Search People Result | Academic Influence

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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#5001

Michelle Manes

#72606

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Michelle Ann Manes is an American mathematician whose research interests span the fields of number theory, algebraic geometry, and dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has been a program director for algebra and number theory at the National Science Foundation.

#5002

Ludomir Newelski

#83864

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Ludomir Newelski is a Polish mathematician, specializing in model theory, set theory, foundations of mathematics, and universal algebra. He attended the 14th High School in Wrocław, where in April 1977, as a second-year student, he became one of the first laureates of the Polish Mathematical Olympiad in this school. He studied and graduated in mathematics at the University of Wrocław and then worked at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences . At PAN he received his PhD in 1987 and habilitated in 1991. He worked at PAN until 1994 and then moved to the University of Wrocław, where he now works.

#5003

Erling Størmer

#85978

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Erling Størmer is a Norwegian mathematician, who has mostly worked with operator algebras. He was born in Oslo as a son of Leif Størmer. He was a grandson of Carl Størmer and nephew of Per Størmer. He took his doctorate at Columbia University in 1963 with thesis advisor Richard Kadison, and was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1974 to his retirement in 2007.

#5004

Ushadevi Bhosle

#87995

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Dr. Ushadevi Narendra Bhosle is an Indian mathematician, educator and researcher. She specialises in Algebraic Geometry. She worked on the moduli spaces of bundles. Early life and education She got a B.Sc. degree in 1969 and an M.Sc. degree in 1971 from University of Pune, Shivaji University, respectively. She commenced her post-graduate studies in 1971 from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and got her doctorate degree of philosophy under the guidance of her mentor S.Ramanan in 1980.

#5005

Gavin Brown

#41412

Overall Influence

1942 - 2010 (68 years)

Gavin Brown AO FAA CorrFRSE was a Scottish-born mathematician and long-serving Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney between 1996 and 2008. Early career After attending secondary school at Madras College in St Andrews, Brown graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the University of St Andrews , and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne . His academic career began at the University of Liverpool, where he became a senior lecturer in mathematics.

#5006

Michael Minovitch

#65378

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (90 years)

Michael Andrew Minovitch is an American mathematician who developed gravity assist technique when he was a UCLA graduate student and working summers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1961 Minovitch began using the fastest available computer at the time, the IBM 7090, to solve the three-body problem. He ran simulations and developed his own solution by 1962.

#5007

Otto Leiberich

#76285

Overall Influence

1927 - 2015 (88 years)

Otto Leiberich was a German cryptologist and mathematician. Leiberich is most notable for establishing the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik in 1991. Life Leiberich started his career during World War II, conscripted as a soldier and working as a cryptanalyst in Chi IV of the OKW/Chi.

#5008

Leone Burton

#89382

Overall Influence

1936 - 2007 (71 years)

Leone Minna Burton was a professor of education in mathematics and science, working in London teacher education colleges in the 1970s, the Open University in the 1980s and, from 1992, the University of Birmingham. At the South Bank Polytechnic ;she helped establish the first MSc in Mathematics Education in the UK. After retiring in 2001 she became Honorary Professor at King's College London, and Visiting Fellow in the Cambridge University Faculty of Education. She was noted for her influence as a researcher and doctoral supervisor, setting up national and international research networks in ...

#5009

Karen Kafadar

#78348

Overall Influence

Karen Kafadar is an American statistician. She is Commonwealth Professor of Statistics at the University of Virginia, and chair of the statistics department there. She was editor-in-chief of Technometrics from 1999 to 2001, and was president of the International Association for Statistical Computing for 2011–2013. In 2017 she was elected president of the American Statistical Association for the 2019 term.

#5010

Gennadi Henkin

#92473

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Gennadi Markovich Henkin was a Russian mathematician and mathematical economist. Henkin studied at Moscow State University, where he received his doctorate in 1967 and habilitated in 1973 . From 1973 he was a senior scientist at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. From 1991 he was a professor at the Pierre et Marie Curie University .

#5011

Alexander Ramm

#95947

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Alexander G. Ramm is an American mathematician. His research focuses on differential and integral equations, operator theory, ill-posed and inverse problems, scattering theory, functional analysis, spectral theory, numerical analysis, theoretical electrical engineering, signal estimation, and tomography.

