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,
#401
Sanjay Ghemawat
#6702
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sanjay Ghemawat is an Indian American computer scientist and software engineer. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Ghemawat's work at Google, much of it in close collaboration with Jeff Dean, has included big data processing model MapReduce, the Google File System, and databases Bigtable and Spanner. Wired have described him as one of the "most important software engineers of the internet age".
Go to Profile#402
Ashok Goel
#7194
Overall Influence
Ashok K. Goel is a professor of computer science and human-centered computing in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the chief scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. He conducts research into cognitive systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science with a focus on computational design and creativity. Goel is also the executive director of National Science Foundation's AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education and an editor emeritus of AAAI's AI Magazine.
Go to Profile#403
Gordon Cormack
#6553
Overall Influence
Gordon Villy Cormack is a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and co-inventor of Dynamic Markov Compression. Cormack's research with Maura R. Grossman has been cited in cases of first impression in United States, Ireland, and United Kingdom approving the use of technology-assisted review in civil litigation.
Go to Profile#404
Amnon Shashua
#5909
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Amnon Shashua is an Israeli computer scientist and businessman. Shashua is the Sachs Professor of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the President and chief executive officer of the autonomous driving and driver-assistance technology company Mobileye, Co-founder of the artificial vision devices company OrCam, Founder and Owner of digital bank and chairman of the artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs.
Go to Profile#405
Paul Mockapetris
#4357
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paul V. Mockapetris is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, who invented the Internet Domain Name System . Education Mockapetris graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1966, received his bachelor's degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971 and his doctorate in information and computer science from the University of California at Irvine in 1982.
Go to Profile#406
Mike Lesk
#6885
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael E. Lesk is an American computer scientist. Biography In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a BA degree in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard College in 1964 and a PhD from Harvard University in Chemical Physics in 1969.
Go to Profile#407
Daniel Sleator
#7647
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 1999, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for the splay tree data structure.
Go to Profile#408
Gene Spafford
#6303
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#409
Karen Spärck Jones
#5413
Overall Influence
1935 - 2007 (72 years)
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency , a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in the field of computer science. She even came up with a slogan: “Computing is too important to be left to men.” In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recog...
Go to Profile#410
Ronald J. Brachman
#4696
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ronald Jay "Ron" Brachman is the director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of Yahoo! and head of Yahoo! Labs. Prior to that, he was the Associate Head of Yahoo! Labs and Head of Worldwide Labs and Research Operations.
Go to Profile#411
Azriel Rosenfeld
#6532
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Azriel Rosenfeld was an American Research Professor, a Distinguished University Professor, and Director of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, where he also held affiliate professorships in the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Psychology, and a talmid chochom. He held a Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University , rabbinic ordination and a Doctor of Hebrew Literature degree from Yeshiva University, honorary Doctor of Technology degrees from Linkoping University and Oulu University , and an honorary Doctor...
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Pat Hanrahan
#4408
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.
Go to Profile#413
Andrew Barto
#7049
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrew G. Barto is an American computer scientist, currently Professor Emeritus of computer science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Barto is best known for his foundational contributions to the field of modern computational reinforcement learning.
Go to Profile#414
Ellis Horowitz
#5816
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ellis Horowitz is an American computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California . Horowitz is best known for his computer science textbooks on data structures and algorithms, co-authored with Sartaj Sahni. At USC, Horowitz was chairman of the Computer Science Department from 1990 to 1999. During his tenure he significantly improved relations between Computer Science and the Information Sciences Institute , hiring senior faculty, and establishing the department's first industrial advisory board. From 1983 to 1993 with Lawrence Flon he co-founded Quality Software Products which designed and built UNIX application software.
Go to Profile#415
Steve Lawrence
#7534
Overall Influence
Steve Lawrence is an Australian computer scientist. He was among the group at NEC Research which was responsible for the creation of the Search Engine/Digital Library CiteSeer. He was an employee at Google. He is currently a co-founder & CTO at Xoo.
Go to Profile#416
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann
#5745
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nadia Magnenat Thalmann is a computer graphics scientist and robotician and is the founder and head of MIRALab at the University of Geneva. She has chaired the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University , Singapore from 2009 to 2021.
Go to Profile#417
James H. Morris
#7781
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James Hiram Morris is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He was previously dean of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science and Dean of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. Biography A native of Pittsburgh, Morris received a Bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, an S.M. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.
