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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#4301
James C. Weaver
#112690
Overall Influence
#4302
Joel Thompson
#112711
Overall Influence
#4303
Monica Anderson
#88778
Overall Influence
Monica Anderson is an American computer scientist who is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Alabama. Anderson works on robotics, with a focus on multi-agent systems, multi-robot systems, and user interfaces. Anderson received the UPE Excellence in Instruction Award in 2008, and co-organized the AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation at the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#4304
Andy Stanford-Clark
#88595
Overall Influence
Andrew James Stanford-Clark is a British information technology research engineer, specialising in telemetry and publish/subscribe messaging. In July 2017 he was appointed IBM CTO for UK and Ireland Previously, he led a research team at IBM. He is a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an IBM Master Inventor and visiting professor at Newcastle University. He also serves on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council peer review college and regularly delivers public talks.
Go to Profile#4305
Richard Long
#7836
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard Julian Long, is an English sculptor and one of the best-known British land artists. Long is the only artist to have been short-listed four times for the Turner Prize. He was nominated in 1984, 1987 and 1988, and then won the award in 1989 for White Water Line. He lives and works in Bristol, the city in which he was born.
Go to Profile#4306
Massimo Pinzani
#112759
Overall Influence
#4307
Muhammad Nawaz Tahir
#112775
Overall Influence
#4308
Richard Anuszkiewicz
#18216
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Richard Joseph Anuszkiewicz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Life and work Anuszkiewicz was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of Victoria and Adam Anuszkiewicz, who worked in a paper mill. His parents were Polish immigrants. He first studied art under Joseph Plavcan while still in high school, later describing him as his most significant influence. Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio , and then with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut , where he earned his Masters of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#4309
Finale Doshi-Velez
#97138
Overall Influence
Finale Doshi-Velez is a computer scientist and the John L. Loeb Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She works on machine learning, computational statistics and healthcare.
Go to Profile#4310
Joe Simon
#24054
Overall Influence
1913 - 2011 (98 years)
Joseph Henry Simon was an American comic book writer, artist, editor, and publisher. Simon created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s–1940s Golden Age of Comic Books and served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics.
Go to Profile#4311
Jiuping Xu
#112856
Overall Influence
#4312
Priya Narasimhan
#86322
Overall Influence
Priya Narasimhan is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is also the CEO and founder of YinzCam, a U.S.-based technology company that provides the mobile fan experience for a number of professional sports teams and leagues in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Go to Profile#4313
William Kaufmann
#35236
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
William Weed Kaufmann was an American nuclear strategist and adviser to seven defense secretaries, who advocated for a shift from the strategy of massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in the event of a nuclear strike.
Go to Profile#4314
Johannes Schöning
#112468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Johannes Schöning is a computer scientist best known for his research in human-computer interaction, geoinformatics and mobile computing and was awarded with the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for humanitarian contributions within Computer Science and Informatics in 2012. He is a professor at the University of Bremen in Germany. He owns a "Lichtenberg-Professur" of the Volkswagen Foundation.
Go to Profile#4315
Taro Kawai
#112878
Overall Influence
#4316
Diana Marculescu
#93358
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Diana Marculescu is the Department Chair and Motorola Regents Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering #2 at the University of Texas at Austin. She was formerly the David Edward Schramm Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the first female chair in the department's history.
Go to Profile#4317
Terry Wogan
#24296
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Sir Michael Terence Wogan was an Irish-British radio and television broadcaster who worked for the BBC in the UK for most of his career. Between 1993 and his semi-retirement in December 2009, his BBC Radio 2 weekday breakfast programme Wake Up to Wogan regularly drew an estimated eight million listeners. He was believed to be the most listened-to radio broadcaster in Europe.
Go to Profile#4318
Virgil Cantini
#54222
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Virgil David Cantini was an American enamelist, sculptor and educator. He was well known for innovation with enamel and steel and received both local and national recognition for his work, including honorary awards, competitive prizes and commissions, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Cantini long served as a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, where he helped to create the Department of Studio Arts. A longtime resident of the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cantini died on May 2, 2009, at the age of 90. Today, many of his large scale works are on disp...
Go to Profile#4319
Yuichi Motai
#17034
Overall Influence
Yuichi Motai is a Japanese researcher, professor, and book author. He serves as director of the Sensory Intelligence Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University and as an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Motai is a past professor at University of Vermont; He was a visiting faculty of Air Force Research Lab at Hanscom MA, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
Go to Profile#4320
Mark Leckey
#38377
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mark Leckey is a British contemporary artist. His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore and Industrial Light and Magic , for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize.
Go to Profile#4321
Qiang Ji
#112619
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Qiang Ji from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, United States, was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to automatic facial image processing and affective computing.