#5012

Gretar Tryggvason

#43277

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Gretar Tryggvason is Department Head of Mechanical Engineering and Charles A. Miller Jr. Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for developing the front tracking method to simulate multiphase flows and free surface flows. Tryggvason was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Computational Physics from 2002–2015.

#5013

Heike Hofmann

#53856

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Heike Hofmann is a statistician and Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. Education She earned an MSc in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science, and a PhD in Statistics, from the University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany in 1998 and 2000, respectively.

#5014

Jeanne LaDuke

#87613

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Alice Jeanne LaDuke is an American mathematician who specialized in mathematical analysis and the history of mathematics. She was also a child actress who appeared in one film . Early life and film career LaDuke was raised on a farm in Posey County, in southwest Indiana. Her parents were college-educated and an aunt who taught mathematics in Chicago frequently visited, bringing mathematics puzzles for LaDuke.

#5015

Abba Gumel

#30810

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Abba Gumel is a Professor & The Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed E-Nnovate Chair in Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park. His research, which spans three main areas of applied mathematics , is focused on the use of mathematical modeling and rigorous approaches, together with statistical analysis, to gain insight into the dynamics of real-life phenomena arising in the natural and engineering sciences. The main emphasis of Gumel's work is on the mathematical theory of epidemics – specifically, he uses mathematical theories and methodologies to gain ...

#5016

Julena Steinheider Duncombe

Julena Steinheider Duncombe

#88044

Overall Influence

1911 - 2003 (92 years)

Julena Steinheider Duncombe was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was known for her work as a teacher at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and as an astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, where she made pioneering observations with the 6-inch transit circle, introduced the use of punched cards in cataloging stars and constructing tables of positions of celestial bodies, and led the production of eclipse predictions for almanacs.

#5017

Anna Lysyanskaya

#29382

Overall Influence

Anna A. Lysyanskaya is an American cryptographer known for her research on digital signatures and anonymous digital credentials. She is a professor of computer science at Brown University. Early life and education Lysyanskaya grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the US in 1993 to attend Smith College, where she graduated in 1997. She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2002. Her dissertation, Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design, was supervised by Ron Rivest.

#5018

Joanne Elliott

#68248

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (100 years)

Joanne Elliott was an American mathematician who specialized in potential theory, who was described as a "disciple" of her co-author, probability theorist William Feller. She was also a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

#5019

Vladimir Vovk

#56372

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Vladimir Vovk is a British computer scientist, and professor at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the co-inventor of Conformal prediction. He is the co-director of the Centre for Machine Learning at Royal Holloway University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

#5020

Ehud de Shalit

#47421

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Ehud de Shalit is an Israeli number theorist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Ehud de Shalit was born in Rehovot. His father was Amos de-Shalit. He completed his B.Sc. at the Hebrew University in 1975, and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1984 under the supervision of Andrew Wiles.

#5021

Washek Pfeffer

#66404

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Washek F. Pfeffer was a Czech-born US mathematician and Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Davis. Pfeffer was one of the world's pre-eminent authorities on real integration and has authored several books on the topic of integration, and numerous papers on these topics and others related to many areas of real analysis and measure theory. Pfeffer gave his name to the Pfeffer integral, which extends a Riemann-type construction for the integral of a measurable function both to higher-dimensional domains and, in the case of one dimension, to a superset of the Lebesgue integrable ...

#5022

Jarkko Kari

#66951

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Jarkko J. Kari is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist, known for his contributions to the theory of Wang tiles and cellular automata. Kari is currently a professor at the Department of Mathematics, University of Turku.

#5023

Bernard J. Matkowsky

#99750

Overall Influence

1939 - 2020 (81 years)

Bernard Judah Matkowsky was an American applied mathematician. Matkowsky received a B.S. from City College of New York in 1960, an M.E.E. from New York University in 1961, an M.S. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1966 from the Courant Institute at NYU. His advisor was Joseph B. Keller and his thesis was entitled "Asymptotic Solution of Partial Differential Equations in Thin Domains". He was Professor of Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1966 to 1977. In 1977 he accepted an offer from Northwestern University, with a mandate to build an Applied Mathematics department, eventually becoming Professor of Applied Mathematics, Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering.

#5024

Louis Chen Hsiao Yun

#63115

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Louis Chen Hsiao Yun is emeritus professor at the National University of Singapore. Chen earned his BSc from University of Singapore in 1964 and completed his MSc as well as PhD at Stanford University in 1969 and 1971 respectively. In 1972, he joined the mathematics department of the then University of Singapore as a lecturer. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1977, associate professor in 1981 and professor in 1989.

