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,
#5301
B. R. Bhat
#91799
Overall Influence
Beliyar Ramdas Bhat was a professor and head of the department of statistics at Karnataka University for more than two decades. He was elected member of International Statistical Institute, and Fellow of Royal Statistical Society.
Go to Profile#5302
Brian Caffo
#69646
Overall Influence
Brian Caffo is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He graduated from the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida in 2001, and from the Department of Mathematics at UF in 1995. His doctoral advisor was James G. Booth. He works in the fields of computational statistics and neuroinformatics and co-created the SMART working group. He has been the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Golden Apple and AMTRA teaching awards.
Go to Profile#5303
Kathryn Leonard
#68358
Overall Influence
Kathryn Leonard is an American mathematician and computer scientist. Leonard received a Henry L. Alder Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 2012. She received the AWM Service Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015. She served as the AWM Meetings Coordinator from 2015 - 2018. She was President of the AWM and is now AWM Past-President. She is also director of the NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. She is currently on the American Mathematical Society Nominating Committee.
Go to Profile#5304
Abdul Jerri
#43810
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Abdul Jabbar Hassoon Jerri is an Iraqi American mathematician, most recognized for his contributions to Shannon Sampling Theory, It's Generalizations, Error Analysis, and Historical Reviews, and in particular his establishment in 2002 of the journal Sampling Theory in Signal and Image Processing with over thirty top international experts as its editors, besides establishing its Sampling Publishing, also his contribution to the general understanding of the Gibbs Phenomenon, where he wrote the first book ever on the subject, published by Springer - Verlag, then he followed it by editing anothe...
Go to Profile#5305
Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr.
#28562
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Samuel Standfield Wagstaff Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, whose research interests are in the areas of cryptography, parallel computation, and analysis of algorithms, especially number theoretic algorithms. He is currently a professor of computer science and mathematics at Purdue University who coordinates the Cunningham project, a project to factor numbers of the form bn ± 1, since 1983. He has authored/coauthored over 50 research papers and four books. He has an Erdős number of 1.
Go to Profile#5306
Tom Bohman
#91808
Overall Influence
Tom Bohman is an American mathematician who is a former head of the Department of Mathematical Sciences and is a Alexander M. Knaster Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#5307
Tatyana Shaposhnikova
#94995
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Tatyana Olegovna Shaposhnikova is a Russian-born Swedish mathematician. She is best known for her work in the theory of multiplierss in function spaces, partial differential operators and history of mathematics, some of which was partly done jointly with Vladimir Maz'ya. She is also a translator of both scientific and literary texts.
Go to Profile#5308
Hans Jörg Stetter
#87555
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Hans Jörg Stetter is a German mathematician, specializing in numerical analysis. Stetter studied at the University of Munich and then at the Technical University of Munich. For one academic year, he was an undergraduate exchange student in Fort Collins at the Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, i.e. Colorado A&M , where he participated in the Putnam competition and was awarded an honorable mention. After receiving a master's degree as a qualification for teaching in secondary school, he studied the numerical analysis of partial differential equations with applications to...
Go to Profile#5309
Justin T. Moore
#92844
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Justin Tatch Moore is a set theorist and logician. He is a full professor in mathematics at Cornell University. Career Moore received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Stevo Todorcevic. He was an assistant professor in mathematics at Boise State University. In the fall of 2007, he joined the faculty at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#5310
Fedor Fomin
#88297
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Fedor V. Fomin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Bergen. He is known for his work in algorithms and graph theory. He received his PhD in 1997 at St. Petersburg State University under Nikolai Nikolaevich Petrov.
Go to Profile#5311
Niles Pierce
#73494
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Niles A. Pierce is an American mathematician, bioengineer, and professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is a leading researcher in the fields of molecular programming and dynamic nucleic acid nanotechnology. His research is focused on kinetically controlled DNA and RNA self-assembly. Pierce is working on applications in bioimaging.
