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.

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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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School

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#5201

Christopher K. W. Tam

#105968

Overall Influence

Christopher K. W. Tam is an American mathematician, currently the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.

#5202

Michael Cowling

#88028

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Michael George Cowling is an Australian pure mathematician who was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 1949. He gained a BSc from the Australian National University and a PhD from Flinders University. After rising to the rank of professor at the University of Genoa, he became Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of New South Wales in 1983. His work centers on harmonic analysis, representation theory, partial differential equations and geometry of Lie groups. He was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal in 1989, and he was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1993.

#5203

William S. Zwicker

#83249

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

William Seymour Zwicker is an American mathematician and the William D. Williams Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Zwicker earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1971, and a Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, under the supervision of Eugene M. Kleinberg. He joined the Union College faculty in 1975, was given his named chair in 2006, and retired in 2021.

#5204

Glenda Lappan

#91415

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Glenda T. Lappan is a professor emerita of mathematics at Michigan State University. She is known for her work in mathematics education and in particular for developing the widely used Connected Mathematics curriculum for middle school mathematics in the US.

#5205

Hyung Ju Park

#89054

Overall Influence

Yong Hoon Lee is the President of Ajou University, South Korea. He is a mathematician. Early life Born in Buyeo, South Korea, Park studied physics at Seoul National University and received his undergraduate degree in 1986. He then received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, USA in 1995.

#5206

David J. Simms

#82944

Overall Influence

1933 - 2018 (85 years)

David John Simms was an Indian-born Irish mathematician who was a Fellow Emeritus and former Associate Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin. Born in Sankeshwar, Mysore , India, he specialized in differential geometry and geometric quantisation. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy from 1978 and was a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Mathematical Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

#5207

Charles Joel Stone

#79020

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Charles "Chuck" Joel Stone was an American statistician and mathematician. Early life Charles Joel Stone was born and raised in Los Angeles. After secondary school at North Hollywood High School, Stone graduated with a Bachelor of Science in science from the California Institute of Technology in 1958. He then matriculated at Stanford University, where in 1961 he received his PhD in statistics. His PhD thesis Limit Theorems for Birth and Death Processes and Diffusion Processes was supervised by Samuel Karlin.

#5208

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh

#78329

Overall Influence

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a statistician who works as a professor in the Department of Educational Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves the development of generalized linear mixed models of data that incorporate latent variables to handle hidden data.

#5209

Al Jean

#23333

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Alfred Ernest Jean III is an American screenwriter and producer. Jean is well known for his work on The Simpsons. He was raised near Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard University in 1981. Jean began his writing career in the 1980s with fellow Harvard alum Mike Reiss. Together, they worked as writers and producers on television shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, ALF and It's Garry Shandling's Show.

#5210

Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar

Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar

#69974

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar is an Indian mathematician, statistician and psephologist. He served as the director of Chennai Mathematical Institute from 2010 until 2021 and now he is Professor Emeritus at CMI. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy.

#5211

Yishay Mansour

#106095

Overall Influence

#5212

Elaine Cohen

#79904

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Elaine Cohen is an American researcher in geometric modeling and computer graphics, known for her pioneering research on B-splines. She is a professor in the school of computing at the University of Utah.

#5213

Naomi Wray

#72565

Overall Influence

Naomi Ruth Wray is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics. Naomi pioneered the use of polygenic scores in human genetics, and has made significant contributions to both the development of met...

#5214

Arnaud Chéritat

Arnaud Chéritat

#87751

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (50 years)

Arnaud Chéritat is a French mathematician who works as a director of research at the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse. His research concerns complex dynamics and the shape of Julia sets. Chéritat earned a licenciate in mathematics in 1995 from the École Normale Supérieure, a diplôme d'études approfondies in pure mathematics in 1996 from the University of Paris-Sud, and a master's degree in pure and applied mathematics and informatics in 1998 from the École Normale Supérieure. He defended his doctoral thesis in 2001 from the University of Paris-Sud, under the supervision of Adrien Douady, and completed his habilitation in 2008 from the University of Toulouse.

#5215

Carina Curto

#86016

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (47 years)

Carina Curto is an American mathematician, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a Sloan Research Fellow. She is known for her work on mathematical neuroscience, including the applications of mathematics in both theoretical and computational neuroscience. Her recent work is funded by the BRAIN Initiative. She is an associate editor at SIAGA, a SIAM journal on applied algebra and geometry and on the editorial board at Physical Review Research.

