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,
#51
Vladimir Arnold
#785
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Vladimir Igorevich Arnold was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable systems, he contributed to several areas, including geometrical theory of dynamical systems theory, algebra, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, symplectic topology, differential equations, classical mechanics, differential geometric approach to hydrodynamics, geometric analysis and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19.
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Robert Langlands
#845
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Phelan Langlands, is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He was an emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired.
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Stephen Cole Kleene
#120
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Stephen Cole Kleene was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star , Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented regular expressions in...
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Garrett Birkhoff
#815
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Garrett Birkhoff was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work in lattice theory. The mathematician George Birkhoff was his father. Life The son of the mathematician George David Birkhoff, Garrett was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He began the Harvard University BA course in 1928 after less than seven years of prior formal education. Upon completing his Harvard BA in 1932, he went to Cambridge University to study mathematical physics but switched to studying abstract algebra under Philip Hall. While visiting the University of Munich, he met Carathéodory who pointed him toward...
Go to Profile#55
Jeff Cheeger
#1409
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Jeff Cheeger is a mathematician. Cheeger is professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in New York City. His main interests are differential geometry and its connections with topology and analysis.
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John Tate
#1093
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
John Torrence Tate Jr. was an American mathematician distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry, and related areas in algebraic geometry. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2010.
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Saharon Shelah
#874
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Saharon Shelah is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey. Biography Shelah was born in Jerusalem on July 3, 1945. He is the son of the Israeli poet and political activist Yonatan Ratosh. He received his PhD for his work on stable theories in 1969 from the Hebrew University.
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Ronald Graham
#760
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
#59
Armand Borel
#1312
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Armand Borel was a Swiss mathematician, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and was a permanent professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States from 1957 to 1993. He worked in algebraic topology, in the theory of Lie groups, and was one of the creators of the contemporary theory of linear algebraic groups.
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Kiyosi Itô
#1055
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Kiyosi Itô was a Japanese mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, in particular, the theory of stochastic processes. He invented the concept of stochastic integral and stochastic differential equation, and is known as the founder of so-called Itô calculus.
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Nigel Hitchin
#1858
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Nigel James Hitchin FRS is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, gauge theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
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Lars Ahlfors
#1457
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Lars Valerian Ahlfors was a Finnish mathematician, remembered for his work in the field of Riemann surfaces and his textbook on complex analysis. Background Ahlfors was born in Helsinki, Finland. His mother, Sievä Helander, died at his birth. His father, Axel Ahlfors, was a professor of engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. The Ahlfors family was Swedish-speaking, so he first attended the private school Nya svenska samskolan where all classes were taught in Swedish. Ahlfors studied at University of Helsinki from 1924, graduating in 1928 having studied under Ernst Lindelöf and Rolf Nevanlinna.
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Béla Bollobás
#1567
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős since the age of 14.
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Dennis Sullivan
#1332
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dennis Parnell Sullivan is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center and is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University.
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Jean Leray
#1485
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Jean Leray was a French mathematician, who worked on both partial differential equations and algebraic topology. Life and career He was born in Chantenay-sur-Loire . He studied at École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1929. He received his Ph.D. in 1933. In 1934 Leray published an important paper that founded the study of weak solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations. In the same year, he and Juliusz Schauder discovered a topological invariant, now called the Leray–Schauder degree, which they applied to prove the existence of solutions for partial differential equations lacking uniqueness.
Go to Profile#66
Vladimir Drinfeld
#1334
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld , surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a renowned mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
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Lloyd Shapley
#510
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Lloyd Stowell Shapley was an American mathematician and Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist. He contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory. Shapley is generally considered one of the most important contributors to the development of game theory since the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern. With Alvin E. Roth, Shapley won the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
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Daniel Quillen
#1574
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Daniel Gray "Dan" Quillen was an American mathematician. He is known for being the "prime architect" of higher algebraic K-theory, for which he was awarded the Cole Prize in 1975 and the Fields Medal in 1978.