Go to Profile#418
Jack Minker
#7169
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Jack Minker was a leading authority in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. He was also an internationally recognized leader in the field of human rights of computer scientists. He was an Emeritus Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#419
David Musser
#10065
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David "Dave" Musser is a professor emeritus of computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, United States. He is known for his work in generic programming, particularly as applied to C++, and his collaboration with Alexander Stepanov. Their work together includes coining the term "generic programming" in , and led to the creation of the C++ Standard Template Library .
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Rudy Rucker
#1310
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb.
Go to Profile#421
Vijay Vazirani
#5111
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Vijay Virkumar Vazirani is an Indian American distinguished professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Education and career Vazirani first majored in electrical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi but in his second year he transferred to MIT and received his bachelor's degree in computer science from MIT in 1979 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. His dissertation, Maximum Matchings without Blossoms, was supervised by Manuel Blum. After postdoctoral research with Michael O.
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Heinz Zemanek
#3294
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Heinz Zemanek was an Austrian computer pioneer who led the development, from 1954 to 1958, of one of the first complete transistorised computers on the European continent. The computer was nicknamed Mailüfterl — Viennese for "May breeze" — in reference to Whirlwind, a computer developed at MIT between 1945 and 1951.
Go to Profile#423
Eric Allman
#4939
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Eric Paul Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, Inc.
Go to Profile#424
Ramesh Sitaraman
#6942
Overall Influence
Ramesh Sitaraman is an Indian American computer scientist known for his work on distributed algorithms, content delivery networks, streaming video delivery, and application delivery networks. He helped build the Akamai content delivery network, one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms. He is currently in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#425
Chris Crawford
#5058
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christopher Crawford is an American video game designer and writer. Hired by Alan Kay to work at Atari, Inc., he wrote the computer wargame Eastern Front for the Atari 8-bit family which was sold through the Atari Program Exchange and later Atari's official product line. After leaving Atari, he wrote a string of games beginning with Balance of Power for Macintosh. Writing about the process of developing games, he became known among other creators in the nascent home computer game industry for his passionate advocacy of game design as an art form. He self-published The Journal of Computer Gam...
Go to Profile#426
Joel Moses
#4276
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Joel Moses was an Israeli-American mathematician, computer scientist, and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Biography Joel Moses was born in Mandatory Palestine on 25 November 1941 and emigrated to the United States in 1954. He attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in mathematics, also from Columbia.
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Ronald Fagin
#5670
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ronald Fagin is an American mathematician and computer scientist, and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is known for his work in database theory, finite model theory, and reasoning about knowledge.
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Pat Morin
#7957
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Patrick Ryan Morin is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in computational geometry and data structures. He is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. Education and career Morin was educated at Carleton University, earning a bachelor's degree with highest honours in 1996, a master's degree in 1998, and a Ph.D. in 2001. His dissertation, Online Routing in Geometric Graphs, was jointly supervised by Jit Bose and Jörg-Rüdiger Sack. After postdoctoral research at McGill University, he returned to Carleton University as a faculty member in 2002.
Go to Profile#429
Oliver Selfridge
#4074
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Oliver Gordon Selfridge was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception." Biography Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department stores. His father was Harry Gordon Selfridge Jr. and his mother was a clerk at Selfridge's store. His parents had met, fallen in love, married and had children all in secret, and Oliver never met his grandfather, Harry Sr. He was educated at Malvern College, and, upon moving to the US, at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, before earning an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945.
Go to Profile#430
Daniel Thalmann
#7901
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Prof. Daniel Thalmann is a Swiss and Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer in Virtual humans. He is currently Honorary Professor at EPFL, Switzerland and Director of Research Development at MIRALab Sarl in Geneva, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#431
Keith Packard
#6348
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation.
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Brendan Frey
#7752
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Brendan John Frey FRSC is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, engineer and scientist. He is Founder and CEO of Deep Genomics, Cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto. Frey is a pioneer in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, their use in accurately determining the consequences of genetic mutations, and in designing medications that can slow, stop or reverse the progression of disease.
Go to Profile#433
Ross J. Anderson
#4463
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ross John Anderson is a researcher, author, and industry consultant in security engineering. He is Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge where he is part of the University's security group.
Go to Profile#434
Stanley Zdonik
#8009
Overall Influence
Stanley Zdonik is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is a tenured professor of computer science at Brown University. Zdonik has lived in the Boston area his entire life. After completing two bachelor’s and two master's degrees at MIT, he then earned a PhD in database management under Michael Hammer.
