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,

#4601

John Warnock

John Warnock
#91231
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Edward Warnock was an American computer scientist, inventor, technology businessman, and philanthropist best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke in 1982. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company. Although he retired as CEO in 2001, he continued to co-chair the Adobe Board of Directors with Geschke until 2017. Warnock pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the...
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#4602

Dan Meyerstein

#19589
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Dan Meyerstein FRSC is an Israeli academic and former president of Ariel University. Biography Meyerstein was born in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. He earned an M.Sc. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Physical Chemistry , and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the school as well .
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#4603

Gunnar A. Niklasson

#117088
Overall Influence
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#4604

Lori A. Clarke

#108975
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Lori A. Clarke is an American computer scientist noted for her research on software engineering. Biography Clarke received a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1969. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1976.
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#4605

Stefano Taddei

#117105
Overall Influence
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#4606

Okyay Kaynak

#117134
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
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#4607

Camille Utterback

Camille Utterback
#65716
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Camille Utterback is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art. One of her most well-known installations is the work Text Rain .
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#4608

Rakesh Agrawal

#60099
Overall Influence
Rakesh Agrawal is a chemical engineer known for contributions to separations, cryogenic gas separation and liquefaction, and for contributions to renewable energy including the conversion of biomass to chemicals and fuels, inorganic solar cell fabrication, and the synergistic use of solar energy. He is the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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#4609

Akira Sakai

#117170
Overall Influence
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#4610

Paul B. Jacobsen

#117175
Overall Influence
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#4611

Lutgarde Thijs

#117182
Overall Influence
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#4612

Adji Bousso Dieng

#64677
Overall Influence
Adji Bousso Dieng is a Senegalese Computer Scientist and Statistician working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Her research bridges probabilistic graphical models and deep learning to discover meaningful structure from unlabelled data. She is currently an Artificial Intelligence Research Scientist at Google Brain in Mountain View, California. In 2021, she will start her tenure-track faculty position at Princeton University becoming the first Black female faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the first Black faculty member ever in the Department of Computer Science.
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#4613

S. Muthukrishnan

#111061
Overall Influence
S. Muthukrishnan is a computer scientist of Indian origin, known for his work in streaming algorithms, auction design, and pattern matching. He is vice president of sponsored products, Amazon Advertising.
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#4614

Hiroshi Kimura

#117243
Overall Influence
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#4615

John B Wong

#117262
Overall Influence
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#4616

Nick Goldman

#74025
Overall Influence
Nicholas Goldman is a group leader and senior scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute , located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, England. He began working at the EBI in 2002, and became a senior scientist there in 2009. His group's research focuses on evolutionary genetics and genomics. He and his EBI colleague Ewan Birney, along with other researchers, developed a tool for DNA digital data storage, on which they successfully encoded all the sonnets of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, a PDF of the 1953 paper "Molecu...
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#4617

Thomas L. Carroll

#117268
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#4618

Claude Delmas

#117272
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
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#4619

Vijay Kingswood Varadharajan

#117291
Overall Influence
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#4620

I. V. Laptev

#117293
Overall Influence
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#4621

Ralf P. Steinmetz

#117298
Overall Influence
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#4622

Sheelagh Carpendale

#108743
Overall Influence
Sheelagh Carpendale is a Canadian artist and computer scientist working in the field of information visualization and human-computer interaction. Profession Carpendale is a professor at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, where she holds an NSERC/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies. She was previously a professor at University of Calgary, where she held a Canada Research Chair in Information Visualization and an NSERC/AITF/SMART Industrial Research Chair in Interactive Technologies. She directs the Innovations in Visualization research group. A...
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#4623

Salvatore Siena

#117355
Overall Influence
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#4624

William E. Kraus

#117369
Overall Influence
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#4625

Michal Feldman

#72987
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Michal Feldman is a full professor of Computer Science and the Chair of Computation and Economics at Tel Aviv University, the head of Economics and Computation lab, and a visiting researcher in Microsoft Research Israel. Michal’s research focuses on algorithmic game theory, an area that lies in the intersection of computer science, microeconomics and game theory. Among other topics, she studies auction theory, mechanism design, algorithm design, the price of anarchy, and e-commerce. Michal is an alumna of the Israel Young Academy and of the Global Young Academy. Her research is funded by pre...
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#4626

Tetsuro Majima

#117397
Overall Influence
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#4627

Jiliang. Tang

#117401
Overall Influence
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#4628

