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,
#5051
Philip Drazin
#90620
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Philip Gerald Drazin was a British mathematician and a leading international expert in fluid dynamics. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge under G. I. Taylor in 1958. He was awarded the Smith's Prize in 1957. After leaving Cambridge, he spent two years at MIT before moving to the University of Bristol, where he stayed and became a Professor until retiring in 1999. After retiring, he lectured at the University of Oxford and the University of Bath until his death in 2002.
Go to Profile#5052
Clark Kimberling
#90459
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Clark Kimberling is a mathematician, musician, and composer. He has been a mathematics professor since 1970 at the University of Evansville. His research interests include triangle centers, integer sequences, and hymnology.
Go to Profile#5053
Paul Syverson
#11041
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Paul Syverson is a computer scientist best known for inventing onion routing, a feature of the Tor anonymity network. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Syverson, and Tor's co-creators Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, among its Top 100 Global Thinkers "for making the web safe for whistleblowers".
Go to Profile#5054
Dipankar Chatterji
#18268
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Dipankar Chatterji is an Indian molecular biologist and the Honorary Professor at Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science, a multidisciplinary research institute under the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. He is known for his pioneering research on bacterial transcription. He is a recipient of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize and is an elected fellow of all the major Indian science academies. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2016, for his contributions to science and engineering.
Go to Profile#5055
Riaz Ahsan
#64989
Overall Influence
1951 - 2008 (57 years)
Syed Riaz Ahsan was a Pakistani statistician and mathematician who has worked in applied statistics, applied analysis, applications of special functions. He was a noted professor of applied statistics in University of Karachi, Karachi. Previously, he has served as the president of Sindh Professors and Lecturers’ Association . Prof. Riaz Ahsan was born on 24 December 1951 and he died on 8 September 2008.
Go to Profile#5056
Dorothy McCoy
#88809
Overall Influence
1903 - 2001 (98 years)
Dorothy McCoy was an American mathematician and university professor. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Iowa, and she worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at Belhaven College and Wayland Baptist College.
Go to Profile#5057
Dick Bulterman
#30566
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Dick C. A. Bulterman is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, where he heads the Distributed Multimedia Languages and Interfaces theme. He is also a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Dr. Bulterman was President and CEO of FX Palo Alto Laboratory from 2013–2015.
Go to Profile#5058
Russell H. Wiesner
#103207
Overall Influence
#5059
Albert Nikolaevich Shiryaev
#103220
Overall Influence
#5060
Norman J. Pullman
#98068
Overall Influence
1931 - 1999 (68 years)
Norman J. Pullman was a mathematician, professor of mathematics, and Doctor of Mathematics, who specialized in number theory, matrix theory, linear algebra, and theory of tournaments. Career He earned an M.A. degree in mathematics from Harvard University, and in 1962, he was awarded the Doctorate degree of Mathematics from Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#5061
Akram Aldroubi
#68991
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Akram Aldroubi is an American mathematician known for his work in sampling theory, harmonic analysis, and their applications to signal and image processing as well as biomedical data analysis. Education Aldroubi received a diplôme in electrical engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, in 1982. He studied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, earning his master’s in 1984 and his doctorate in 1987.
Go to Profile#5062
Alexei Gvishiani
#74153
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Alexei Dzhermenovich Gvishiani is a well-known Russian scientist, full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences . Chief scientist of the Geophysical Center of RAS. Member of the Scientific Coordinating Council of the Federal Agency of Scientific organizations of Russia and the Expert Council of the Russian Scientific Foundation. Foreign member of the Romanian Academy of Engineering and Technical Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Doctor Honoris Causa of the National Technological University of Ukraine, professor of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Paris Institute of Earth Physics of the Earth.
Go to Profile#5063
Ravindra Shripad Kulkarni
#83833
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Ravindra Shripad Kulkarni is an Indian mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. He is known for the Kulkarni–Nomizu product. Education and career Ravi S. Kulkarni received in 1968 his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Shlomo Sternberg with thesis Curvature and Metric. For the academic year 1980–1981 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.
Go to Profile#5064
Andy Liu
#69310
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Andrew Chiang-Fung Liu is a Canadian mathematician. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta. Liu was born in Guangzhou, and attended New Method College in Hong Kong. He then did his undergraduate studies in mathematics at McGill University, and earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Harvey Abbott, with a dissertation about hypergraphs.
Go to Profile#5065
Scott A. Mitchell
#75537
Overall Influence
Scott Alan Mitchell is a researcher of applied mathematics in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. Background Mitchell received a B.S in Applied Math, Engineering & Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison , and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Math from Cornell University. He worked the summer of 1991 at Xerox PARC . Since 1992 he has been at Sandia National Laboratories in the Center for Computing Research, with several different roles. He researched theoretical computational geometry meshing from 1992—1993. He contributed to applied meshing in the CUBIT project: R&D 1993—2000, project leader 2000—2002, R&D 2015—.
Go to Profile#5066
Lawrence Paul Horwitz
#88636
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Lawrence Paul Horwitz is an American/Israeli physicist and mathematician who has made contributions in particle physics, statistical mechanics, mathematical physics, theory of unstable systems, classical chaos and quantum chaos, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, representations of quantum theory on hypercomplex Hilbert modules, group theory and functional analysis and stochastic theories of irreversible quantum evolution.
Go to Profile#5067
Iain Gordon
#42243
Overall Influence
Iain Gordon, FRSE, is a mathematician, currently Iain Gordon is Professor of Mathematics, Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His field of specialisation is representation theory and noncommutative algebra.
Go to Profile#5068
Gabriele Steidl
#94369
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Gabriele Steidl is a German mathematician whose research interests include computational harmonic analysis, convex optimization, and image processing. She is a professor of mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#5069
Helen F. Cullen
#77549
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Helen Frances Cullen was an American mathematician specializing in topology. She worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was the first female faculty member in the mathematics department at Amherst. She was known as the author of the book Introduction to General Topology , as well as for her outspoken antisemitism.
Go to Profile#5070
Gunnar E. Carlsson
#103413
Overall Influence
#5071
Dirk Kroese
#71170
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Dirk Pieter Kroese is a Dutch-Australian mathematician and statistician, and Professor at the University of Queensland. He is known for several contributions to applied probability, kernel density estimation, Monte Carlo methods and rare-event simulation. He is, with Reuven Rubinstein, a pioneer of the Cross-Entropy method.
Go to Profile#5072
George Blakley
#61424
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
George Robert Blakley Jr. was an American cryptographer and a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M University, best known for inventing a secret sharing scheme in 1979 . Biography Blakley did his undergraduate studies in physics at Georgetown University, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1960. After postdoctoral studies at Cornell University and Harvard University, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the State University of New York at Buffalo before joining Texas A&M in 1970. At Texas A&M, he was chairman of ...
Go to Profile#5073
Viktor Ginzburg
#80788
Overall Influence
Viktor L. Ginzburg is a Russian-American mathematician who has worked on Hamiltonian dynamics and symplectic and Poisson geometry. As of 2017, Ginzburg is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Go to Profile#5074
Bernard Epstein
#70719
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Bernard Epstein was an American mathematician and physicist who wrote several widely used textbooks on mathematics. Epstein was the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, Yitzkhak Aharon Epstein and Sophie-Sarah née Goldenberg, and was the first person in his family to go to college. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and physics from New York University and then in 1947 a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, with thesis advisor Maurice Heins, from Brown University with thesis Method for the Solution of the Dirichlet Problem for Certain Types of Domains.
Go to Profile#5075
S. L. Woronowicz
#81085
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Stanisław Lech Woronowicz is a Polish mathematician and physicist. He is affiliated with the University of Warsaw and is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Research Woronowicz and Erling Størmer classified positive maps in low-dimensional cases, which translate to the Peres-Horodecki criterion in the context of quantum information theory. He is also known for contributions to quantum groups.
