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,
#4801
Kenneth L. Mcmillan
#119994
Overall Influence
#4802
Eytan Ruppin
#120002
Overall Influence
#4803
Imrich Chlamtac
#120004
Overall Influence
#4804
Charles Ofria
#33825
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Dr. Charles A. Ofria is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, the director of the Digital Evolution Lab there, and Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. He is the son of the late Charles Ofria, who developed the first fully integrated shop management program for the automotive repair industry. Ofria attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Ward Melville High School in 1991. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University in 1994, and a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#4805
Nikhil Ranjan Pal
#120026
Overall Influence
#4806
Marco Gobbetti
#120033
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#4807
Ahmad Esmaillzadeh
#120047
Overall Influence
#4808
George Segal
#9223
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
George Segal was an American painter and sculptor associated with the pop art movement. He was presented with the United States National Medal of Arts in 1999. Works Although Segal started his art career as a painter, his best known works are cast life-size figures and the tableaux the figures inhabited. In place of traditional casting techniques, Segal pioneered the use of plaster bandages as a sculptural medium. In this process, he first wrapped a model with bandages in sections, then removed the hardened forms and put them back together with more plaster to form a hollow shell. These ...
Go to Profile#4809
Josep Torrellas
#108914
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Josep Torrellas is Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar in the Department of Computer Science and a research faculty for the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Torrellas's research area is computer architecture, focusing on speculative multithreading, multiprocessor organization, integration of processors and memory, and architectural support for software debuggability and machine reliability. He has been involved in the Stanford DASH and the Illinois Cedar multiprocessor projects, and led the Illinois Aggressive COMA and FlexRAM Inte...
Go to Profile#4810
Rick Griffin
#9957
Overall Influence
1944 - 1991 (47 years)
Richard Alden "Rick" Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best-known posters and album covers such as Aoxomoxoa. His work within the surfing subculture included both film posters and his comic strip, Murphy.
Go to Profile#4811
Pascal Boileau
#120101
Overall Influence
#4812
Joe Sinnott
#25111
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Joseph Leonard Sinnott was an American comic book artist. Working primarily as an inker, Sinnott is best known for his long stint on Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four, from 1965 to 1981 , initially over the pencils of Jack Kirby. During his 60 years as a Marvel freelance artist and then remote worker salaried artist, Sinnott inked virtually every major title, with notable runs on The Avengers, The Defenders, and Thor.
Go to Profile#4813
Robert Wilburn
#59753
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert C. Wilburn is the director of Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College's Washington, DC campus as well as a Distinguished Service Professor at the college. Prior to this position he was the first president and Chief Executive Officer of the Gettysburg Foundation. He served as president and CEO of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and as president of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Under his leadership, the number of customers, members, donors, and volunteers increased sharply within each organization. The merger of the Buhl Science Center with the Carnegie Institute and the construction of a new $40 million Carnegie Science Center are among his notable accomplishments.
Go to Profile#4814
T. E. Baldwin
#120122
Overall Influence
#4815
Hamid Naderi Yeganeh
#37891
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Hamid Naderi Yeganeh is an Iranian mathematical artist and digital artist. He is known for using mathematical formulas to create drawings of real-life objects, intricate and symmetrical illustrations, animations, fractals and tessellations. Naderi Yeganeh uses mathematics as the main tool to create artworks. Therefore, his artworks can be totally described by mathematical concepts. Mathematical concepts he uses in his work include trigonometric functions, exponential function, Fibonacci sequence, sawtooth wave, etc.
Go to Profile#4816
M. Shamim Hossain
#120134
Overall Influence
#4817
Thomas Aaron Gulliver
#120148
Overall Influence
#4818
James Chesebro
#56744
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
James W. Chesebro was Distinguished Professor of Telecommunications in the Department of Telecommunications at Ball State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1972. Previous educational institutions Chesebro taught at several institutions, including:Indiana State UniversityNorth Dakota State UniversityBall State UniversityGeorge Mason UniversityQueens College of the City University of New YorkUniversity of Puerto RicoTemple UniversityUniversity of MinnesotaConcordia College
Go to Profile#4819
Michael Bronstein
#119264
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Michael Bronstein is an Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is a computer science professor at the University of Oxford. Biography Bronstein received his PhD from the Technion in 2007. Since 2010, he has been a professor at University of Lugano, Switzerland, affiliated with the Institute of Computational Science and IDSIA. Between 2018 and 2021, he held the Chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. In 2022, he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as the DeepMind Professor of Artifici...
Go to Profile#4820
Mark T. Maybury
#81315
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mark Thomas Maybury is an American computer scientist and administrator who is currently the Chief Technology Officer of Stanley Black & Decker. Previously, he was at the MITRE Corporation, joining them in 1987 and serving as Executive Director from 1998–2010. A former Air Force officer, he was also the Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force, Washington, D.C., from 2010 to 2013, where he was a scientific adviser to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Secretary of the U.S. Air Force, providing assessments on a wide range of scientific and technical issues affecting the Air Force mi...
