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,
#3901
Hamido Fujita
#106463
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#3902
John Westcott
#37644
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
John Hugh Westcott FRS, FREng, Hon FIEE was a British scientist specialising in control systems and Professor of Computing and Automation at Imperial College London. Career Westcott was educated at Wandsworth Grammar School, the City and Guilds College, both in London, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His career began in radar research during World War II. After a year in Germany with the Allied Commission, he obtained a scholarship to the MIT where many scientists returning from the services were addressing the early possibilities of computer applications.
Go to Profile#3903
Alan Jay Smith
#87356
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dr. Alan Jay Smith is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of development and applications of caching strategies and the measurement and analysis of computer storage systems with many important contributions to the field. He currently is professor emeritus at the EECS faculty of the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#3904
Terence Picton
#101665
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Terence "Terry" W. Picton is a Canadian Professor Emeritus of neuroscience at the University of Toronto. Early life and career Terence Picton was born in England in 1945 and spent the first 11 years of his life in Ipswich in East Anglia. In 1956 he emigrated to Canada on the SS Homeric. There, from the immigration office in Quebec City he travelled via train to Toronto. After graduating from high school he attended University of Toronto where he played rugby and studied medicine, graduating in 1967 with an M.D. degree.
Go to Profile#3905
Francesco Mondada
#69402
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Francesco Mondada is a Swiss professor in artificial intelligence and robotics. He got a Master's degree in Microengineering at the EPFL in 1991 and a PhD degree in 1997. He is one of the creators of the Khepera and directed the design of the S-bot, the e-puck, the marXbot and the Thymio mobile robots. Together, these robots are mentioned in more than 9000 research articles. In particular the Khepera robot is a milestone in the field of bio-inspired and evolutionary robotics.
Go to Profile#3906
Xiaogang Liu
#106488
Overall Influence
#3907
Dru Lavigne
#98329
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor, technical writer and director at FreeBSD Foundation. She has been using FreeBSD since 1996, has authored several BSD books, and spent over 10 years developing training materials and providing training on the administration of FreeBSD systems.
Go to Profile#3908
Richard T. Hoppe
#106510
Overall Influence
#3909
Peter M. Fayers
#106519
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#3910
Jose Duato
#93277
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
José Francisco Duato Marín is a Spanish professor and researcher awarded the National Prize for Research Julio Rey Pastor in 2009 and the King Jaime I Prize for new technologies in 2006. His research is based mainly in the field of interconnection networks and develops its role as Full Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Go to Profile#3911
Jeng‐shyang Pan
#106584
Overall Influence
#3912
Lutz Michael Wegner
#63679
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lutz Michael Wegner is a German computer scientist. Biography Wegner was born in Weinsberg near Heilbronn, Germany, in 1949. He graduated from Williston Academy in Easthampton, Mass. in 1968 and from Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Heilbronn in 1969. From 1969 to 1974 he studied industrial engineering at the University of Karlsruhe finishing with an MBA to be followed by two years as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. His thesis titled "Analysis of two-level grammars" was submitted and defended in Karlsruhe in 1977 with Hermann Maurer and Thomas Ottmann being the referees.
Go to Profile#3913
Toshio Tanaka
#106610
Overall Influence
#3914
Ross Bleckner
#13352
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ross Bleckner is an American artist. He currently lives and works in New York City. His artistic focus is on painting, and he held his first solo exhibition in 1975. Some of his art work reflected on the AIDS epidemic.
Go to Profile#3915
Bill Williams
#79636
Overall Influence
1960 - 1998 (38 years)
Bill Williams was an American video game designer, programmer, composer, and author born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder. According to a medical encyclopedia Williams consulted when he was 12, people with cystic fibrosis weren't expected to live past the age of 13.
Go to Profile#3916
Richard E. Carson
#86214
Overall Influence
Richard Ellis Carson is an American researcher and biomedical engineer. He is currently Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. At Yale he is also Director of the PET Center and Director of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on the application of mathematical techniques to the study of humans and primates with Positron Emission Tomography.
