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).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#1
Alexander Grothendieck
#38
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Alexander Grothendieck was a French mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.
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André Weil
#59
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
André Weil was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. His influence is due both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark he left on mathematical practice and style, through some of his own works as well as through the Bourbaki group, of which he was one of the principal founders.
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Paul Erdős
#48
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open...
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Eugene Wigner
#21
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
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Jean-Pierre Serre
#115
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.
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Shing-Tung Yau
#87
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
#7
Roger Penrose
#26
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
#8
Terence Tao
#176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
#9
Michael Atiyah
#218
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004.
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Henri Cartan
#316
Overall Influence
1904 - 2008 (104 years)
Henri Paul Cartan was a French mathematician who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology. He was the son of the mathematician Élie Cartan, nephew of mathematician Anna Cartan, oldest brother of composer , physicist and mathematician , and the son-in-law of physicist Pierre Weiss.
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Paul Halmos
#211
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis . He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.
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David Mumford
#335
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
David Bryant Mumford is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry and then for research into vision and pattern theory. He won the Fields Medal and was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He is currently a University Professor Emeritus in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
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Saunders Mac Lane
#274
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Saunders Mac Lane was an American mathematician who co-founded category theory with Samuel Eilenberg. Early life and education Mac Lane was born in Norwich, Connecticut, near where his family lived in Taftville. He was christened "Leslie Saunders MacLane", but "Leslie" fell into disuse because his parents, Donald MacLane and Winifred Saunders, came to dislike it. He began inserting a space into his surname because his first wife found it difficult to type the name without a space. He was the oldest of three brothers; one of his brothers, Gerald MacLane, also became a mathematics professor at Rice University and Purdue University.
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Jean Dieudonné
#363
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Jean Alexandre Eugène Dieudonné was a French mathematician, notable for research in abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and functional analysis, for close involvement with the Nicolas Bourbaki pseudonymous group and the Éléments de géométrie algébrique project of Alexander Grothendieck, and as a historian of mathematics, particularly in the fields of functional analysis and algebraic topology. His work on the classical groups , and on formal groups, introducing what now are called Dieudonné modules, had a major effect on those fields.
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Grigori Perelman
#305
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman abruptly quit his research job at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, due to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg, and has not accepted offers for interviews since 2006.
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Alonzo Church
#30
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, and philosopher who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, the Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem , the Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language . Alongside his doctoral student Alan Turing, Church is considered one of the founders of computer science.
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Simon Donaldson
#453
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#18
Pierre Deligne
#397
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Pierre René, Viscount Deligne is a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading to a complete proof in 1973. He is the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize, 2008 Wolf Prize, 1988 Crafoord Prize, and 1978 Fields Medal.
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Samuel Eilenberg
#429
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Samuel Eilenberg was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory and homological algebra. Early life and education He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to a Jewish family. He spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University.
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John Horton Conway
#235
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
#21
Alain Connes
#334
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
#22
Shiing-Shen Chern
#285
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Shiing-Shen Chern was a Chinese-American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geometry" and is widely regarded as a leader in geometry and one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, winning numerous awards and recognition including the Wolf Prize and the inaugural Shaw Prize. In memory of Shiing-Shen Chern, the International Mathematical Union established the Chern Medal in 2010 to recognize "an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recogn...
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Friedrich Hirzebruch
#491
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology, complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation. He has been described as "the most important mathematician in Germany of the postwar period."
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Israel Gelfand
#396
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand was a prominent Soviet-American mathematician. He made significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and functional analysis. The recipient of many awards, including the Order of Lenin and the first Wolf Prize, he was a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society and professor at Moscow State University and, after immigrating to the United States shortly before his 76th birthday, at Rutgers University. Gelfand is also a 1994 MacArthur Fellow.
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Richard S. Hamilton
#500
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Richard Streit Hamilton is an American mathematician who serves as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. He is known for contributions to geometric analysis and partial differential equations. Hamilton is best known for foundational contributions to the theory of the Ricci flow and the development of a corresponding program of techniques and ideas for resolving the Poincaré conjecture and geometrization conjecture in the field of geometric topology. Grigori Perelman built upon Hamilton's results to prove the conjectures, and was awarded a Millennium Prize for his work. H...