Go to Profile#4821
Kang Zhang
#52585
Overall Influence
Kang Zhang is a Chinese-American ophthalmologist specializing in ophthalmic genetics and aging processes in the eye. He is currently a Professor of the Faculty of Medicine at Macau University of Science and Technology. He was previously a Professor of Ophthalmology and the Founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang is particularly known for his work on lanosterol, stem cell research , gene editing, and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#4822
Thomas Attin
#120246
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
#4823
Gui-hai Chen
#120280
Overall Influence
#4824
Kenjirou Higashi
#120281
Overall Influence
#4825
Robert N. Luben
#120284
Overall Influence
#4826
Junji Konishi
#120290
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
#4827
Suzanna Lewis
#44196
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Suzanna E. Lewis was a scientist and Principal investigator at the Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until her retirement in 2019. Lewis led the development of open standards and software for genome annotation and ontologies.
Go to Profile#4828
James Rosenquist
#3618
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
James Albert Rosenquist was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist's pieces often explored the role of advertising and consumer culture in art and society, utilizing techniques he learned making commercial art to depict popular cultural icons and mundane everyday objects. While his works have often been compared to those from other key figures of the pop art movement, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist's pieces were unique in the way that they often employed elements of surrealism using fragments of advertisements and cultural imagery to emphasize the overwhelming nature of ads.
Go to Profile#4829
Jesper Hallas
#120313
Overall Influence
#4830
Volker Brinkmann
#120357
Overall Influence
#4831
Shinji Uemoto
#120362
Overall Influence
#4832
Jack A. Taylor
#120381
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#4833
Sebastiano Vigna
#110437
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Sebastiano Vigna is a professor of computer science at the University of Milan. He created the xorshift+ and xoroshiro128+ pseudorandom number generators. Xorshift128+ is used in the JavaScript engines of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. In 1991, he received a laurea in Mathematics and in 1996 a Ph.D. in computer science; both from the University of Milan. He developed UbiCrawler, a web crawler, in a collaboration with others.
Go to Profile#4834
Michael L. Pace
#120423
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#4835
Martin Kavaliers
#120435
Overall Influence
#4836
Aaron Fenster
#120446
Overall Influence
#4837
Paulo Andrade Lotufo
#120471
Overall Influence
#4838
Kelvyn Jones
#46649
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kelvyn Jones, is a British professor of human quantitative geography at the University of Bristol. He focuses on the quantitative modelling of social science data with complex structure through the application of multilevel models; especially in relation to change and health outcomes. Uniquely he is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of the Social Sciences and the Learned Society of Wales.
Go to Profile#4839
Ping-hui Liao
#28184
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ping-hui Liao is Chuan-liu Chair Professor in Taiwan Studies at the Department of Literature of the University of California, San Diego . Prior to taking the chair professor position at UCSD, he was a distinguished professor at National Tsing Hua University and also Director General of the National Science Council Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. He was also a visiting professor at Columbia University during the 2001–02 academic year and before that a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1996-97 and Princeton University in 1991–92. He graduated from Tunghai University in 1976.
Go to Profile#4840
Winfried Häuser
#120480
Overall Influence
#4841
Yousef Saleh Khader
#120485
Overall Influence
#4842
Vadim Komkov
#31509
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Vadim Komkov was born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in Poland after his parents died in the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a member of the Polish RAF during WWII. He was stationed at Hucknall Aerodrome, and was sent to RAF Wrexham to practice flying the Avro Lancaster and the Supermarine Spitfire. He later became a mechanical engineer in London, where he met and married his first wife Joyce Radford, of Long Eaton, England, in 1946. He received his Diplom Ingenieur from Warsaw Polytechnic in 1948. He and Joyce had their first child after the war and the family moved to emigrated to Zambia where he worked for the Rhokana Mining Company.
Go to Profile#4843
Mukul Sharma
#64782
Overall Influence
Mukul M. Sharma is a professor who holds the W. A. "Tex" Moncrief, Jr. Centennial Chair in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and then M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Southern California in 1981 and 1985 respectively. He has been on the faculty at the University of Texas for the past 37 years and served as chairman of the department from 2001 to 2005.
Go to Profile#4844
Motoaki Seki
#120563
Overall Influence
#4845
Dennis Shasha
#59478
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Dennis Elliot Shasha is an American professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a division of New York University. He is also an associate director of NYU WIRELESS. His current areas of research include work done with biologists on pattern discovery for microarrays, combinatorial design, network inference, and protein docking; work done with physicists, musicians, and professionals in finance on algorithms for time series; and work on database applications in untrusted environments. Other areas of interest include database tuning as well as tree and graph ...
Go to Profile#4846
Nobu Tamura
#31986
Overall Influence
Nobumichi Tamura, often shortened to Nobu Tamura, is a French-born Japanese American paleoartist and physicist. He currently lives in California, United States. Biography Tamura became a physicist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is an artist specializing in the field of paleoart.
Go to Profile#4847
Alistair Moffat
#120593
Overall Influence
#4848
Bill Tomlinson
#71816
Overall Influence
William M. "Bill" Tomlinson is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a researcher in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He studies the fields of environmental informatics, human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems and computer-supported learning. His book Greening through IT examines the ways in which information technology can help people think and act on the broad scales of time, space, and complexity necessary for us to address the world's current environmental issues. In addition, he has authored dozens of papers across a range of journals and conferences in computing, the learning sciences, and the law.
Go to Profile#4849
Jacob Schaefer
#120620
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
#4850
Alessandro Piccolo
#120622
Overall Influence