Go to Profile#3917
Brian Sherwin
#23503
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Brian Sherwin is an American art critic, writer, and blogger with a degree from Illinois College in 2003. Sherwin is a founding Management Team member of the artist social networking site myartspace, where he also served as Senior Editor for six years. As Senior Editor for myartspace.com Sherwin established an extensive interview series with emerging and established visual artists. Sherwin currently writes for FineArtViews and is the editor of The Art Edge. Sherwin is also an advocate for youth art education.
Go to Profile#3918
David J. Torgerson
#106677
Overall Influence
#3919
Carlos Romero López
#92520
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Carlos Romero is a Spanish academic who specializes in the field of economic optimization chiefly by using multi-criteria programming methods, concretely goal programming methods. In 2006, the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making awarded him the Georg Cantor Medal.
Go to Profile#3920
Andrea Rotnitzky
#54425
Overall Influence
Andrea Gloria Rotnitzky is an Argentine biostatistician whose research involves causal inference on the effects of medical interventions in the face of missing data. She is Prentice Endowed Professor of Biostatistics in the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#3921
Peter Wonka
#106704
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter Wonka is an Austrian computer scientist and Professor and Associate Director at the Visual Computing Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia. He was previously employed at the Arizona State University as Associate Professor and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award.
Go to Profile#3922
David G. Maloney
#60399
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David G. Maloney is an oncologist and researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington who specializes in developing targeted immunotherapies for the treatment of blood cancers.
Go to Profile#3923
Vishal. M. Patel
#106742
Overall Influence
#3924
Hein Putter
#106748
Overall Influence
#3925
Xiaohua Jia
#101194
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Xiaohua Jia received his BSc and MEng from University of Science and Technology of China, and DSc in Information Science from University of Tokyo. He is currently Chair Professor with Dept of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include cloud computing and distributed systems, data security and privacy, computer networks and mobile computing. Prof. Jia is an editor of IEEE Internet of Things, IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems , Wireless Networks, Journal of World Wide Web, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, etc. He is the General Chair ...
Go to Profile#3926
Lei-Han Tang
#106802
Overall Influence
#3927
Nicolas Gruber
#106817
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
#3928
Charles Zukowski
#68978
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Charles Albert Zukowski is a professor and former chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. Zukowski was born in Buffalo, New York. While still a student at MIT, from 1979 to 1982, Zukowski worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received his BS in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. He received the IBM PhD Fellowship from 1982 to 1985; in 1985 he earned his PhD in electrical engineering with a thesis entitled "Design and measurement of a reconfigurable multi-microprocessor machine". The same year, he joined the faculty of Columbia University as assistant professor, and was awarded tenure in 1993.
Go to Profile#3929
Bernard Testa
#106852
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
#3930
José María Kenny
#106874
Overall Influence
#3931
Peter C. Ford
#106923
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
#3932
Fatih Porikli
#106945
Overall Influence
Fatih Porikli is an engineer at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for his contributions to computer vision and video surveillance. Porikli is currently working as a Chief Scientist at Global Technologies Lab at Huawei, and as a professor at Australian National University.
Go to Profile#3933
Richard Chbeir
#63324
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Richard Chbeir is a professor of computer science at the University of Pau and the Adour Region in France, where he leads the computer science laboratory called LIUPPA. He is the director of the Semantics & Privacy in Digital Ecosystems Research group . He is currently working on information and knowledge extraction.
Go to Profile#3934
Gabe Aul
#72283
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Gabriel J. "Gabe" Aul, is the Vice President of Oculus at Meta. He was previously the Corporate Vice President of Windows & Devices Group , Engineering Systems team at Microsoft. He was appointed as VP on 31 July 2015, following the launch of Windows 10 on 29 July 2015. He led the Windows Insider Program until June 1, 2016, where he was succeeded by Dona Sarkar.
