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,
#3851
Gianfranco Sinagra
#105671
Overall Influence
#3852
Weisi Lin
#103621
Overall Influence
Weisi Lin is a professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering of Nanyang Technological University , Singapore. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 "for contributions to perceptual modeling and processing of visual signals." He is also a Fellow of IET. He has been a Highly Cited Researcher , and a Distinguished Lecturer for both IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association . He has been elected for the COE Research Award 2023, NTU.
Go to Profile#3853
Aretha Teckentrup
#46704
Overall Influence
Aretha Leonore Teckentrup is a UK-based mathematician, known for her research on uncertainty quantification and numerical analysis. Her work focuses on multilevel Monte Carlo methods for the numerical solution of partial differential equations, Gaussian processes and Bayesian inference. She is a reader in the mathematics of data science at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#3854
Radu Timofte
#105738
Overall Influence
#3855
Antoni Muntadas
#31982
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Antoni Muntadas is a postconceptual multimedia artist, who resides in New York since 1971. His work often addresses social, political and communications issues through different media: such as photography, video, text and image publications, the Internet, and multi-media installations.
Go to Profile#3856
Junichi Iijima
#56074
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Junichi Iijima , Japanese, Enterprise Engineer and Professor of the Department of Industrial Management and Engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. Biography Born in Hokkaido, Junichi Iijima in 1983 received his PhD in systems theory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#3857
Gordon Kindlmann
#77845
Overall Influence
Gordon L. Kindlmann is an American computer scientist who works on information visualization and image analysis. He is recognized for his contributions in developing tools for tensor data visualization.
Go to Profile#3858
Deva Kannan Ramanan
#105780
Overall Influence
#3859
Michael Reiter
#90600
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Michael K. Reiter is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a James B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He was formerly the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was previously a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Reiter's research interests are in computer and communications security and distributed computing.
Go to Profile#3860
Marc van Kreveld
#90378
Overall Influence
Marc Johan van Kreveld is a Dutch computational geometer, known as one of the authors of the textbook Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications . Van Kreveld completed his Ph.D. in 1992 at Utrecht University. His dissertation, New Results on Data Structures in Computational Geometry, was supervised by Mark Overmars. He is a professor of computer science at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#3861
Cameron Tropea
#105801
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#3862
Joe Stoy
#96625
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Joseph E. Stoy is a British computer scientist. He initially studied physics at Oxford University. Early in his career, in the 1970s, he worked on denotational semantics with Christopher Strachey in the Programming Research Group at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory . He was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He has also spent time at MIT in the United States. In 2003, he co-founded Bluespec, Inc.
Go to Profile#3863
Robert Edelman
#105826
Overall Influence
#3864
Patrick M. Kochanek
#105835
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#3865
Muhammad Ali Imran
#105837
Overall Influence
#3866
Franz Fazekas
#53857
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Franz Fazekas is an Austrian neurologist and former head of the department of neurology at the Medical University of Graz. Career Fazekas studied medicine at the faculty of medicine of the University of Graz and completed his studies in 1980. Afterwards, he started his residency at the department of neurology and psychiatry of the university hospital of Graz. Fazekas received a Fulbright scholarship in 1985 and spent a two-year research stay at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#3867
Xing Xie
#105851
Overall Influence
#3868
Maureen C. Stone
#100157
Overall Influence
Maureen C. Stone is an American computer scientist, specializing in color modeling. Biography Stone has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and another master's degree from the California Institute of Technology. She worked for many years at Xerox PARC. After leaving PARC, she founded a consulting firm in the Seattle, Washington area in 1998, and became is an adjunct professor in the School for Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She joined Tableau Research in 2011, and headed the com...
Go to Profile#3869
Jieping. Ye
#105879
Overall Influence
#3870
Peter W Laird
#105883
Overall Influence
#3871
Halil Güven
#28969
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Halil Guven is a Cypriot-born professor, currently serving as the Dean of San Diego State University - Georgia. He was a Vice Dean of SDSU Georgia for four years before then and was one of the coordinators of the project at the time of its conception. Dr. Güven served as a Rector at three different universities in Turkey and in Cyprus. He served as the rector of Istanbul Bilgi University appointed in the academic year of 2009–2010, Eastern Mediterranean University , North Cyprus in 2004–2007, and Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1999–2003. He received his B.S. degree from Boğaziçi University , his M.S.
Go to Profile#3872
Virgil Griffith
#64779
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Virgil Griffith , is an American programmer and convicted felon. He worked extensively on the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform, designed the Tor2web proxy along with Aaron Swartz, and created the Wikipedia indexing tool WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and integrated information theory. Griffith was arrested in 2019 and in 2021 pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. laws relating to money laundering using cryptocurrency and sanctions related to North Korea. On April 12, 2022, Griffith was sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for assisting North Korea with evading sa...