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Laurent Schwartz
#418
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Laurent-Moïse Schwartz was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on the theory of distributions. For several years he taught at the École polytechnique.
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William Thurston
#551
Overall Influence
1946 - 2012 (66 years)
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
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Raoul Bott
#572
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Raoul Bott was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.
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Andrew Wiles
#432
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
#30
Eugenio Calabi
#378
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (102 years)
Eugenio Calabi was an Italian-born American mathematician and the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and their applications.
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Bartel Leendert van der Waerden
#616
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Bartel Leendert van der Waerden was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics. Biography Education and early career Van der Waerden learned advanced mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Göttingen, from 1919 until 1926. He was much influenced by Emmy Noether at Göttingen, Germany. Amsterdam awarded him a Ph.D. for a thesis on algebraic geometry, supervised by Hendrick de Vries. Göttingen awarded him the habilitation in 1928. In that year, at the age of 25, he accepted a professorship at the University of Groningen.
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Gian-Carlo Rota
#590
Overall Influence
1932 - 1999 (67 years)
Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, probability theory, and phenomenology.
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Goro Shimura
#761
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Gorō Shimura was a Japanese mathematician and Michael Henry Strater Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University who worked in number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry. He was known for developing the theory of complex multiplication of abelian varieties and Shimura varieties, as well as posing the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture which ultimately led to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
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Donald Knuth
#27
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
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Herman Goldstine
#250
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Herman Heine Goldstine was a mathematician and computer scientist, who worked as the director of the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study and helped to develop ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers. He subsequently worked for many years at IBM as an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical position.
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Louis Nirenberg
#606
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Louis Nirenberg was a Canadian-American mathematician, considered one of the most outstanding mathematicians of the 20th century. Nearly all of his work was in the field of partial differential equations. Many of his contributions are now regarded as fundamental to the field, such as his strong maximum principle for second-order parabolic partial differential equations and the Newlander-Nirenberg theorem in complex geometry. He is regarded as a foundational figure in the field of geometric analysis, with many of his works being closely related to the study of complex analysis and differential...
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Martin Gardner
#47
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century".
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Benoit Mandelbrot
#165
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.
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Freeman Dyson
#65
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Freeman John Dyson was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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René Thom
#428
Overall Influence
1923 - 2002 (79 years)
René Frédéric Thom was a French mathematician, who received the Fields Medal in 1958. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became world-famous among the wider academic community and the educated general public for one aspect of this latter interest, his work as founder of catastrophe theory .
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Stephen Smale
#419
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Stephen Smale is an American mathematician, known for his research in topology, dynamical systems and mathematical economics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and spent more than three decades on the mathematics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley , where he currently is Professor Emeritus, with research interests in algorithms, numerical analysis and global analysis.
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John Milnor
#786
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
John Willard Milnor is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and the only mathematician to have won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize and all three Steele prizes.
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Serge Lang
#714
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Serge Lang was a French-American mathematician and activist who taught at Yale University for most of his career. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in 1960 and was a member of the Bourbaki group.
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László Lovász
#506
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
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George Dantzig
#182
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
George Bernard Dantzig was an American mathematical scientist who made contributions to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics. Dantzig is known for his development of the simplex algorithm, an algorithm for solving linear programming problems, and for his other work with linear programming. In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving late to a lecture by Jerzy Neyman.
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Peter Lax
#609
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
#47
Michael Artin
#1073
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Michael Artin is a German-American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. Life and career Michael Artin or Artinian of Armenian origin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century of Armenian descent. Artin's parents left Germany in 1937, because his mother's father was Jewish. His elder sister is , who was married to mathematician John Tate until the late 1980s.
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Igor Shafarevich
#860
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. Outside mathematics, he wrote books and articles that criticised socialism and other books which were described as anti-semitic.
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Jean Bourgain
#1014
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Jean Louis, baron Bourgain was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics.
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Barry Mazur
#1101
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