#5025

Guillaume Carlier

#40886

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Guillaume Carlier is a French mathematician. Most of his work lies in the field of calculus of variation and optimization. He is a professor of applied mathematics at Paris Dauphine University and a researcher at Mokaplan, a joint INRIA-CNRS-Université Paris-Dauphine team dedicated to research in the field of optimal transport.

#5026

Mohammad Sal Moslehian

#94398

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Mohammad Sal Moslehian is an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. He is the President of the Iranian Mathematical Society for the period of 2021-2024 and an invited member of the Iranian Academy of Sciences. His Erdős number is 3. He is known for his contribution to the operator and norm inequality. He has developed the orthogonality in Hilbert C*-modules and has significant contributions to operator means. He established noncommutative versions of martingale and maximum inequalities that play an essential role in noncommutative probability spaces.

#5027

Robert U Newton

#102580

Overall Influence

#5028

Gertrude Ehrlich

#47031

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (102 years)

Gertrude Ehrlich is an Austrian-American mathematician, specializing in abstract algebra and algebraic number theory. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

#5029

William Jay Conover

#102625

Overall Influence

#5030

Gui-Qiang Chen

#99427

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Gui-Qiang George Chen is a Chinese-born American-British mathematician. Currently, he is Statutory Professor in the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations, Director of the Oxford Centre for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Partial Differential Equations at the Mathematical Institute, and Professorial Fellow at Keble College, located at the University of Oxford, as well as Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

#5031

Marta Lewicka

#72026

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Marta Lewicka is a Polish-American professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in mathematical analysis. Lewicka has contributed results in the theory of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, fluid dynamics, calculus of variations, nonlinear elasticity, nonlinear potential theory and differential games.

#5032

Doris Stockton

#68585

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Doris G. Skillman Stockton was an American mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and Banach spaces, and known for her many mathematics textbooks. For many years she was a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

#5033

Jit Bose

#70126

Overall Influence

Prosenjit K. "Jit" Bose is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist who works at Carleton University as a professor in the School of Computer Science and associate dean of research and graduate studies for the Faculty of Science. His research concerns graph algorithms and computational geometry, including work on geometric spanners and geographic routing in wireless ad hoc networks.

#5034

Hui Zou

#102076

Overall Influence

Hui Zou is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Minnesota. Selected publications Honors and awards Fellow of the American Statistical Association, 2019Highly Cited Researcher in Mathematics, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2015.Institute of Mathematical Statistics Tweedie New Researcher Award, 2011National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2009New Hot Paper in Mathematics, 2008Fast Breaking Paper in Mathematics, 2006

#5035

Juha Heinonen

#102569

Overall Influence

1960 - 2007 (47 years)

Juha Heinonen was a Finnish mathematician, known for his research on geometric function theory. Biography Heinonen, whose father was a lumberjack and local politician, grew up in a small town in central Finland. He studied mathematics at the University of Jyväskylä and received his doctorate there in 1987 with a thesis on nonlinear potential theory. His thesis advisor was Olli Martio. During the academic year 1987–1988 Heinonen was a visiting researcher at the Deutsche Forschunsgemeinschaft in Bonn and then at the Centre de Recerca Matemática in Barcelona. He first came to the University of M...

#5036

Heini Murer

#102691

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

#5037

Susan Jane Colley

#95590

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Susan Jane Colley is an American mathematician. She is Andrew and Pauline Delaney Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College, and a former editor-in-chief of the American Mathematical Monthly. Her mathematical research specialty is enumerative geometry.

#5038

S. M. Shah

#102617

Overall Influence

1905 - 1996 (91 years)

Swarupchand Mohanlal Shah was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Kentucky. He received his Ph.D. from University of London in 1942, advised by Edward Titchmarsh who was a Ph.D. student of G. H. Hardy. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

#5039

Charles M. Stein

#101197

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Charles Max Stein was an American mathematical statistician and professor of statistics at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D in 1947 at Columbia University with advisor Abraham Wald. He held faculty positions at Berkeley and the University of Chicago before moving permanently to Stanford in 1953. He is known for Stein's paradox in decision theory, which shows that ordinary least squares estimates can be uniformly improved when many parameters are estimated; for Stein's lemma, giving a formula for the covariance of one random variable with the value of a function of another when the tw...