#5216

Rebecca Walo Omana

#91636

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Rebecca Walo Omana is a Congolese mathematician, professor, and reverend sister. Omana became the first female mathematics professor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1982. She is the director of the mathematics and informatics doctoral program at the University of Kinshasa and is a vice-president of the African Women in Mathematics Association. Her mathematical interests lie in differential equations, nonlinear analysis, and modeling.

#5217

Alexander Laszlo

#47565

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Alexander Laszlo is a polycultural systems scientist, currently residing in Argentina. Laszlo was the 57th President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences , known for his work on systems theories and "education ecosystems". He, furthermore, is the President of the Board of Directors of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science , based in Vienna, Austria. He also functions as the director of research at the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research , which is based in Trieste, Italy.

#5218

Laurette Tuckerman

#92390

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (69 years)

Laurette Stephanie Tuckerman is a mathematical physicist working in the areas of hydrodynamic instability, bifurcation theory, and computational fluid dynamics. She is currently a director of research for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, at the Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media Laboratory of ESPCI Paris.

#5219

Chris Hall

#65492

Overall Influence

Christopher Hall is an American cryptographer and mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry. He is one of the creators of the cryptosystem Twofish. He obtained a BS from the University of Colorado-Boulder Department of Computer Science and a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University in 2003, under Nick Katz.

#5220

Amandine Aftalion

#83664

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Amandine Aftalion is a French applied mathematician, known for her research on Bose–Einstein condensates and on the mathematics of footracing. She is a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique .

#5221

Martin Bland

#62349

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

John Martin Bland , known as Martin Bland, is a British statistician. He has been professor of health statistics at the University of York since 2003. Bland is known for his work on medical measurement, particularly methodology for method comparison studies such as the Bland–Altman plot.

#5222

Norman E. Gibbs

#51276

Overall Influence

1941 - 2002 (61 years)

Norman E. Gibbs was an American software engineer, scholar and educational leader. He studied to a B.Sc. in mathematics at Ursinus College and M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University, advised by Robert R. Korfhage. His research area was cycle generation, an area in graph theory. Gibbs joined the faculty at Bowdoin College in Maine, Arizona State University and College of William and Mary in Virginia before moving to Pittsburgh, joining Carnegie Mellon University as professor of computer science and becoming the first director of the educational program at the Software Engineering Institute .

#5223

Ivan Rival

#83851

Overall Influence

1947 - 2002 (55 years)

Ivan Rival was a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of mathematics at the University of Calgary and of computer science at the University of Ottawa. Rival's Ph.D. thesis concerned lattice theory. After moving to Calgary he began to work more generally with partially ordered sets, and to study fixed point theorems for partially ordered structures. He was a frequent organizer of conferences in order theory, and in 1984 he founded the journal Order. As a computer scientist at Ottawa, he shifted research topics, applying his expertise in order theory to the study of data...

#5224

Johann Makowsky

Johann Makowsky

#61634

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Johann A. Makowsky is a Hungarian-born naturalised Swiss mathematician who works in mathematical logic and the logical foundations of computer science and combinatorics. He studied at ETH Zurich from 1967–73. He was a student in Zürich of Ernst Specker and Hans Läuchli in mathematical logic, , of Beno Eckmann and Volker Strassen , and in Warsaw of Andrzej Mostowski and Witek Marek, where he spent 1972 as an exchange student. Makowsky held visiting positions at the Banach Center in Warsaw , Stanford University , Simon Fraser University , University of Florence , MIT , Lausanne University and ETH Zurich .

#5225

Andrew H. Wallace

#76810

Overall Influence

1926 - 2008 (82 years)

Andrew Hugh Wallace was a Scottish-American mathematician. Biography Andrew Hugh Wallace was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. He received in 1946 an MA in mathematics from Edinburgh University and in 1949 a PhD from St. Andrews University with thesis Rational integral functions and associated linear transformations. In the 1950s he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 1959 he became a professor at Indiana University's mathematics department, where he was also department chair. In 1965 he left Indiana to become a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1986.

#5226

Roberto Conti

#91376

Overall Influence

1923 - 2006 (83 years)

Roberto Conti was an Italian mathematician, who contributed to the theory of ordinary differential equations and the development of the comparison method. Biography Roberto Conti was born in Florence on 29 April 1923. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, under the supervision, respectively, of Leonida Tonelli and Giovanni Sansone. Conti’s M.Sc. and Ph.D. dissertations dealt with translation surfaces and particular aspects of the Cauchy problem. Later he held the position of research assistant to the chair of Sansone at the University of Florence.

#5227

Taivo Arak

#101794

Overall Influence

1946 - 2007 (61 years)

Taivo Arak was an Estonian mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Biography In 1969 he graduated from Leningrad State University. There he received in 1972 his Russian candidate degree under I. A. Ibragimov.

#5228

Dominic Kwiatkowski

Dominic Kwiatkowski

#77247

Overall Influence

2000 - 2023 (23 years)

Dominic Kwiatkowski was an English medical researcher and geneticist who was head of the parasites and microbes programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge and a Professor of Genomics at the University of Oxford. Kwiatkowski applied genomics and computational analysis to problems in infectious disease, with the aim of finding ways to reduce the burden of disease in the developing world.

#5229

Lars-Erik Persson

#95906

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Lars-Erik Persson is a Swedish/Norwegian professor in mathematics, known for his works in Fourier analysis, function spaces, inequalities, interpolation theory and related problems connected to convexity and quasi-monotone functions.

#5230

Thomas Willmore

#106681

Overall Influence

#5231

Gheorghe Moroșanu

Gheorghe Moroșanu

#89416

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Gheorghe Moroșanu is a Romanian mathematician known for his works in Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, Nonlinear Analysis, Calculus of Variations, Fluid Mechanics, Asymptotic Analysis, Applied Mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in 1981 from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași.

#5232

George Roger Sell

#90254

Overall Influence

1937 - 2015 (78 years)

George Roger Sell was an American mathematician, specializing in differential equations, dynamical systems, and applications to fluid dynamics, climate modeling, control systems, and other subjects.

#5233

Jerald Franklin Lawless

#106703

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

#5234

John H. Smith

#88629

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (25 years)

John Howard Smith is an American mathematician and retired professor of mathematics at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, under the supervision of Kenkichi Iwasawa. In voting theory, he is known for the Smith set, the smallest nonempty set of candidates such that, in every pairwise matchup between a member and a non-member, the member is the winner by majority rule, and for the Smith criterion, a property of certain election systems in which the winner is guaranteed to belong to the Smith set. He has also made contributions to spectra...

#5235

Milton Abramowitz

#106783

Overall Influence

#5236

Igor Krichever

#86427

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

Igor Moiseevich Krichever was a Russian academic and mathematician. Biography Krichever was born in Kuybyshev to aviation engineer Moisey Solomonovich Krichever and Maria Leyzerovna Arlievskaya. He received a silver medal at the 1967 International Mathematical Olympiad. He graduated from the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics in 1972.

#5237

James Keener

#84364

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

James "Jim" Paul Keener is an American mathematician, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Utah. He is recognized as a pioneer in the field of mathematical physiology and cardiology. Biography Jim Keener received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1972. Initially intending to work on bifurcation theory, he came across a paper by Otto Rossler that implied that heartbeat can be modeled using chaos theory. Looking to investigate this claim, he picked up the Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur Guyton to build some foundational knowledge in cardiology and disc...

#5238

Eric M. Opdam

#106824

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Eric Marcus Opdam is a Dutch mathematician, specializing in algebra and harmonic analysis. He is one of the two namesakes of Heckman–Opdam polynomials. Opdam received his PhD from Leiden University in 1988 under the supervision of Gerrit van Dijk. Opdam is a professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has been at the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics since 1999. From 2015 he is the KdVI's director as the successor to Jan Wiegerinck.

#5239

Iain S. Duff

#75208

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Iain S. Duff is a British mathematician and computer scientist, known for his work in numerical methods and software for solving problem with sparse matrices, in particular the Harwell Subroutine Library. From 1986 to 2009, he was the Group Leader of Numerical Analysis at Harwell Laboratory, which has moved in 1990 to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is also the Project Leader for the Parallel Algorithms Group at CERFACS in Toulouse.

#5240

Peter Bürgisser

#95201

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (63 years)

Peter Bürgisser is a Swiss mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who deals with algorithmic algebra and algebraic complexity theory. Education and career Bürgisser received in 1990 his doctorate from the University of Konstanz with thesis Degenerationsordnung und Trägerfunktional bilinearer Abbildungen under the supervision of Volker Strassen. Bürgisser was a postdoc at the University of Bonn from 1991 to 1993 and then at the University of Zürich. He was a professor at the University of Paderborn and since 2013 a professor at the Technical University of Berlin .