Go to Profile#5312
Ira Longini
#77618
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Ira M. Longini is an American biostatistician and infectious disease epidemiologist. Early life and education Longini was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in Biometry and Biomathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1977. He also received a MS in Statistics/Operations Research in 1973 and a BS, Engineering/Operations Research, from the University of Florida in 1971.
Go to Profile#5313
Monique Teillaud
#72579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Monique Teillaud is a French researcher in computational geometry at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Nancy, France. She moved to Nancy in 2014 from a different INRIA center in Sophia Antipolis, where she was one of the developers of CGAL, a software library of computational geometry algorithms.
Go to Profile#5314
Michael Fourman
#25713
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Michael Paul Fourman FBCS FRSE is Professor of Computer Systems at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, and was Head of the School of Informatics from 2001 to 2009. Fourman is worked in applications of logic in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science – more specifically, formal models of digital systems, system design tools, proof assistants, categorical semantics and propositional planning.
Go to Profile#5315
Maria Gordina
#99845
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Maria Gordina is a Russian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. Her research is at the interface between stochastic analysis, differential geometry, and functional analysis, including the study of heat kernels on infinite-dimensional groups.
Go to Profile#5316
Caroline Finch
#75465
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Caroline Finch AO is an Australian sports injury epidemiologist and sports injury prevention researcher. Her research has been adopted and used to directly inform safety policy by Government Departments of Sport and Health, health promotion and injury prevention agencies, and peak sports bodies both within Australia and internationally. Her injury prevention research has been applied to falls in older people, road safety, workplace safety and injuries in children.
Go to Profile#5317
Odile Favaron
#82723
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Odile Zink-Favaron is a French mathematician known for her research in graph theory, including work on well-covered graphs, factor-critical graphs, spectral graph theory, Hamiltonian decomposition, and dominating sets. She is retired from the Laboratory for Computer Science at the University of Paris-Sud.
Go to Profile#5318
Anadi Sankar Gupta
#91135
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Anadi Sankar Gupta was an Indian mathematician. Till his death, he was an INSA Senior Scientist and emeritus faculty with the Department of Mathematics, IIT Kharagpur. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for mathematical sciences in 1972 by the Government of India for his "significant contributions in the field of fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics, notably on heat transfer in free convection flow in the presence of magnetic field," amongst other things.
Go to Profile#5319
Carlos Matheus
#108288
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (41 years)
Carlos Matheus Silva Santos is a Brazilian mathematician working in dynamical systems, analysis and geometry. He currently works at the CNRS, in Paris. He earned his Ph.D. from the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in 2004 under the supervision of Marcelo Viana, at the age of 19.
Go to Profile#5320
Peter G. Casazza
#107424
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Peter G. Casazza, born June 28, 1945, in Albany, New York, is an American mathematician, presently working at the University of Missouri. He began his career as a Banach space theorist, but he is perhaps most well known for his role in the development of frame theory as a popular discipline of mathematical research.
Go to Profile#5321
Wataru C. O. Patent Di Takahashi
#108440
Overall Influence
#5322
Felipe Cucker
#96664
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Juan Felipe Cucker Farkas is an Uruguayan mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who has done research into the complexity theory of the Blum–Shub–Smale computational model and the complexity of numerical algorithms in linear programming and numerical algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#5323
Dipendra Prasad
#90002
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Dipendra Prasad is an Indian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He is a number theorist known for his work in the areas of automorphic representations and the Gan–Gross–Prasad conjecture. He is currently the president of Commission for Developing Countries of International Mathematics Union and of Indian Math Society .
Go to Profile#5324
Jane Cullum
#93577
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Jane Grace Kehoe Cullum is an American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical algorithms and control theory, who became president of the IEEE Control Systems Society. Education and career Cullum studied chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, graduating in 1960. She continued at Virginia Tech for a master's degree in mathematics in 1962, with the master's thesis Applications of the analog computer to mathematical problems. She completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. Her dissertation, Continuous Optimal Control Problems with Ph...