#5040

Joseph Shalika

#94064

Overall Influence

1941 - 2010 (69 years)

Joseph Andrew Shalika was a mathematician working on automorphic forms and representation theory, who introduced the multiplicity-one theorem. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1965 to 1966.

#5041

László Lempert

#93701

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

László Lempert is a Hungarian-American mathematician, working in several complex variables and complex geometry. He proved that the Carathéodory and Kobayashi distances agree on convex domains. He further proved that a compact, strictly pseudoconvex real analytic hypersurface can be embedded into the unit sphere of a Hilbert space.

#5042

Curt Meyer

#91586

Overall Influence

1919 - 2011 (92 years)

Curt Meyer was a German mathematician. He made notable contributions to number theory. A native of Bremerhaven, Meyer obtained his doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1950, under supervision of Helmut Hasse. In 1966 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Cologne, a position he held until 1985.

#5043

Aleksandr Aleksandrov

Aleksandr Aleksandrov

#80990

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov was a Soviet/Russian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and mountaineer. Personal life Aleksandr Aleksandrov was born in 1912 in Volyn, Ryazan Oblast. His father was a headmaster of a secondary school in St Petersburg and his mother a teacher at said school, thus the young Alekandrov spent a majority of his childhood in the city. His family was old Russian nobility—students noted ancestral portraits which hung in his office. His sisters were Soviet botanist Vera Danilovna Aleksandrov and Maria Danilovna Aleksandrova, author of the first monograph on gerontopsychology in the USSR.

#5044

Franz Aurenhammer

#74681

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Franz Aurenhammer is an Austrian computational geometer known for his research in computational geometry on Voronoi diagrams, straight skeletons, and related structures. He is a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science of Graz University of Technology.

#5045

John Rhodes

#76169

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

John Lewis Rhodes is a mathematician known for work in the theory of semigroups, finite state automata, and algebraic approaches to differential equations. Education and career Rhodes was born in Columbus, Ohio, on July 16, 1937, but grew up in Wooster, Ohio, where he founded the Wooster Rocket Society as a teenager. In the fall of 1955, Rhodes entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology intending to major in physics, but he soon switched to mathematics, earning his B.S. in 1960 and his Ph.D. in 1962. His Ph.D. thesis, co-written with a graduate student from Harvard, Kenneth Krohn, became known as the Prime Decomposition Theorem, or more simply the Krohn–Rhodes Theorem.

#5046

Zbigniew Marciniak

#93421

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Zbigniew Stanisław Marciniak is a Polish mathematician and university teacher. Between 2007–2009 he was an Education vice-secretary and from 2010 until 2012 he was Science Secretary. Life He graduated mathematic studies in 1976 on the Department of Mathematic, IT and Mechanics of Warsaw University. In 1982 he was taking a PhD degree in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and postdoctoral degree in 1997. Dr. Marciniak specializes in Group theory and Ring theory.

#5047

Wolfgang Hahn

#77848

Overall Influence

1911 - 1998 (87 years)

Wolfgang Hahn was a German mathematician who worked on special functions, in particular orthogonal polynomials. He introduced Hahn polynomials, Hahn difference, Hahn q-addition , and the Hahn–Exton q-Bessel function. He was an honorary member of the Austrian Mathematical Society.

#5048

Jyotiprasad Medhi

#56599

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Jyotiprasad Medhi was a professor of statistics at Gauhati University and Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology. Work and education Medhi started his schooling in Dibrugarh and in 1940 he passed matriculation from Dibrugarh Government High School. After matriculation, he did his graduate studies in Cotton College in 1946 and was a gold medalist in BSc with Honours in mathematics. There he received the Sudmerson Gold Medal and Rajanikant Barat Gold Medal. Medhi did his MSc in Pure Mathematics from Calcutta University, and got the Debendra Nath Gangopadhaya Gold medal for record marks obtained and the Post graduate First class first gold medal in 1948.

#5049

D. J. Bartholomew

#66432

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

David John Bartholomew was a British statistician who was president of the Royal Statistical Society between 1993 and 1995. He was professor of statistics at the London School of Economics between 1973 and 1996.

#5050

Zuhair Nashed

#73067

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

M. Zuhair Nashed is an American mathematician, working on integral and operator equations, inverse and ill-posed problems, numerical and nonlinear functional analysis, optimization and approximation theory, operator theory, optimal control theory, signal analysis, and signal processing.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions