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,
#4501
Zibin Zheng
#115686
Overall Influence
#4502
Jane Liu
#87134
Overall Influence
Jane Win-Shih Liu is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her work on real-time computing. She is a professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Shun Hing Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University, a distinguished visiting fellow of the Academia Sinica, and the former editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers.
Go to Profile#4503
Biswajit Sarkar
#115703
Overall Influence
#4504
You Han Bae
#115707
Overall Influence
#4505
Yuji Sano
#115716
Overall Influence
#4506
Diane Souvaine
#71909
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Diane L. Souvaine is a professor of computer science and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Tufts University. Contributions Souvaine's research is in computational geometry and its applications, including robust non-parametric statistics and molecular modeling. She has also encouraged women and minorities to study and pursue careers in mathematics and the sciences and advocated gender neutrality in science teaching.
Go to Profile#4507
Haruhiko Okumura
#106022
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
is a Japanese professor. His public domain LZSS implementation from 1989 is used in many products. He also worked on an adding an arithmetic-encoding step to form LZARI, the precursor to LZH.
Go to Profile#4508
Lucila Ohno-Machado
#106470
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lucila Ohno-Machado is a biomedical engineer and Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#4509
Thomas Kohnen
#115788
Overall Influence
#4510
Alessandro Rambaldi
#115795
Overall Influence
#4511
Stephen Buckland
#92100
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Terrence Buckland is a British statistician and professor at the University of St Andrews. He is best known for his work on distance sampling, a widely used technique for estimating the size of animal populations. He has also made significant contributions in the following areas: bootstrap resampling methods; modelling the dynamics of wild animal populations and measuring biodiversity.
Go to Profile#4512
Jian Ma
#31231
Overall Influence
Jian Ma is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a faculty member in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department. His lab develops machine learning algorithms to study the structure and function of the human genome and cellular organization and their implications for evolution, health and disease. During his Ph.D. and postdoc training, he developed algorithms to reconstruct the ancestral mammalian genome. His research ...
Go to Profile#4513
Ahmad-reza A. Sadeghi
#115837
Overall Influence
#4514
David A. Landgrebe
#115852
Overall Influence
#4515
Karl Aberer
#115866
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#4516
Peter K Gregersen
#115878
Overall Influence
#4517
Diane Pozefsky
#84922
Overall Influence
Diane P. Pozefsky is a research professor at the University of North Carolina in the department of Computer Science. Pozefsky was awarded the Women in Technology International 2011 Hall of Fame Award for contributions to the fields of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#4518
Birte Svensson
#115901
Overall Influence
#4519
Santo Fortunato
#115902
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
#4520
David K. C. Cooper
#115904
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
#4521
Hiroshi Itoh
#115921
Overall Influence
#4522
Csaba Szepesv'ari
#115923
Overall Influence
#4523
Zvi Schwartz
#115994
Overall Influence
#4524
Sofya Raskhodnikova
#110102
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Sofya Raskhodnikova is a Belarusian and American theoretical computer scientist. She is known for her research in sublinear-time algorithms, information privacy, property testing, and approximation algorithms, and was one of the first to study differentially private analysis of graphs. She is a professor of computer science at Boston University.
Go to Profile#4525
Chander Prakash
#116001
Overall Influence
#4526
Zvi Lotker
#34522
Overall Influence
Zvi Lotker is an Israeli computer scientist and communications systems engineer who works in the fields of digital humanities, artificial intelligence, distributed computing, network algorithms, and communication networks. He is an associate professor in the Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University.
Go to Profile#4527
Baowen Li
#116026
Overall Influence
#4528
Julia Chuzhoy
#70533
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Julia Chuzhoy is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, known for her research on approximation algorithms and graph theory. Education and career Chuzhoy earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, 2000, and 2004 respectively. Her dissertation, on approximation algorithms, was supervised by Seffi Naor. She has been at the Toyota Technological Institute since 2007, and also holds a position in the Computer Science Department of the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#4529
Olivier Gascuel
#66993
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Olivier Gascuel is a French researcher in bioinformatics. He is a research director at the CNRS. His work focuses in particular on phylogeny. He was the director of the Centre for Bioinformatics, Biostatistics and Integrative Biology at the Pasteur Institute from 2015 till 2020. In 2021, he joined the Institute of Systematics, Evolution, Biodiversity at the National Museum of Natural History, France.
Go to Profile#4530
Shunichi Takeda
#116035
Overall Influence
#4531
Muhammad Mamdani
#116054
Overall Influence
Muhammad Mamdani is a Canadian professor, pharmacist and epidemiologist, known for contributions to pharmacoeconomics, drug safety and application of data analytics and artificial intelligence to medical systems.
Go to Profile#4532
David Ames
#103366
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David John Ames is an Australian psychiatrist and academic. In addition to being Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, he is a part-time consultant psychiatrist at a number of hospitals in Melbourne, a professorial fellow with The National Ageing Research Institute and a research fellow at the Howard Florey Institute. Over his career, Ames has written over 56 book chapters, edited 22 books, and has published over 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Ames' main research and clinical interests have been the detection and management of Alzheimer's ...
Go to Profile#4533
Andy Brass
#87457
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Andrew M. Brass is a Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Manchester in the Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Life Sciences. Education Brass was educated at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his PhD on Solid-state physics in 1987.
Go to Profile#4534
Jiayi Ma
#116076
Overall Influence
#4535
Bonnie Ann Wallace
#107464
Overall Influence
Bonnie Ann Wallace, FRSC is a British and American biophysicist and biochemist. She is a professor of molecular biophysics in the department of biological sciences, formerly the department of crystallography, at Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
Go to Profile#4536
Javier Jiménez
#116086
Overall Influence
#4537
Eitan Zemel
#44194
Overall Influence
Eitan Zemel is the Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives and the W. Edwards Deming Professor of Quality and Productivity at New York University's Stern School of Business. He also teaches courses in operations management and operations strategy at NYU. Professor Zemel also teaches for the Master of Science in Business Analytics Program for Executives , which is jointly hosted by NYU Stern and NYU Shanghai.
Go to Profile#4538
Peter N. Schlegel
#116151
Overall Influence
#4539
Allan L Goldstein
#116163
Overall Influence
#4540
Bernard Iung
#116170
Overall Influence
#4542
Sergey Aleynikov
#25266
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sergey Aleynikov is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer. Between 2009 and 2016, he was prosecuted by NY Federal and State jurisdictions for the same conduct of allegedly copying proprietary computer source code from his employer, Goldman Sachs, before joining a competing firm. His first prosecution in federal court in New York ultimately resulted in acquittal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The outcome of his second prosecution and trial in New York state court was a split verdict dismissed by court, which acquitted him on all counts. One count in that or...
Go to Profile#4543
Annie K. Powell
#116221
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
#4544
Gregory J Riely
#116244
Overall Influence
#4545
Junzhou Huang
#116260
Overall Influence
#4546
Surajit Chaudhuri
#116271
Overall Influence
#4547
Syed Waqar Jaffry
#67013
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Syed Waqar ul Qounain Jaffry is a Pakistani academic and researcher in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. He is a full Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Director of National Centre of Artificial Intelligence, and Chairman of the Department of Information Technology at the University of the Punjab, Lahore.
Go to Profile#4548
Yu-long Qiao
#116284
Overall Influence
#4549
Tomohiro Kurosaki
#116316
Overall Influence
#4550
Somesh Jha
#116331
Overall Influence
