benchmark Suite.
Go to Profile#3823
John E. L. Peck
#96508
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
John Edward Lancelot Peck was the first permanent Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia . He remained the Head of Department from 1969 to 1977. He was one of the editors of the original Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68 and a contributing editor to the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. He has written an article outlining his personal account of being part of the design team. Before assuming his role as the Head of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, he was the first Head of the University of Calgary's newl...
Go to Profile#3824
Christian Gerber
#105280
Overall Influence
#3825
Youfa Wang
#105283
Overall Influence
#3826
Julian Togelius
#96602
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Julian Togelius is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Career Togelius holds a BA from Lund University, an MSc from the University of Sussex, and a PhD from the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#3827
Trevor Bench-Capon
#94946
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Trevor Bench-Capon is a British computer scientist and an Honorary Visiting Professor of computer science at the University of Liverpool, where he taught from 1987 until his retirement in 2012. He is the author of work on computer science and ontology and is one of the editors in chief of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal.
Go to Profile#3828
Jianping Yao
#105341
Overall Influence
#3829
Abdul Rahman Bin Mohamed
#105347
Overall Influence
#3830
Nobuko Yoshida
#100045
Overall Influence
Nobuko Yoshida is the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. She undertook her BSc and MSc at the University of Keio, Japan, before completing her PhD jointly at the universities of Keio and Manchester.
Go to Profile#3831
Yoshiyuki Tomino
#27615
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Yoshiyuki Tomino is a Japanese anime director, screenwriter, songwriter and novelist best known for creating the Gundam anime franchise. Early life and family Tomino was born on November 5, 1941, in Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture, to an old family of regional landowners in Ōjima . His grandfather Kiheiji Tomino was the mayor of Ōjima and statutory auditor of Ōtsuka Rubber Works. His father Kihei Tomino was an employee at Japan Processed Fabrics, and his mother Sachiko was the daughter of town councillor and celluloid toy manufacturer Sakichi Tanaka. His uncle Kiheiji Tomino was a member of the T...
Go to Profile#3832
Sanford Weisberg
#105384
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#3833
Michael Lew
#97345
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael S. Lew is a scientist in multimedia information search and retrieval at Leiden University, Netherlands. He has published over a dozen books and 150 scientific articles in the areas of content based image retrieval, computer vision, and deep learning. Notably, he had the most cited paper in the ACM Transactions on Multimedia, one of the top 10 most cited articles in the history of the ACM SIGMM, and the most cited article from the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval in 2008 and also in 2010. He was the opening keynote speaker for the 9th International Con...
Go to Profile#3834
Carl Andre
#4814
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear and grid format sculptures and for the suspected murder of contemporary artist and wife, Ana Mendieta. His sculptures range from large public artworks , to large interior works exhibited on the floor , to small intimate works .
Go to Profile#3835
Ferdinando Nicoletti
#105450
Overall Influence
#3836
Bashar Ahmad Nuseibeh
#94807
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Bashar Ahmad Nuseibeh, is a professor of computing at The Open University in the United Kingdom, a professor of software engineering at the University of Limerick in Ireland, and chief scientist of Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. He is also an honorary professor at University College London and the National Institute of Informatics , Japan.
Go to Profile#3837
Timothy Behrens
#82141
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Timothy E.J. Behrens is a British neuroscientist. He is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroscience Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and Honorary Lecturer at, Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience, University College London.
Go to Profile#3838
Maarten Boers
#105493
Overall Influence
#3839
Elad Hazan
#99745
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Elad Hazan is an Israeli-American computer scientist, academic, author and researcher. He is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and the co-founder and director of Google AI Princeton.
Go to Profile#3840
Brent Hailpern
#97767
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Brent Hailpern is a computer scientist retired from IBM Research. His research work focused on programming languages, software engineering, and concurrency. Education Dr. Hailpern received his B.S. degree, summa cum laude, in Mathematics from the University of Denver in 1976, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. His thesis was titled, "Verifying Concurrent Processes Using Temporal Logic".
Go to Profile#3841
Jun Qin
#105529
Overall Influence
#3842
Michael Baskes
#71777
Overall Influence
Michael I. Baskes is an American engineer. Baskes earned a degree in engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1965, and remained at the institution through 1970 to pursue doctoral study in materials science. He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 29 years, until 2005, then started a teaching career. Baskes held an adjunct professorship at the University of California, San Diego, joined the faculty of Mississippi State University in 2013, and later moved to the University of North Texas as a distinguished research professor. He founded the journal Modelling and Si...
Go to Profile#3843
Yoshinori Asakawa
#105558
Overall Influence
#3844
Peter Gouras
#105570
Overall Influence
#3845
Allan D. Struthers
#105584
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#3846
Diane Litman
#95354
Overall Influence
Diane Litman is an American professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. She also jointly holds the positions of senior scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center and faculty with the Intelligent Systems department. Litman is noted for her work in the areas of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and user modeling.
Go to Profile#3847
David E. Neal
#105593
Overall Influence
#3848
Dongfeng Xue
#105647
Overall Influence
#3849
Gene Roddenberry
#24297
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Sr. was an American television screenwriter, producer, and creator of Star Trek: The Original Series, its sequel spin-off series Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Born in El Paso, Texas, Roddenberry grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a police officer. Roddenberry flew 89 combat missions in the Army Air Forces during World War II and worked as a commercial pilot after the war. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Los Angeles Police Department, where he also began to write scripts for television.
Go to Profile#3850
Massimiliano Versace
#65506
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Massimiliano Versace is the co-founder and the CEO of Neurala Inc, a Boston-based company building Artificial Intelligence emulating brain function in software and used in automating the process of visual inspection in manufacturing. He is also the founding Director of the Boston University Neuromorphics Lab. Massimiliano Versace is a Fulbright scholar and holds two PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste, Italy and Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University, USA. He obtained his BSc from the University of Trieste, Italy.
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