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,
#4001
Farzad Ebrahimi
#108078
Overall Influence
#4002
Mitsuhiko Ikura
#108079
Overall Influence
#4003
Jacob Savir
#66323
Overall Influence
Jacob Savir is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an IEEE Fellow. He is credited with developing two approaches to detecting Transition Faults that might occur during the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, viz., the Skewed-Load Transition Test and the Broad-side delay test .
Go to Profile#4004
Pei Kang Shen
#108122
Overall Influence
#4005
Cary Peppermint
#89648
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Cary Peppermint is a New York-based conceptual, new media, performance, and environmental artist. Peppermint was born in Rome, Georgia, in 1970 and received in M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1997. Peppermint has conducted a series of Dadaist and Fluxus inspired digital, networked performances via his website RestlessCulture, an ongoing, post-cinema living documentary database. In Artforum, Mark Tribe called this series of work “twenty-first-century takes on Warhol's Factory.”
Go to Profile#4006
Maria L. Gini
#63587
Overall Influence
Maria Gini is an Italian and American Computer Scientist in artificial intelligence and robotics. She has considerable service to the computer science artificial intelligence community and for broadening participation in computing. She was Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence SIGAI from 2003 to 2010. She is currently a member of the CRA-W board.
Go to Profile#4007
Antonio Luz Furtado
#74545
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Antonio Luz Furtado is a Brazilian computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science known for his work in databases and conceptual modeling. Biography Furtado received undergrad degrees in Economics from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and Law from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro , a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro , a M.A. in Business Administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas , and his PhD from University of Toronto . Currently he is Professor Emeritus and Senior Researcher at the Department of Informatics at PUC-Rio....
Go to Profile#4008
Kenneth L. McMillan
#84585
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kenneth L. McMillan is an American computer scientist working in the area of formal methods, logic, and programming languages. He is a professor in the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory.
Go to Profile#4009
Yihe Zhang
#108157
Overall Influence
#4010
Julie Dorsey
#57259
Overall Influence
Julie Dorsey is an American computer scientist specializing in computer graphics. With architecture as a driving application, her research in computer graphics has included work on high-dynamic-range imaging, image-based modeling and rendering, and billboarding. She is the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, and the founder and Chief Scientist of 3D sketching software company Mental Canvas.
Go to Profile#4011
Carl Gutwin
#103830
Overall Influence
Carl Gutwin is a Canadian computer scientist, professor and the director of the Human–computer interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. He is also a co-theme leader in the SurfNet research network and was a past holder of a Canada Research Chair in Next-Generation Groupware. Gutwin is known for his contributions in HCI ranging from the technical aspects of systems architectures, to the design and implementation of interaction techniques, and to social theory as applied to design. Gutwin was papers co-chair at CHI 2011 and was a conference co-chair of Computer Supported Cooperative W...
Go to Profile#4012
Harold N. Gabow
#52409
Overall Influence
Harold N. Gabow is an American computer scientist known for his research on graph algorithms and data structures. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the former founding editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
Go to Profile#4013
Elizabeth M. Belding-royer
#108209
Overall Influence
#4014
Holly Yanco
#43051
Overall Influence
Holly Ann Yanco is an American roboticist and computer scientist who works as Distinguished University Professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the director of the New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation center. She is known for her research in human–robot interaction, and has applied robotics as a way to broaden interest in computer science by schoolchildren, in assistive technology, in manufacturing, and for rescue robots.
Go to Profile#4015
Jeffrey Loria
#3531
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jeffrey Harold Loria is an American entrepreneur, author, and the former owner of the Montreal Expos and Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball. Early life Loria was born and raised in a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Ruth and Walter J. Loria, a lawyer. Loria took an early interest in baseball, attending his first New York Yankees game in the late 1940s. Loria attended New York City's Stuyvesant High School and Yale University, where he initially took pre-med courses. With a requirement to take a history class, Loria chose art history.
Go to Profile#4016
Lada Adamic
#38498
Overall Influence
Lada Adamic is an American network scientist, who researches information dynamics in networks. She studies how network structure influences the flow of information, how information influences the evolution of networks, and crowdsourced knowledge sharing.
Go to Profile#4017
John Ballato
#22447
Overall Influence
John Ballato is an American materials scientist, entrepreneur, and academic. He holds the J. E. Sirrine Endowed Chair of Optical Fiber and is a professor of materials science and engineering, electrical and computer engineering, as well as physics and astronomy at Clemson University. He has received many international recognitions for his research on optical and optoelectronic materials, particularly as relates to optical fiber.
Go to Profile#4018
Makoto Mark Taketo
#108251
Overall Influence
#4019
Yoshiharu Kohayakawa
#46960
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Yoshiharu Kohayakawa is a Japanese-Brazilian mathematician working on discrete mathematics and probability theory. He is known for his work on Szemerédi's regularity lemma, which he extended to sparser graphss.