Go to Profile#435
Edward F. Moore
#3883
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Edward Forrest Moore was an American professor of mathematics and computer science, the inventor of the Moore finite state machine, and an early pioneer of artificial life. Biography Moore received a B.S. in chemistry from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1947 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in June 1950. He worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1950 to 1952 and was a visiting professor at MIT and visiting lecturer at Harvard University simultaneously in 1961-1962. He worked at Bell Labs from 1952 to 1966.
Go to Profile#436
Raghu Ramakrishnan
#8898
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Raghu Ramakrishnan is a researcher in the areas of database and information management. He is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. He has been a Vice President and Research Fellow for Yahoo! Inc. Ramakrishnan spent 22 years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With Johannes Gehrke, he authored the popular textbook Database Management Systems, also known as the "Cow Book".
Go to Profile#437
Susan Owicki
#8027
Overall Influence
Susan Owicki is a computer scientist, Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, and one of the founding members of the Systers mailing list for women in computing. She changed careers in the early 2000s and became a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Go to Profile#438
Bob Barker
#722
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Robert William Barker was an American media personality and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS's The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. He also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975.
Go to Profile#439
Herb Sutter
#9499
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Herb Sutter is a prominent C++ expert. He is also an author of several books on C++ and was a columnist for Dr. Dobb's Journal. Education and career Sutter was born and raised in Oakville, Ontario, and studied computer science at Canada's University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#440
David P. Reed
#6105
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Patrick Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking and wireless communications networks.
Go to Profile#441
Atta ur Rehman Khan
#6451
Overall Influence
Atta ur Rehman Khan is a computer scientist and academician who has contributed to multiple domains of the field. According to a Stanford University report, he is among World's Top 2% Scientists. He is the founder of National Cyber Crime Forensics Lab Pakistan, which operates in partnership with NR3C. He has published numerous research articles and books. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM.
Go to Profile#442
Noel Sharkey
#5206
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Noel Sharkey is a computer scientist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is best known to the British public for his appearances on television as an expert on robotics; including the BBC Two television series Robot Wars and Techno Games, and co-hosting Bright Sparks for BBC Northern Ireland. He is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#443
Moti Yung
#6149
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography. Career Yung earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google. In 2016, Yung moved from Google to Snap Inc. Yung is currently a research scientist at Google.
Go to Profile#444
David Turner
#7602
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
David A. Turner was a British computer scientist. He is best known for designing and implementing three programming languages, including the first for functional programming based on lazy evaluation, combinator graph reduction, and polymorphic types: SASL , Kent Recursive Calculator , and the commercially supported Miranda . Miranda had a strong influence on the later Haskell.
Go to Profile#445
Bert Sutherland
#6921
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
William Robert Sutherland was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories , the Systems Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC , and the Computer Science Division of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. which helped develop the ARPANET.
Go to Profile#446
Benjamin C. Pierce
#9030
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Benjamin Crawford Pierce is the Henry Salvatori Professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. Pierce joined Penn in 1998 from Indiana University and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research includes work on programming languagess, static type systems, distributed programming, mobile agents, process calculi, and differential privacy.
Go to Profile#447
Arthur C. Clarke
#505
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science fiction writer, an avid populariser of space travel, and a futurist of a distinguished ability. He wrote many books and many essays for popular magazines. In 1961, he received the Kalinga Prize, a UNESCO award for popularising science. Clarke's science and science fiction writings earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age".
Go to Profile#448
Yoav Freund
#8608
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Yoav Freund is an Israeli professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego who mainly works on machine learning, probability theory and related fields and applications. He is best known for his work on the AdaBoost algorithm, an ensemble learning algorithm which is used to combine many "weak" learning machines to create a more robust one. He and Robert Schapire received the Gödel prize in 2003 for their joint work on AdaBoost.
Go to Profile#449
Jack Dennis
#5375
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Jack Bonnell Dennis is a computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The work of Dennis in computer systems and computer languages is recognized to have played a key role in hacker culture. As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member he sponsored easier access to computer facilities at MIT during the early development of the subculture. Much of what would later become Unix came from his early collaboration with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This collaborative and open philosophy lives on today.
Go to Profile#450
Anita Borg
#7379
Overall Influence
1949 - 2003 (54 years)
Anita Borg was an American computer scientist celebrated for advocating for women’s representation and professional advancement in technology. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
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