Go to Profile#5325
Ionica Smeets
#91092
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Ionica Smeets is a Dutch mathematician, science journalist, columnist, television presenter and professor in science communication at Leiden University. Biography Ionica Smeets was born in Delft, where she completed her propedeuse in computer science at the Delft University of Technology. She switched studies and graduated in applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#5326
Genevieve M. Knight
#89138
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Genevieve Madeline Knight was an American mathematics educator. Education and career Knight was the youngest of three sisters who all became mathematics and science educators, daughters of a seamstress and a civil service radar specialist. As a freshman at Fort Valley State College in 1957, Knight was studying home economics when the Sputnik launch created a big push for more American students to become educated in mathematics and the sciences. Knight transferred to mathematics, "because it had fewer labs than any of the sciences", and graduated in 1961.
Go to Profile#5327
Kerrie Mengersen
#97756
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Kerrie Mengersen is an Australian statistician. Since 2016, she has been Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Queensland University of Technology in the Science and Engineering Faculty. She earned BA and PhD degrees in Mathematics, majoring in Statistics and Computing, from the University of New England in 1985 and 1989, respectively. She is the Director of the Bayesian Research and Applications Group . This group is part of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers of Big Data, Big Models, New Insights.
Go to Profile#5328
Don Bernard Zagier
#108574
Overall Influence
#5329
Antonio Auffinger
#98130
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Antonio Auffinger is a Brazilian mathematician. He works in the area of probability theory and mathematical physics. Education and career Auffinger completed his doctorate at the Courant Institute in 2011; his dissertation was supervised by Gerard Ben Arous and was awarded the Francisco Aranda-Ordaz Prize by the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability.
Go to Profile#5330
Tilla Weinstein
#97727
Overall Influence
1934 - 2002 (68 years)
Tilla Weinstein was an American mathematician known for her mentorship of younger women in mathematics. Her research concerned differential geometry, including conformal structures, harmonic maps, and Lorentz surfaces. She taught for many years at Rutgers University, where she headed the mathematics department in the Douglass Residential College.
Go to Profile#5331
Dănuț Marcu
#100913
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Dănuţ Marcu is a Romanian mathematician and computer scientist, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest in 1981. He claimed to have authored more than 400 scientific papers. Marcu was frequently accused of plagiarism. The editors of Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, Informatica decided to ban Marcu from their journal for this reason, as did the editors of 4OR and the editors of Geombinatorics. The editors of Geometriae Dedicata state that they suspect Marcu of plagiarism, as he submitted a manuscript which is "more-or-less word for word the same" as a paper by Bernt Lindström.
Go to Profile#5332
Eléna Wexler-Kreindler
#85852
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Eléna Wexler-Kreindler was a Romanian mathematician. She spent most of her professional career in France, where she specialized in modern algebra and studied the Ore extensions, the theory of the filtration of rings, or algebraic microlocalisation.
Go to Profile#5333
Roger C. Alperin
#98999
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Roger Charles Alperin was an American mathematician, best known for his work in group theory, including its connections with geometry and topology. He was a professor at the University of Oklahoma and at San Jose State University.
Go to Profile#5334
Nancy Geller
#89800
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Marilyn Nancy Lorch Geller is an American biostatistician, the director of biostatistics research at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and a former president of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#5335
Rachel Justine Pries
#91150
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Rachel Justine Pries is an American mathematician whose research focuses on arithmetic geometry and number theory. She is a professor at Colorado State University and both a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5336
Jotun Hein
#60620
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Jotun John Piet Hein is Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Statistics of the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow of University College, Oxford. Hein was previously Director of the Bioinformatics Research Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Go to Profile#5337
Małgorzata Klimek
#73254
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Małgorzata Klimek is a Polish mathematical analyst and mathematical physicist known for her research on the fractional calculus and fractional differential equations. She is a professor in the Institute of Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at Częstochowa University of Technology in Poland.