Go to Profile#4020
Kurt Jensen
#103624
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kurt Jensen is a Danish computer science professor at Aarhus University has been writing peer-reviewed papers since 1976, and by 2014 had an h-index of 32. He is best known for his research into coloured Petri nets.
Go to Profile#4021
Neal Adams
#19241
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Neal Adams was an American comic book artist. He was the co-founder of the graphic design studio Continuity Associates, and was a creators-rights advocate who helped secure a pension and recognition for Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. During his career, Adams co-created the characters Ra's al Ghul, Man-Bat, and John Stewart for DC Comics.
Go to Profile#4022
Gaston Godin
#108293
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#4023
Ding-Zhu Du
#101254
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Ding-Zhu Du is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has received public recognition when he solved two long-standing open problems on the Euclidean minimum Steiner trees, the proof of Gilbert–Pollack conjecture on the Steiner ratio of the Euclidean plane, and the existence of a polynomial-time heuristic with a performance ratio bigger than the Steiner ratio. The proof of Gilbert-Pollak's conjecture on Steiner ratios was later found to have gaps, thus leaving the problem unsolved.
Go to Profile#4024
Emilio Hirsch
#108371
Overall Influence
#4025
Wolfgang Händler
#77088
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Wolfgang Händler was a German mathematician, pioneering computer scientist and professor at Leibniz University Hannover and University of Erlangen–Nuremberg known for his work on automata theory, parallel computing, artificial intelligence, man-machine interfaces and computer graphics. Händler diagram
Go to Profile#4026
Xiuzhen Cheng
#105908
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Xiuzhen Cheng is a Chinese computer scientist whose research interests include wireless sensor networks, edge computing, and the internet of things. She is a professor of computer science at Shandong University.
Go to Profile#4027
Dipak Kumar Das
#108478
Overall Influence
#4028
Raghavan Srinivasan
#108481
Overall Influence
#4029
Arnold Ganser
#108486
Overall Influence
#4030
Jiangchuan Liu
#108487
Overall Influence
#4031
David Blumenthal
#108497
Overall Influence
#4032
Arlindo Oliveira
#41338
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Arlindo Manuel Limede de Oliveira is a Portuguese academic, researcher and writer. He is author of more than 150 scientific articles and papers in conferences, and three books: Computer Architecture , The Digital Mind , and Inteligência Artificial .
Go to Profile#4033
Fernando Botero
#2052
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Fernando Botero Angulo was a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor. His signature style, also known as "Boterismo", depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume, which can represent political criticism or humor, depending on the piece. He was considered the most recognized and quoted artist from Latin America in his lifetime, and his art can be found in highly visible places around the world, such as Park Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, at different times.
Go to Profile#4034
Noam Slonim
#98019
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Noam Slonim is an Israeli computer scientist, specializing in Natural Language Processing and Computational Argumentation. He is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and the Principal Investigator of Project Debater at the IBM Research lab at Haifa, Israel.
Go to Profile#4035
Quan Xue
#108635
Overall Influence
#4036
Milan Sonka
#108637
Overall Influence
#4037
Willard S. Moore
#108646
Overall Influence
#4038
Giovanni Martinelli
#108659
Overall Influence
#4039
Wen Gao
#108294
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Wen Gao is a Chinese computer scientist and winners of the CCF Wang Xuan Award etc.. He is the founding director of Peng Cheng Laboratory and the director of Faculty of Information & Engineering Sciences at Peking University. He is the pioneer in audio video coding technologies and standards in China, and has served on the faculty of different universities for over 37 years. He received the National Technology Innovation Awards in 2020, the top award of science and technology in China, for his work in the field of video coding technology.
Go to Profile#4040
Monica Rogati
#102053
Overall Influence
Monica Rogati is a data scientist, computer scientist and the former Vice President of Data of Jawbone. Before that, she was a senior data scientist at LinkedIn. Early life and education Rogati was born in Romania, where she attended the Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science. Rogati has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#4041
Masoud Afrand
#108687
Overall Influence
#4042
Konstantinos N. (kostas) Plataniotis
#108707
Overall Influence
#4043
Hiroaki Kitano
#108712
Overall Influence
#4044
Alain Wegmann
#68582
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alain Wegmann was a Swiss computer scientist, professor of Systemic Modeling at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , and Information Technology and Services consultant, known for the development of the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology .
Go to Profile#4045
Leonard B. Saltz
#108739
Overall Influence
#4046
Sergio Cerutti
#108740
Overall Influence
#4047
Fabrizio Sebastiani
#108772
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#4048
Francisco José Garcı́a-peñalvo
#108786
Overall Influence
#4049
Giancarlo Fortino
#107294
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Giancarlo Fortino is an Italian computer scientist who is currently a full professor of computer engineering at the Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and Systems of the University of Calabria.
Go to Profile#4050
Mark Stockman
#39638
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Mark Stockman was a Soviet-born American physicist. He was a professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University. Best known for his contributions to plasmonics, Stockman has co-theorized plasmonic lasers, also known as spasers, in 2003.
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