Go to Profile#5076
Rodolfo H. Torres
#102664
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Rodolfo Humberto Torres is an Argentinian American mathematician specializing in harmonic analysis who works as the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development and a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside.
Go to Profile#5077
Krzysztof Narkiewicz
#103705
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
#5078
Douglas M. Hawkins*
#103748
Overall Influence
#5079
Peter Orlik
#86987
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Peter Paul Nikolas Orlik is an American mathematician, known for his research on topology, algebra, and combinatorics. Orlik earned in 1961 his bachelor's degree from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim and in 1966 his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan under Frank Raymond with thesis Necessary conditions for the homeomorphism of Seifert manifolds. He became in 1966 an assistant professor and in 1973 a full professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#5080
Nico Nagelkerke
#100027
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Nicolaas Jan Dirk "Nico" Nagelkerke is a Dutch biostatistician and epidemiologist. As of 2012, he was a professor of biostatistics at the United Arab Emirates University. He previously taught at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has now been retired for several years but as of now he is still active in research.
Go to Profile#5081
Éric Moulines
#94422
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Éric Moulines is a French researcher in statistical learning and signal processing. He received the silver medal from the CNRS in 2010, the France Télécom prize awarded in collaboration with the French Academy of Sciences in 2011. He was appointed a Fellow of the European Association for Signal Processing in 2012 and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2016. He is General Engineer of the Corps des Mines .
Go to Profile#5082
Bruno Zumbo
#86344
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Bruno D. Zumbo is a Canadian mathematical scientist trained in the tradition of research that combines pure and applied mathematics with statistical and algorithmic techniques to develop theory and solve problems arising in measurement, testing, and surveys in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. He is currently Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, the Canada Research Chair in Psychometrics and Measurement , and the Paragon UBC Professor of Psychometrics & Measurement at University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#5083
Kaye Stacey
#83563
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Kaye C. Vale Stacey is an Australian mathematics educator who held the Foundation Chair of Mathematics Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne for 20 years, from 1992 until her retirement in 2012. She is the editor-in-chief of Educational Designer, the journal of the International Society for Design and Development in Education.
Go to Profile#5084
Indulata Sukla
#42622
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Indulata L. Sukla was an Indian academic, who was professor of mathematics for more than three decades at Sambalpur University, Sambalpur, Odisha. She did her schooling from Maharani Prem Kumari Girls’ School and B.Sc. with Mathematics Honours from M.P.C. College, Baripada. She completed her M.Sc. in Mathematics from Ravenshaw College, Cuttack in 1966, and had a brief stint as a lecturer in M.P.C. College, before moving to the University of Jabalpur with a CSIR Fellowship to pursue Ph.D. under the supervision of Tribikram Pati. While pursuing her researches, she joined Sambalpur University in...
Go to Profile#5085
Shirley McBay
#85589
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Shirley Ann Mathis McBay was an American mathematician who was the founder and president of the Quality Education for Minorities Network, a nonprofit dedicated to improving minority education. She was the dean for student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1990. She was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia . McBay was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.
Go to Profile#5086
Emmanuel Grenier
#39525
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Emmanuel Grenier is a French mathematician. His research interests include hydrodynamics and mathematical biology. Grenier attended École Normale Supérieure from 1990 to 1994, before attaining his doctorate at Pierre and Marie Curie University, under supervision of Yann Brenier. He won an EMS Prize in 2000.
Go to Profile#5087
Elena Moldovan Popoviciu
#64778
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Elena Moldovan Popoviciu was a Romanian mathematician known for her work in functional analysis and specializing in generalizations of the concept of a convex function. She was a winner of the Simion Stoilow Prize in mathematics.
