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,
#4751
Yusu Wang
#63755
Overall Influence
Yusu Wang is a Chinese computer scientist and mathematician who works as a professor at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego . Her research concerns computational geometry and computational topology, including results on discrete Laplace operators, curve simplification, and Fréchet distance.
Go to Profile#4752
Graham H. Pyke
#119314
Overall Influence
#4753
Jean Scholtz
#86092
Overall Influence
Jean Clarice Scholtz is an American computer scientist known for her contributions to human–computer interaction, and particularly for developing the "Common Industry Format" for usability test results while at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Go to Profile#4754
Masaki Otagiri
#119372
Overall Influence
#4755
Murat Uysal
#119389
Overall Influence
#4756
Anil Kumar Gupta
#119428
Overall Influence
#4757
Robert Ditchfield
#119439
Overall Influence
#4758
James H. Clark
#84093
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
James Henry Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in computer graphics led to the development of systems for the fast rendering of three-dimensional computer images.
Go to Profile#4759
George Varghese
#113397
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
George Varghese is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Before joining MSR's lab in Silicon Valley in 2013, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California San Diego, where he led the Internet Algorithms Lab and also worked with the Center for Network Systems and the Center for Internet Epidemiology. He is the author of the textbook Network Algorithmics, published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2004.
Go to Profile#4760
Mathias Ulbricht
#119482
Overall Influence
#4761
Benjamin Fung
#110240
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Benjamin Fung is a Hong Kong-born Canadian computer scientist. Fung holds the positions of Canada Research Chair in Data Mining for Cybersecurity and Full Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University. His research focuses on developing data mining and machine learning methods in the areas of cyber security, data privacy, malware analysis, and authorship analysis.
Go to Profile#4762
Ricardo Galli
#103555
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Dr. Ricardo Adolfo Galli Granada, also known as gallir, is a doctor of computer science at the University of the Balearic Islands, where he teaches operating system design. He is a speaker for the Free Software Foundation and a free software activist.
Go to Profile#4763
Paul Saftig
#119511
Overall Influence
#4764
Gene Amdahl
#87501
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Gene Myron Amdahl was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. He formulated Amdahl's law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.
Go to Profile#4765
Ryuichi Shigemoto
#119537
Overall Influence
#4766
Vaidhyanathan Ramamurthy
#119539
Overall Influence
#4767
David I. Gottlieb
#119560
Overall Influence
#4768
Yoh‐han Pao
#119565
Overall Influence
#4769
Steven D. Johnson
#119580
Overall Influence
#4770
Max Wyss
#119590
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
#4771
Gang Sun
#119605
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#4772
Jack Chow
#54363
Overall Influence
Jack Chow is an American professor of public health. He holds the position of Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College. Chow held a number of global public health offices including positions as the first Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Special Representative of the U.S. Secretary of State on Global HIV/AIDS and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Health and Science. This was a first - "first U.S. diplomat of ambassador rank appointed to a public health mission."
Go to Profile#4773
Alan Selman
#94649
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Alan Louis Selman was a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his research on structural complexity theory, the study of computational complexity in terms of the relation between complexity classes rather than individual algorithmic problems.
Go to Profile#4774
Dan Gode
#38152
Overall Influence
Dhananjay "Dan" Gode is a Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting, Taxation, and Business law at New York University Stern School of Business. He teaches courses in corporate financial accounting, and also teaches for the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program, an alliance of NYU Stern, the London School of Economics and HEC School of Management.
Go to Profile#4775
Humberto Bustince
#119670
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#4776
David P. Fairlie
#119710
Overall Influence
#4777
Suresh Senan
#119711
Overall Influence
#4778
Roberto Merletti
#119722
Overall Influence
#4779
Dipti Srinivasan
#78158
Overall Influence
Dipti Srinivasan is a Singaporean electrical engineer whose research involves renewable energy and smart grids. She is a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and director of the Centre for Green Energy Management & Smart Grid at the National University of Singapore.
Go to Profile#4780
Brice Marden
#8823
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was an American artist generally described as minimalist, although his work has roots in abstract expressionism, color field painting. and lyrical abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#4781
Peter S. Rabinovitch
#119747
Overall Influence
#4782
Clifton Bogardus
#119757
Overall Influence
#4783
Ari Juels
#119766
Overall Influence
#4784
Christophe Cognard
#119783
Overall Influence
#4785
Kwan‐liu Ma
#119784
Overall Influence
#4786
Ernest Hamel
#119808
Overall Influence
#4787
Graham Neubig
#119810
Overall Influence
#4788
Rudi Beyaert
#119816
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
#4789
Stanislav Dusko Ehrlich
#119854
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
#4790
Cho‐jui Hsieh
#119862
Overall Influence
#4791
Daniel Wigdor
#115061
Overall Influence
Professor Daniel J. Wigdor is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He was previously co-director of the university's Dynamic Graphics Project and a visiting associate professor at Cornell Tech. He has co-authored and contributed to several books, including "Brave NUI World" , "The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, Third Edition" , and "Computer Science Handbook, Third Edition" .
Go to Profile#4792
Joseph D. Andrade
#105656
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joseph D. Andrade is an American bioengineer, professor, educator, scientist and writer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Bioengineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Pharmaceutics at University of Utah.
Go to Profile#4793
Wataru Shimizu
#119881
Overall Influence
#4794
Judith Klavans
#83332
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Judith L. Klavans is a linguist and computer scientist. She has been active in academia, industry and government in furthering the development and application of computational approaches to the study of language, with publications in areas including speech synthesis, machine translation, the development of resources and corpus analysis, internet addiction, information retrieval, and automatic summarization. Her technologies have been applied in fields ranging from medical informatics, cybersecurity, database interoperability, cultural heritage institutions and Digital Government.
Go to Profile#4795
Helen C. Frederick
#50804
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Helen C. Frederick is an American artist, curator, and the founder of Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, an arts organization in Maryland. She is known mainly for printed media and large-scale works created by hand papermaking as a medium of expression that often incorporate the use of language. She has curated exhibitions such as Ten Years After 9/11, which respond to issues about the human condition.
Go to Profile#4796
Dennis Oppenheim
#9475
Overall Influence
1938 - 2011 (73 years)
Dennis Oppenheim was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the nature of art, the making of art and the definition of art: a meta-art that arose when strategies of the Minimalists were expanded to focus on site and context. As well as an aesthetic agenda, the work progressed from perceptions of the physical properties of the gallery to the social and political context, largely taking the form of permanent public sculpture in the last two decades of a highly ...
Go to Profile#4797
Mary-Anne Williams
#91120
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mary-Anne Williams FTSE is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia based in the UNSW Business School. She is founder and director of the UNSW Business AI Lab and deputy director of the UNSW AI Institute.
Go to Profile#4798
C. Dianne Martin
#72446
Overall Influence
Carol Dianne Briggs Martin is an American computer scientist, former Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at George Washington University and first Senior Faculty Fellow of the North Carolina Study Center. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina Department of Computer Science and the School of Information and Library Sciences.
Go to Profile#4799
Amedeo Staiano
#119973
Overall Influence
#4800
Maristella Agosti
#95764
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Maristella Agosti , is an Italian researcher and professor. Her research covers retrieval, user engagement, databases, digital cultural heritage, and data engineering. She has published more than 200 papers covering these areas. She also is the Professor in Computer Science at the University of Padua. She was granted the title of Professor Emeritus by Decree of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. She is also a recipient of the Tony Kent Strix Award.
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