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,
#4451
Richard A. Caruana
#114807
Overall Influence
#4452
Tony Sinclair
#69476
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Ronald Entrican Sinclair is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of British Columbia. Education and early life The son of Sir Ronald Ormiston Sinclair, Tony Sinclair spent his early childhood in the African bush in Tanzania, where his love for Africa and animals led him to study for degrees in zoology at Pembroke College, Oxford. For his doctoral dissertation, Sinclair conducted research into the ecology of African Buffalo under Niko Tinbergen at the University of Oxford with supervision from Hugh Lamprey at the Serengeti Research Institute.
Go to Profile#4453
Toby Howard
#77184
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Toby L. J. Howard is an Honorary Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK. He was appointed Lecturer in 1985, and was Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department 2011–2019. He retired from the University in 2020 and was appointed to an Honorary position.
Go to Profile#4454
Lothar Ley
#114841
Overall Influence
#4455
Jessica Staddon
#99579
Overall Influence
Jessica Nicola Staddon is an American computer scientist with broad research interests that include cryptography, human–computer interaction, information visualization, coding theory, and information privacy. She is a research scientist at Google, and an adjunct professor of computer science at North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#4456
Daniel Rosenfeld
#114870
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#4457
Kevin Crowston
#114876
Overall Influence
#4458
Blake Hannaford
#114882
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#4459
Xiangnan He
#114895
Overall Influence
#4460
Charles W. Reynolds
#114914
Overall Influence
#4461
Antonio Girolami
#114934
Overall Influence
#4462
Edward Tipping
#114940
Overall Influence
#4463
Tetsuya Taga
#114967
Overall Influence
#4464
Stuart K. Card
#114997
Overall Influence
#4465
William Amin Ghali
#115037
Overall Influence
#4466
Cesare Hassan
#115042
Overall Influence
#4467
Lynne S. Taylor
#115100
Overall Influence
#4468
Sue Whitesides
#65561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Sue Hays Whitesides is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, a professor emeritus of computer science and the chair of the computer science department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research specializations include computational geometry and graph drawing.
Go to Profile#4469
Barry B. Hughes
#37104
Overall Influence
Barry B. Hughes is the John Evans Professor at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is a senior scientist, mentor and founder of the Pardee Center for International Futures, a center for long-term, systemic thinking on political, economic, social and environmental issues. Hughes has spent the majority of his career developing the International Futures global integrated assessment model. This model has been used by a wide range of international organizations and governments, including the European Commission, the National Intelligence Council, the United St...
Go to Profile#4470
Umeshwar Dayal
#115141
Overall Influence
#4471
Robert A. Kowalski
#115154
Overall Influence
#4472
Scott Pakin
#85747
Overall Influence
#4473
David H. Phillips
#115157
Overall Influence
#4474
Wanderley De Souza
#115158
Overall Influence
#4475
Robert Motherwell
#2287
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Go to Profile#4476
Daphna Hacker
#22137
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Daphna Hacker is a full professor at the Tel Aviv University law faculty and Women and Gender Studies Program. After publishing Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization, Hacker was awarded the 2018 LSA Jacob Book prize.
Go to Profile#4477
Richard J. Hayes
#115166
Overall Influence
#4478
Remo Panaccione
#115182
Overall Influence
#4479
Ricardo Armentano
#60004
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ricardo Luis Armentano Feijoo is an Uruguayan professor and researcher who has worked in biomedical engineering and cardiovascular systems. He currently serves as the director of the GIBIO research group at the National Technological University — Buenos Aires Regional Faculty . Also he is the director of the Department of Biological Engineering, University of the Republic . He has two doctoral degrees, two post-doctoral degrees, and has authored more than 300 research articles and 20 books/book chapters.
Go to Profile#4480
Claus E. Heinrich
#21331
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Claus E. Heinrich is a German manager, entrepreneur, who is an honorary professor for operations research at both the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Mannheim and served as board member of SAP between 1996 and 2009. Since 2009 he serves as honorary senator of the Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#4481
Johan De Kleer
#115264
Overall Influence
#4482
Sheila McIlraith
#111351
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sheila McIlraith is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in Artificial Intelligence . She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada CIFAR AI Chair , and Associate Director and Research Lead of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Go to Profile#4483
Evan Wood
#115292
Overall Influence
#4484
Harrison Hooker Barrett
#115309
Overall Influence
#4485
Amira Klip
#115349
Overall Influence
#4486
Masahiro Murakami
#115366
Overall Influence
#4487
John Sidney
#115370
Overall Influence
#4488
Naofumi Mukaida
#115396
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
#4489
Mogens Kilian
#115410
Overall Influence
#4490
D. Batra
#115414
Overall Influence
#4491
Daniel Patrick Whittlesey Ellis
#115420
Overall Influence
#4492
Juho Hamari
#115430
Overall Influence
#4493
Donald Judd
#3150
Overall Influence
1928 - 1994 (66 years)
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" . Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement.
Go to Profile#4494
Leon J. Osterweil
#107474
Overall Influence
Leon Joel Osterweil is an American computer scientist noted for his research on software engineering. Biography Osterweil received a B. A. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1965. He received a M.A. in mathematics in 1970 and a Ph.D in mathematics in 1971 from the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#4495
Craig Dietrich
#78932
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Craig Dietrich is a digital artist and educator affiliated with Occidental College in Los Angeles. History Dietrich began his multimedia career as an Exhibit Engineering Assistant at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California. He attended Adrian C. Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California. In 2008, he was a professor in the University of Maine New Media Department and continues as a researcher at UMaine's Still Water lab. Beginning in 2009, before moving to the Claremont Colleges, he was on the faculty of the Division of Media Arts and Practice, part of the School of Cinematic ...
Go to Profile#4496
Sue Sentance
#100581
Overall Influence
Susan Sentance is a British computer scientist, educator and director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Her research investigates a wide range of issues computer science education, teacher education and the professional development of those teaching computing. In 2020 Sentance was awarded a Suffrage Science award for her work on computing education.
Go to Profile#4497
Alison Darcy
#45423
Overall Influence
Alison Darcy is a research psychologist and technologist. She is the Founder and President of Woebot Health, a company which provides digital therapeutics and behavioural health products. Early life and education Darcy was an undergraduate student in Ireland at the University College Dublin, where she specialised in psychology. After completing her studies, Darcy became interested in computer science, so moved to London to work in an investment bank as a software developer. The investment bank was acquired by a larger bank during the dot com crash, leaving Darcy looking for new options. In par...
Go to Profile#4498
Deborah Frincke
#79600
Overall Influence
Deborah A. Frincke is an American academic and computer scientist specializing in computer security who is the associate laboratories director of national security programs at Sandia National Laboratories.
Go to Profile#4499
Massimo Falconi
#115642
Overall Influence
#4500
Tony Lindeberg
#115667
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