#5241

Evelyn Buckwar

#98617

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Evelyn Buckwar is a German mathematician specializing in stochastic differential equations. She is Professor for Stochastics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria. Education Buckwar earned a diploma in mathematics in 1992 from the Free University of Berlin, and completed her doctorate there in 1997. Her dissertation, Iterative Approximation of the Positive Solutions of a Class of Nonlinear Volterra-type Integral Equations, was supervised by Rudolf Gorenflo.

#5242

James Stewart

#70870

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

James Drewry Stewart, was a Canadian mathematician, violinist, and professor emeritus of mathematics at McMaster University. Stewart is best known for his series of calculus textbooks used for high school, college, and university level courses.

#5243

Robert F. Tichy

Robert F. Tichy

#86197

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Robert Franz Tichy is an Austrian mathematician and professor at Graz University of Technology. He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna and finished 1979 with a Ph.D. thesis on uniform distribution under the supervision of Edmund Hlawka. He received his habilitation at TU Wien in 1983. Currently he is a professor at the Institute for Analysis and Number Theory at TU Graz. Previous positions include head of the Department of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Geodesy at TU Graz, President of the Austrian Mathematical Society, and Member of the Board...

#5244

Nathalie Sinclair

Nathalie Sinclair

#92308

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

Nathalie Michelle Sinclair is a Canadian researcher in mathematics education who holds the Canada Research Chair in Tangible Mathematics Learning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Early life and education Sinclair was born in Grenoble, the daughter of Canadian academics who were on sabbatical there; she grew up in Calgary. She began her undergraduate studies at McGill University in business, but quickly switched to mathematics, and then earned a master's degree with Len Berggren at Simon Fraser on the history of mathematics and mathematics in medieval Islam.

#5245

Richard M. Pollack

Richard M. Pollack

#94924

Overall Influence

1935 - 2018 (83 years)

Richard M. Pollack was an American geometer who spent most of his career at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where he was Professor Emeritus until his death. Contributions In combinatorics, Pollack published several papers with Paul Erdős and János Pach.

#5246

Carole Lacampagne

#92666

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Carole Baker Lacampagne is a retired mathematician formerly of George Washington University. She is known for her work in mathematics education and gender equality. Career Lacampagne received her Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1964. She then worked at Northern Illinois University and the National Science Foundation before moving to the Department of Education in 1991, becoming Director of the National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning . She then became Director of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Academies of Sc...

#5247

Matt Robshaw

#77740

Overall Influence

Matthew John Barton "Matt" Robshaw is a cryptographer. Formerly a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and a member of the cryptography research group at France Telecom's Orange Labs, he is now a Technical Fellow at Impinj. He coordinated the Symmetric Techniques Virtual Lab for ECRYPT. Robshaw's notable work includes the cryptanalysis of a number of cryptographic primitives, including the extension of linear cryptanalysis to use multiple approximations, and the design of the block ciphers Crab and RC6.

#5248

Eduard Feireisl

#99382

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

Eduard Feireisl is a Czech mathematician. After studying from 1973 to 1977 at secondary school in Nové Strašecí, Feireisl studied mathematics at Charles University in Prague from 1977 and graduated there in 1982. He received his doctorate in 1986 from the Institute of Mathematics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences with thesis Critical points of non-differentiable functionals: existence of solutions to problems of mathematical elasticity theory under the supervision of Vladimir Lovicar. During the 1980s he worked as an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Czech Technical University in Prague .

#5249

Lynne McClure

#89488

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Catherine Lynne McClure is a British mathematics educator. In 2014 she was appointed as director of Cambridge Mathematics, a program at the University of Cambridge that spans the university's mathematics and education faculties, Cambridge Assessment, and the Cambridge University Press, and is aimed at developing a flexible tool to inform new mathematics curricula for primary and secondary mathematics education.

#5250

Immanuel Bomze

#87906

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (67 years)

Immanuel Bomze is an Austrian mathematician. In his Ph.D. thesis, he completely classified all possible flows of the generalized Lotka–Volterra dynamics on the plane, employing equivalence of this dynamics to the 3-type replicator equation.

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