Go to Profile#5088
Marie Rognes
#94254
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Marie Elisabeth Rognes is a Norwegian applied mathematician specializing in scientific computing and numerical methods for partial differential equations. She works at the Simula Research Laboratory, as one of their chief research scientists.
Go to Profile#5089
Boaz Tsaban
#97668
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Boaz Tsaban is an Israeli mathematician on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University. His research interests include selection principles within set theory and nonabelian cryptology, within mathematical cryptology.
Go to Profile#5090
Katherine Heinrich
#88886
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Katherine A. Heinrich is a mathematician and mathematics teacher who wasthe first female president of the Canadian Mathematical Society. Her research interests include graph theory and the theory of combinatorial designs. Originally from Australia, she moved to Canada where she worked as a professor at Simon Fraser University and as an academic administrator at the University of Regina.
Go to Profile#5091
John George Herriot
#77628
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
John George Herriot was a mathematician at Stanford University who worked on numerical analysis. Herriot received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1941. He was a professor of mathematics and then of computer science at Stanford University from 1946 until his retirement in 1982. From 1953 to 1961 he was director of the Stanford Computation Center.
Go to Profile#5092
Alasdair Urquhart
#20952
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Alasdair Ian Fenton Urquhart is a Scottish–Canadian philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has made contributions to the field of logic, especially non-classical logic. One of his ideas is proving the undecidability of the relevance logic R. He also published papers in theoretical computer science venues, mostly on mathematical logic topics of relevance to computer science.
Go to Profile#5093
Richard Tweedie
#99883
Overall Influence
1947 - 2001 (54 years)
Richard Lewis Tweedie was an Australian statistician. Education After having completed his undergraduate studies and a Master of Arts at the Australian National University, Tweedie moved to Cambridge University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of David George Kendall in 1972. Additionally, in 1986 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the ANU for his major contributions to the theory of Markov chains on a measurable state space.
Go to Profile#5094
Agnes M. Herzberg
#64107
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Agnes Margaret Herzberg is a Canadian statistician who works as a professor of mathematics and statistics at Queen's University. She was president of the Statistical Society of Canada for 1991–1992, its first female president.
Go to Profile#5095
Harriet Griffin
#81532
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Harriet Madeline Griffin was an American mathematician, and the author of a textbook on number theory. She taught for many years at Brooklyn College. Education and career Griffin was born on April 6, 1903, in Brooklyn, one of two daughters of a furniture salesman. She was educated at Baldwin High School in Baldwin, New York, graduating as valedictorian in 1920. She earned a bachelor's degree at Hunter College in 1925, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, winning the Thomas Hunter Prize in mathematics, and becoming a founding member of Pi Mu Epsilon; her sister graduated in the same year and become a ma...
Go to Profile#5096
John Bryce McLeod
#81377
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
John Bryce McLeod, was a British mathematician, who worked on linear and nonlinear partial and ordinary differential equations. Life and education McLeod was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 23 December 1929. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School; the University of Aberdeen, where he took a first in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1950; and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first in Mathematics in 1952. He was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1955 to 1956. He obtained his PhD in 1959 under the supervision of Edward Charles Titchmarsh at the University...
Go to Profile#5097
Mary Flahive
#95338
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Mary Elizabeth Flahive is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University. Her research interests are in number theory; she is the author of two books on difference equations and Diophantine approximation, and is also interested in the geometry of numbers and algebraic coding theory.
Go to Profile#5098
Michael J Pencina
#104085
Overall Influence
#5099
Ilijas Farah
#48223
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Ilijas Farah is a Canadian-Serbian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at York University in Toronto and at the Mathematical Institute of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia. His research focuses on applications of logic to operator algebras.
Go to Profile#5100
Randall Dougherty
#90668
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Randall Dougherty is an American mathematician. Dougherty has made contributions in widely varying areas of mathematics, including set theory, logic, real analysis, discrete mathematics, computational geometry, information theory, and coding theory.
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