Go to Profile#3873
Heinz Rennenberg
#105924
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#3874
Rajiv Jalan
#105933
Overall Influence
#3875
Hiroshi Kiyono
#105939
Overall Influence
#3876
Allison Mankin
#63363
Overall Influence
Allison Mankin is an American computer scientist and prominent figure in the area of Internet governance. She previously served as the Internet Research Task Force Chair and holds numerous leadership positions within the Internet Engineering Task Force , which is known for developing Internet standards.
Go to Profile#3877
Katrina Ligett
#61932
Overall Influence
Katrina Ligett is an American computer scientist. She is Associate Professor of computer science and economics at the Hebrew University and Visiting Associate at California Institute of Technology. She is known for work on algorithmic game theory and privacy.
Go to Profile#3878
Krzysztof Cios
#71627
Overall Influence
Krzysztof J. Cios is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University , located in Richmond, Virginia. His research is focused on machine learning, data mining, and biomedical informatics.
Go to Profile#3879
Michael Luck
#93443
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Michael Luck is a professor of computer science based at the Department of Informatics, King's College London, in central London, England. His main research area is in intelligent agents and multi-agent systems.
Go to Profile#3880
Joachim Herz
#105979
Overall Influence
#3881
Vadivel Ganapathy
#105985
Overall Influence
#3882
Pascal Frossard
#106023
Overall Influence
#3883
Tarek Abdelzaher
#99898
Overall Influence
Tarek Farouk A. Abdelzaher is an Egyptian-born computer scientist. Abdelzaher earned bachelor's and master's degrees in at computer and electrical engineering at Ain Shams University, followed by a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1999, advised by Kang G. Shin. He is the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Abdelzaher was chief editor of the Journal of Real-Time Systems for twenty years. In 2019, Abdelzaher was awarded fellow status by the Association for Computing Machinery. He was granted an equivalent honor by the IEEE in 2021, "for...
Go to Profile#3884
Nathan Oliveira
#16225
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanfo...
Go to Profile#3885
Masayoshi Watanabe
#106068
Overall Influence
#3886
Srinivasan Seshan
#90140
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Srinivasan "Srini" Seshan is an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in computer networks. Education and career Seshan's bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. are all from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990, 1993, and 1995. His thesis, Low Latency Handoff in Mobile Networks, was supervised by Randy Katz. After graduating, he joined the Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he was a research staff member until 2000, when he joined the CMU faculty. At CMU, he was Finmeccanica Associate Professor from 2004 to 2006.
Go to Profile#3887
Yishay Mansour
#106095
Overall Influence
#3888
Jiwen Lu
#106100
Overall Influence
#3889
Michael Dean
#37345
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Michael Dean is a British artist, living and working in London, United Kingdom. In 2016 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Dean's sculptural work is focused on typefaces. He graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2001 with a BA Fine Art .
Go to Profile#3890
Patricia Melin
#106218
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#3891
Kathryn Leonard
#68358
Overall Influence
Kathryn Leonard is an American mathematician and computer scientist. Leonard received a Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 2012. She received the AWM Service Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015. She served as the AWM Meetings Coordinator from 2015 - 2018. She was President of the AWM and is now AWM Past-President. She is also director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. She is currently on the American Mathematical Society Nominating Committee.
Go to Profile#3892
Shigeru Kinoshita
#106268
Overall Influence
#3893
Ziva Ben-Porat
#30259
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Ziva Ben-Porat is a literary theorist, writer, and editor who lives in Israel and is a professor at Tel Aviv University. Personal life Ben-Porat graduated with a bachelor's degree in English and Hebrew literature and a master's degree in English literature from Tel Aviv University, as well as a doctorate in comparative literature from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3894
Yoshiya Tanaka
#106279
Overall Influence
#3895
James W Varni
#106305
Overall Influence
#3896
Masayoshi Yamaguchi
#106316
Overall Influence
#3897
Wei-ying Ma
#106348
Overall Influence
#3898
John W. Fisher
#20631
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
John William Fisher is a professor emeritus of civil engineering. Biography John W. Fisher served from 1951 to 1953 in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he attained the rank of 2nd lieutenant. After graduating with a B.S. in civil engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1956, he became a graduate student in civil engineering at Lehigh University, where he graduated in 1958 with an M.S. From 1958 to 1961 he worked as assistant bridge research engineer working for the National Academy of Sciences in Ottawa, Illinois at the facility of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Road Test.
Go to Profile#3899
Bin Gao
#106435
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
#3900
Chris Goodnow
#71571
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Carl Goodnow is an immunology researcher and the current executive director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. He holds the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation Chair and is a Conjoint Professor in the faculty of medicine at UNSW Sydney. He holds dual Australian and US citizenship.
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