Go to Profile#3935
Francesco Di Virgilio
#107027
Overall Influence
#3936
Siegfried Mense
#107037
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#3937
Nimal Rajapakshe
#38590
Overall Influence
Nimal Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan-born academic and engineer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a professor of engineering at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Education After a year in a school in his village near Attanagalla, he came to Olcott College and after a year entered Ananda College in grade three. Four generations of his family studied at Ananda College. He gained admission to the University of Ceylon in 1973 from where he graduated with a degree in civil engineering in 1977.
Go to Profile#3938
Marcel Arnold
#107064
Overall Influence
#3939
Hans Jørgen G. Gundersen
#103518
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Hans Jørgen Gottlieb Gundersen was a Danish stereology researcher . He was employed as a professor at Aarhus University. In January 2008 he received the August Krogh Prize "for his ground-breaking research in stereology for the spatial description and understanding of biological tissue". He was a recipient of the Novo Nordisk Prize.
Go to Profile#3940
Samir Khuller
#99180
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Samir Khuller is a professor of Computer Science and the Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern University. He was previously Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science in the University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science. His research is in the area of algorithm design, specifically on combinatorial optimization, graphs and networks and scheduling.
Go to Profile#3941
Ramin Zabih
#99507
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ramin D. Zabih is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech in Ithaca, New York. Education and career Zabih got undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer science and mathematics and then graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a Ph.D. in computer science under Oussama Khatib. Zabih became a faculty member at Cornell University in 1994 and in 2013 joined Cornell Tech. He specializes in computer vision and apps, most of which have to do with medicine. His technology is used by many companies including such as AOL, Google and Microsoft.
Go to Profile#3942
Wu Guanzhong
#10304
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Wu Guanzhong was a contemporary Chinese painter widely recognized as a founder of modern Chinese painting. He is considered to be one of the greatest contemporary Chinese painters. Wu's artworks display both Western and Eastern influences, such as the Western style of Fauvism and the Eastern style of Chinese calligraphy. Wu painted various aspects of China, including its architecture, plants, animals, people, as well as many of its landscapes and waterscapes, in a style reminiscent of the impressionist painters of the early 1900s. He was also a writer on contemporary Chinese art.
Go to Profile#3943
Simon Anders
#107146
Overall Influence
#3944
Eduardo Reck Miranda
#87200
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Eduardo Reck Miranda is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electroacoustic pieces but is most notable in the United Kingdom for his scientific research into computer music, particularly in the field of human-machine interfaces where brain waves will replace keyboards and voice commands to permit the disabled to express themselves musically.
Go to Profile#3945
Pierre Geneves
#97396
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Pierre Genevès is a French computer scientist born in 1980. He is a research scientist at CNRS and recipient of the 2013 CNRS Bronze medal. Biography Born in Cahors in 1980, Pierre Genevès founded in 2001 a software company developing a graphic software, later marketed under the name of AceDesign Pro by the Canadian software company Visicom Media.
Go to Profile#3946
Lim Chwee Teck
#107065
Overall Influence
Lim Chwee Teck is a Singaporean scientist and entrepreneur. He is a specialist in human disease mechanobiology and in developing medical technologies for disease diagnosis and precision therapy and bringing them from the laboratory to the bedside.
Go to Profile#3947
Joel D. Katz
#98518
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joel D. Katz is a Canadian psychologist and researcher. He is a Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology at York University. He also serves as the Research Director of the Pain Research Unit in the Department of Anesthesia and Pain Management at the Toronto General Hospital and is a professor in the Department of Anesthesia at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#3948
C. Peter Herman
#107191
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#3949
Matthias Lütolf
#46040
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Matthias Lutolf is a bio-engineer and a professor at EPFL where he leads the Laboratory of Stem Cell Bioengineering. He is specialised in biomaterials, and in combining stem cell biology and engineering to develop improved organoid models. In 2021, he became the scientific director for Roche's Institute for Translation Bioengineering in Basel.
Go to Profile#3950
Bin Ding
#107227
Overall Influence