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Enrico Bombieri
#1543
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Enrico Bombieri is an Italian mathematician, known for his work in analytic number theory, Diophantine geometry, complex analysis, and group theory. Bombieri is currently Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Bombieri won the Fields Medal in 1974 for his contributions to large sieve mathematics, conceptualized by Linnick 1941, and its application to the distribution of prime numbers.
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Gilbert Strang
#1514
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
William Gilbert Strang is an American mathematician known for his contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis and linear algebra. He has made many contributions to mathematics education, including publishing mathematics textbooks. Strang was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught Linear Algebra, Computational Science, and Engineering, Learning from Data, and his lectures are freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare.
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Albert W. Tucker
#736
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Albert William Tucker was a Canadian mathematician who made important contributions in topology, game theory, and non-linear programming. Early life and education Albert Tucker was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, and earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1928 and his M.A. at the same institution in 1929. In 1932, he earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz, with a dissertation entitled An Abstract Approach to Manifolds. In 1932–33 he was a National Research Fellow at Cambridge, Harvard, and then University of Chicago.
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Endre Szemerédi
#1034
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Alston Scott Householder
#1246
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Alston Scott Householder was an American mathematician who specialized in mathematical biology and numerical analysis. He is the inventor of the Householder transformation and of Householder's method.
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Grigory Margulis
#1691
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Grigory Aleksandrovich Margulis is a Russian-American mathematician known for his work on lattices in Lie groups, and the introduction of methods from ergodic theory into diophantine approximation. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978, a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2005, and an Abel Prize in 2020, becoming the fifth mathematician to receive the three prizes. In 1991, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is currently the Erastus L. De Forest Professor of Mathematics.
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John Forbes Nash Jr.
#700
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
John Forbes Nash, Jr. , known and published as John Nash, was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten were awarded the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. In 2015, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to the field of partial differential equations.
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Elias M. Stein
#1914
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Elias Menachem Stein was an American mathematician who was a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. He was the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he was a faculty member from 1963 until his death in 2018.
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Lars Hörmander
#1652
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Lars Valter Hörmander was a Swedish mathematician who has been called "the foremost contributor to the modern theory of linear partial differential equations". Hörmander was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962 and the Wolf Prize in 1988. In 2006 he was awarded the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for his four-volume textbook Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators, which is considered a foundational work on the subject.
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Maxim Kontsevich
#1374
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#79
Victor Kac
#2046
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Victor Gershevich Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra. He is also known for the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures with Boris Weisfeiler.
Go to Profile#80
Isadore Singer
#1074
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
#81
Yuri Manin
#1081
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Yuri Ivanovich Manin was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics. Life and career Manin was born on 16 February 1937 in Simferopol, Crimean ASSR, Soviet Union.
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Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter
#1788
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter was a British-Canadian geometer and mathematician. He is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. Biography Coxeter was born in Kensington, England, to Harold Samuel Coxeter and Lucy . His father had taken over the family business of Coxeter & Son, manufacturers of surgical instruments and compressed gases , but was able to retire early and focus on sculpting and baritone singing; Lucy Coxeter was a portrait and landscape painter who had attended the Royal Academy of Arts. A maternal cousin was the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scot...
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Walter Rudin
#2236
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Walter Rudin was an Austrian-American mathematician and professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In addition to his contributions to complex and harmonic analysis, Rudin was known for his mathematical analysis textbooks: Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Real and Complex Analysis, and Functional Analysis. Rudin wrote Principles of Mathematical Analysis only two years after obtaining his Ph.D. from Duke University, while he was a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at MIT. Principles, acclaimed for its elegance and clarity, has since become a standard textbook for introductor...
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Mikio Sato
#2072
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Mikio Sato was a Japanese mathematician known for founding the fields of algebraic analysis, hyperfunctions, and holonomic quantum fields. He was a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto.