Ewa Deelman

#99708
Overall Influence
Ewa Deelman is an American computer scientist specializing in distributed computing and cloud computing for applications in scientific computing. Her contributions include leading the design of the Pegasus scientific workflow management system, used by the LIGO scientific collaboration to detect gravitational waves from binary black holes. She is a research professor of computer science in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and a principal scientist at the Information Sciences Institute, both part of the University of Southern California.
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#4629

Ellen W. Zegura

#102132
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ellen Witte Zegura is an American computer scientist who works as a professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, and was the founding chair of the school from 2007 to 2012. Her research concerns a combination of computer network research and computing for social good.
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#4630

Adisak Mekkittikul

#74240
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Adisak Mekkittikul received his B.Eng. from King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Thailand and M.S. in electrical engineering from Wichita State University. He completed the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California in 1999, after defending dissertation titled "Scheduling Non-Uniform Traffic in High Speed Packet Switchers and Routers" which he wrote while being mentored by Nicholas William McKeown. He was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Berkeley Concept Research Corp.
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#4631

Stephen L. Hoffman

#92455
Overall Influence
Stephen L. Hoffman is an American physician-scientist, tropical medicine specialist and vaccinologist, who is the founder and chief executive and scientific officer of Sanaria Inc., a company dedicated to developing PfSPZ vaccines to prevent malaria.
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#4632

Mike Kelley

#10053
Overall Influence
1954 - 2012 (58 years)
Michael Kelley was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion."
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#4633

John P Pierce

#117508
Overall Influence
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#4634

Axel van Lamsweerde

#69228
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Axel van Lamsweerde is a Belgian computer scientist and Professor of Computing Science at the Universite catholique de Louvain, known for his work on requirements engineering and the development of the KAOS goal-oriented modeling language.
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#4635

Burt Goldberg

#28148
Overall Influence
Burt Goldberg is a Clinical Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Goldberg received his B.S. from Pace University, an M.Phil from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cardiff. Prior to retiring from research, his main area of focus was in microbiology.
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#4636

Naresh Magan

#117527
Overall Influence
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#4637

Matthias Augustin

#117546
Overall Influence
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#4638

Thomas E. Spencer

#117550
Overall Influence
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#4639

Zhoupeng Wang

#117581
Overall Influence
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#4640

Tomás Maldonado

Tomás Maldonado
#2056
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Tomás Maldonado was an Argentine painter, designer and thinker, considered one of the main theorists of design theory of the legendary Ulm Model, a design philosophy developed during his tenure at the Ulm School of Design in Germany.
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#4641

Martha Evens

#99097
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Martha Evens is an emeritus professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She worked on the first spelling correction program at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the late 1950s. Evens was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1984.
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#4642

Michael J. Campbell

#117627
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
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#4643

Ludmila Kuncheva

#116815
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ludmila Ilieva Kuncheva is a Bulgarian-British computer scientist known for her research on pattern recognition and machine learning, and particularly on systems that combine results from multiple classifiers. She is professor in computer science at Bangor University in Wales.
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#4644

David Pointcheval

#108632
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
David Pointcheval is a French cryptographer. He is currently a Senior Researcher at CNRS. He is head of the Computer Science Department and Cryptography Laboratory at the École normale supérieure. He is mainly known for his contributions in the area of provable security, including the Forking lemma, the Pointcheval-Stern signature algorithm, and his contributions to Password-authenticated key agreement.
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#4645

Toshifumi Hibi

#117697
Overall Influence
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#4646

Akira Kikuchi

#117770
Overall Influence
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#4647

Sham Kakade

#117778
Overall Influence
Sham Machandranath Kakade is an American computer scientist. He is a Gordon McKay Professor in Computer Science at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Statistics. He co-founded the Algorithmic Foundations of Data Science Institute.
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#4648

José Mauro Volkmer de Castilho

#79025
Overall Influence
1946 - 1998 (52 years)
José Mauro Volkmer de Castilho was a Brazilian scientist, teacher and researcher. Background Castilho began his academic life at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul where he studied engineering. After graduation, in 1971, he went to Rio de Janeiro where he obtained his master's degree in 1973 and Phd in 1982 both on PUC Rio University. José Mauro died of cancer in 1998, he was married and father of three children.
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#4649

Yu-chee Tseng

#117804
Overall Influence
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#4650

Valerie M. Weaver

#112341
Overall Influence
Valerie M. Weaver is a professor and the director of the Center for Bioengineering and Tissue Regeneration in the department of surgery and co-director Bay Area Center for Physical Sciences and Oncology at the University of California San Francisco . She has been working and leading oncology research for more than 20 years. Her scientific contributions have been recognised by different awards. She was the first woman to receive the Shu Chien Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society in 2022, which honours contributions in the cellular and molecular bioengineering field.
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