Go to Profile#5338
Claudia Czado
#73453
Overall Influence
Claudia Czado is a mathematical statistician at the Technical University of Munich, known for her research on copulas, vines, and their applications in statistical finance. Early life and education Czado grew up in a family with five children in Borken, Hesse, a small town in central Germany. She earned a diploma in 1984 from the University of Göttingen, specializing in probability and statistics. Inspired by a high school fascination with Native American culture, Czado enrolled in an master's-level exchange program between University of Göttingen and Cornell University. At Cornell, she worked with Murad Taqqu in their department of operations research and industrial engineering.
Go to Profile#5339
Ronald Rousseau
#75574
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Ronald Rousseau is a Belgian mathematician and information scientist. He has obtained an international reputation for his research on indicators and citation analysis in the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics.
Go to Profile#5340
Luke Tierney
#26389
Overall Influence
Luke Tierney is an American statistician and computer scientist. A fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1988 and of the American Statistical Association since 1991, Tierney is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Iowa. Through his past work on programming languages such as R and Lisp, Tierney now holds a position on the developing team known as the R Core.
Go to Profile#5341
Derek John Scott Robinson
#108832
Overall Influence
#5342
Horst Herrlich
#99916
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Horst Herrlich was a German mathematician, known as a pioneer of categorical topology. Education and career Horst Herrlich received his PhD in 1962 with thesis Ordnungsfähigkeit topologischer Räume under Karl Peter Grotemeyer and Alexander Dinghas at the Free University of Berlin, where he also received his habilitation in 1965 with a thesis on E-compact spaces .
Go to Profile#5343
David Vere-Jones
#97926
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
David Vere-Jones is a New Zealand statistician and probabilist. He is known in particular for his work on earthquake forecasting. Career David Vere-Jones obtained his doctorate in 1962 at Oxford University under the supervision of David George Kendall, with a thesis entitled "Topics in the Theory of Probability".
Go to Profile#5344
Zuowei Shen
#92976
Overall Influence
Zuowei Shen is a Chinese mathematician, and Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore . Shen received his BSc in 1982 from Hohai University , MSc in 1987 and PhD in 1991 from University of Alberta. He first joined NUS as a lecturer at the Department of Mathematics in 1993; was promoted to professor in 2002 and distinguished professor in 2009. Shen was Head of Department of Mathematics from 2012 to 2014 and was appointed Dean of Science in 2014.
Go to Profile#5345
Sylvia Chin-Pi Lu
#96200
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Sylvia Chin-Pi Lu was a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra who was an invited speaker at the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto. Less than 5% of ICM speakers in algebra and number theory have been women, placing Lu in a rarefied group in this "hall of fame for mathematics". Lu's most highly cited papers are on the properties of prime submodules.
Go to Profile#5346
Rick Jardine
#104434
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
John Frederick "Rick" Jardine is a Canadian mathematician working in the fields of homotopy theory, category theory, and number theory. Biography Jardine obtained his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1981, with thesis Algebraic Homotopy written under the direction of Roy Douglas. Following a research fellowship at the University of Toronto and a Dickson instructorship at the University of Chicago, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario in 1984, where he is currently an emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#5347
Aparna V. Huzurbazar
#60840
Overall Influence
Aparna V. Huzurbazar is an American statistician known for her work using graphical models to understand time-to-event data. She is the author of a book on this subject, Flowgraph Models for Multistate Time-to-Event Data .
Go to Profile#5348
Mikhail Gennadiyevich Dmitriyev
#83718
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Mikhail Gennadiyevich Dmitriyev is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He was the President of the University of Pereslavl from 1995 to 1998. Currently he is a professor of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics
Go to Profile#5349
Stevan Stević
#108946
Overall Influence
#5350
Sudipto Banerjee
#52059
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Sudipto Banerjee is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis. He is Professor of Biostatistics and Senior Associate Dean in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He served as the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at UCLA from 2014 through 2023. He also served as the 2022 President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
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