Go to Profile#4322
Salima Hashmi
#15680
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Salima Hashmi is a Pakistanii painter, artist, former college professor, anti-nuclear weapons activist and former caretaker minister in Sethi caretaker ministry. She has served for four years as a professor and the dean of National College of Arts. She is the eldest daughter of the renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British-born wife Alys Faiz.
Go to Profile#4323
Steve Kurtz
#21067
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Steve Kurtz is an American artist and co-founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble . His work with CAE is considered pioneering in the areas of politically engaged art, interventionist practices, and cultural research and action in the field of biotechnology and ecological struggle. He is also a writer and educator.
Go to Profile#4324
Joseph Majdalani
#44519
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Joseph Majdalani is an Lebanese-American professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He began his career at Marquette University, before serving as both the Jack D. Whitfield Professor of High Speed Flows and Arnold Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. He then served as the Auburn Alumni Engineering Council Endowed Professor and Chair, and is currently the Hugh and Loeda Francis Chair of Excellence in Aerospace Engineering at Auburn University.
Go to Profile#4325
George Radin
#60205
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
George Radin was an American computer scientist. He gained his BA in English Literature from Brooklyn College in 1951, followed by an MA from Columbia University in 1952 and an MSc in mathematics from City University of New York in 1961. In 1963 he got a job with the IBM Advanced Computer Utilization Department, where he helped develop the PL/I programming language and design the OS/360 and TSS/360 systems. In 1980, he was appointed an IBM Fellow.
Go to Profile#4326
Robert K. Colwell
#112992
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
#4327
Chelsea Finn
#112996
Overall Influence
#4328
Kay Tan
#100677
Overall Influence
Kay Tan from the National University of Singapore, Singapore was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2014 for contributions to evolutionary multiobjective optimization.
Go to Profile#4329
Qing Zhao
#79706
Overall Influence
Qing Zhao is the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell, she held positions as a Systems Engineer at Aware, Incorporated and on the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at the University of California at Davis. She is expert on sequential decision-making under uncertainty with a focus on infrastructure networks and communication systems.
Go to Profile#4330
David R Kaplan
#113023
Overall Influence
#4331
Ganesh Nagaraju
#42353
Overall Influence
Ganesh Nagaraju is an Indian biochemist, geneticist, cancer biologist and a full professor at the Department of Biochemistry of the Indian Institute of Science. He has been studying DNA damage responses in mammalian cells, and mechanisms underlying chromosome instability genetic diseases and cancer. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2015. In 2018, Nagaraju received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Biological Sciences from CSIR. This ...
Go to Profile#4332
Sukumar Nandi
#88855
Overall Influence
Professor Sukumar Nandi is senior member of IEEE and is in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He did his Ph.D. from IIT Kharagpur under Professor P. Pal Chaudhri. He joined IIT Guwahati, and has been teaching there since 1995. He is also a member of the Board of Governors of IIT Guwahati.
Go to Profile#4333
Ross D. Crosby
#113097
Overall Influence
#4334
Christian Theobalt
#113099
Overall Influence
#4335
Takao Shimizu
#113113
Overall Influence
#4336
Marco Conti
#113115
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#4337
Chen Jin
#79893
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Chen Jin is a Chinese computer scientist. Chen was born in Putian, Fujian, in 1968, along with a twin brother. He earned a bachelor's degree from Tongji University in Shanghai and in 1991, moved to the United States to study computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1998, he earned a Ph.D. there while working at Motorola's Austin research center. Chen moved back to China in 2000 and worked at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Go to Profile#4338
Miodrag Potkonjak
#113128
Overall Influence
#4339
Jesper deClaville Christiansen
#50295
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jesper deClaville Christiansen is a Danish professor in Materials Science and Technology. Professor Christiansen is known for his work in the field of mechanics of polymers, diffusion, rheology and micro and nano composites especially.
Go to Profile#4340
Stefanos P. Zafeiriou
#113139
Overall Influence
#4341
Derek K. Jones
#113155
Overall Influence
#4342
Toshio Suda
#113174
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#4343
Insup Lee
#110196
Overall Influence
Insup Lee is the Cecilia Fitler Moore Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, United States. He is also the Director and co-founder of the PRECISE Center.
Go to Profile#4344
Hiromi Yamashita
#113194
Overall Influence
#4345
Qin Wei
#113202
Overall Influence
#4346
Toshio Kamiya
#113205
Overall Influence
#4347
Jerry P. Nolan
#113247
Overall Influence
#4348
Mohit M. Bansal
#113279
Overall Influence
#4349
Domenico Corrado
#113303
Overall Influence
#4350
Sanjiv Kaul
#113318
Overall Influence