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Gerhard Frey
#2180
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gerhard Frey is a German mathematician, known for his work in number theory. Following an original idea of Hellegouarch, he developed the notion of Frey–Hellegouarch curves, a construction of an elliptic curve from a purported solution to the Fermat equation, that is central to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
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Jürgen Moser
#1998
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Jürgen Kurt Moser was a German-American mathematician, honored for work spanning over four decades, including Hamiltonian dynamical systems and partial differential equations. Life Moser's mother Ilse Strehlke was a niece of the violinist and composer Louis Spohr. His father was the neurologist Kurt E. Moser , who was born to the merchant Max Maync and Clara Moser . The latter descended from 17th century French Huguenot immigrants to Prussia. Jürgen Moser's parents lived in Königsberg, German empire and resettled in Stralsund, East Germany as a result of the Second World War. Moser attended ...
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Vladimir Voevodsky
#1926
Overall Influence
1966 - 2017 (51 years)
Vladimir Alexandrovich Voevodsky was a Russian-American mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002. He is also known for the proof of the Milnor conjecture and motivic Bloch–Kato conjectures and for the univalent foundations of mathematics and homotopy type theory.
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John Tukey
#338
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
John Wilder Tukey was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name. He is also credited with coining the term 'bit' and the first published use of the word 'software'.
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Robin Hartshorne
#2823
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robin Cope Hartshorne is an American mathematician who is known for his work in algebraic geometry. Career Hartshorne was a Putnam Fellow in Fall 1958 while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University . He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1963 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled Connectedness of the Hilbert scheme under the supervision of John Coleman Moore and Oscar Zariski. He then became a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, where he taught for several years. In 1972, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where...
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David Ruelle
#1341
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David Pierre Ruelle is a Belgian mathematical physicist, naturalized French. He has worked on statistical physics and dynamical systems. With Floris Takens, Ruelle coined the term strange attractor, and developed a new theory of turbulence.
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Peter Scholze
#2484
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
#92
Phillip Griffiths
#2841
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Phillip Augustus Griffiths IV is an American mathematician, known for his work in the field of geometry, and in particular for the complex manifold approach to algebraic geometry. He is a major developer in particular of the theory of variation of Hodge structure in Hodge theory and moduli theory, which forms part of transcendental algebraic geometry and which also touches upon major and distant areas of differential geometry. He also worked on partial differential equations, coauthored with Shiing-Shen Chern, Robert Bryant and Robert Gardner on Exterior Differential Systems.
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Anatoly Fomenko
#1671
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko is a mathematician, professor at Moscow State University, well-known as a topologist, and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of a fictitious pseudoscientific history known as New Chronology, based on works of Russian-Soviet writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences .
Go to Profile#94
C. R. Rao
#649
Overall Influence
1920 - Present (104 years)
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He was professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao was honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, a...
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Gerd Faltings
#1845
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gerd Faltings is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. Education From 1972 to 1978, Faltings studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster. In 1978 he received his PhD in mathematics.
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Yakov Sinai
#2143
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Yakov Grigorevich Sinai is a Russian–American mathematician known for his work on dynamical systems. He contributed to the modern metric theory of dynamical systems and connected the world of deterministic systems with the world of probabilistic systems. He has also worked on mathematical physics and probability theory. His efforts have provided the groundwork for advances in the physical sciences.
Go to Profile#97
Charles Fefferman
#2027
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#98
Marcel Berger
#2651
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marcel Berger was a French mathematician, doyen of French differential geometry, and a former director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques , France. Formerly residing in Le Castera in Lasseube, Berger was instrumental in Mikhail Gromov's accepting positions both at the University of Paris and at the IHÉS.
Go to Profile#99
Sergei Novikov
#2178
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sergei Petrovich Novikov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, noted for work in both algebraic topology and soliton theory. In 1970, he won the Fields Medal. Early life Novikov was born on 20 March 1938 in Gorky, Soviet Union .
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Kunihiko Kodaira
#1919
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Kunihiko Kodaira was a Japanese mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry and the theory of complex manifolds, and as the founder of the Japanese school of algebraic geometers. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1954, being the first Japanese national to receive this honour.
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