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,
#5351
Marilyn Breen
#98612
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Marilyn Janet Breen is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oklahoma. Her research involves geometry, including visibility and orthogonal polygons. Life and work Breen graduated in 1966 from Agnes Scott College, and received her Ph.D. from Clemson University in 1970 under the supervision of William Ray Hare Jr. She joined the Oklahoma faculty in 1971 and was promoted to full professor in 1982.
Go to Profile#5352
Lia Bronsard
#99167
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Lia Bronsard is a Canadian mathematician and the former president of the Canadian Mathematical Society. She is a professor of mathematics at McMaster University. Contributions In her research, she has used geometric flows to model the interface dynamics of reaction–diffusion systems. Other topics in her research include pattern formation, grain boundaries, and vortices in superfluids.
Go to Profile#5353
Andreĭ Nikolaevich Tikhonov
#109037
Overall Influence
#5354
Peter Jagers
#101289
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Peter Jagers is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Statistics at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology who made lasting contributions in probability and general branching processes. Jagers was first vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Chair of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg . He in an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and past President of the Bernoulli Society . He also served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Statistics Sweden.
Go to Profile#5355
Carol Walker
#89885
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Carol Lee Walker is a retired American mathematician and mathematics textbook author. Walker's early mathematical research, in the 1960s and 1970s, concerned the theory of abelian groups. In the 1990s, her interests shifted to fuzzy logic and fuzzy control systems.
Go to Profile#5356
Ali Ülger
#103109
Overall Influence
Ali Ulger is a Turkish mathematician who works in the field of functional analysis. He got his PhD from University of Besançon in 1972. Between 1978 and 1996, he worked at Boğaziçi University. Then, he moved to Koç University where he still works as Professor of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5357
Menso Folkerts
#97508
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Menso Folkerts is a German mathematician and writer of popular science books. Early life Career From 1980 to 2008 he was a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He was as a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Go to Profile#5358
Sarah Flannery
#34990
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Sarah Flannery was, at sixteen years old, the winner of the 1999 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition for her development of the Cayley–Purser algorithm, based on work she had done with researchers at Baltimore Technologies during a brief internship there. The project, entitled "Cryptography – A new algorithm versus the RSA", also won her the EU Young Scientist of the Year Award in 1999.
Go to Profile#5359
Siobhán Vernon
#94851
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Siobhán Vernon was the first Irish-born woman to get a PhD in pure mathematics in Ireland, in 1964. Early life and education Siobhán O'Shea was born in Macroom, County Cork, in 1932 and was the daughter of Joseph J. O'Shea and his wife M. O'Shea.
Go to Profile#5360
Douglas Wiens
#60063
Overall Influence
Douglas Paul Wiens is a Canadian statistician; he is a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta. Wiens earned a B.Sc. in mathematics , two master's degrees in mathematical logic and statistics , and a Ph.D. in statistics , all from the University of Calgary. As part of his work on mathematical logic, in connection with Hilbert's tenth problem, Wiens helped find a diophantine formula for the primes: that is, multivariate polynomial with the property that the positive values of this polynomial, over integer arguments, are exactly the prime numbers.
Go to Profile#5361
Eva Vedel Jensen
#89084
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Eva Bjørn Vedel Jensen is a Danish mathematician and statistician known for her work in spatial statistics, stereology, stochastic geometry, and medical imaging. She is a professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Aarhus University.
Go to Profile#5362
Bernardo J. Cockburn
#109201
Overall Influence
#5363
Abu Bakr al-Hassar
#59202
Overall Influence
Al-Hassar or Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Ayyash al-Hassar was a 12th-century Moroccan mathematician. He is the author of two books Kitab al-bayan wat-tadhkar , a manual of calculation and Kitab al-kamil fi sinaat al-adad , on the breakdown of numbers. The first book is lost and only a part of the second book remains.
Go to Profile#5364
Marian Pour-El
#84581
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Marian Boykan Pour-El was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis. Early life and education Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City; her parents were dentist Joseph Boykan and his wife Matilda , a former laboratory technician and housewife. As a young girl, she performed ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and this influenced her later life where she was often more comfortable speaking before large audiences than in small groups. Although she wanted to attend the Bronx High School of Science, it was at that time only for boys; instead, she ...
Go to Profile#5365
T. R. Ramadas
#101557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Trivandrum Ramakrishnan "T. R." Ramadas is an Indian mathematician who specializes in algebraic and differential geometry, and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 1998, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category.
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Valentin Aleskovsky
#33782
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Valentin Borisovich Aleskovsky was a Soviet and Russian scientist and administrator known for his pioneering research on surface reactions underpinning the thin film deposition technique that years later became known as atomic layer deposition. He was the rector of Leningrad Technological Institute and of Leningrad State University .
Go to Profile#5367
Torsten Hothorn
#109277
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
#5368
Zhan Tao
#83932
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Zhan Tao is a Chinese mathematician who served as president of Jilin University from 2008 to 2011 and president of Shandong University from 2000 to 2008. Biography Zhan was born in April 1963, in Yanzhou County , Shandong. He graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Shandong University with a Ph.D. degree in mathematics under the supervision of Pan Chengdong in 1987. After graduation he became a professor of pure mathematics.
Go to Profile#5369
Jen‐chih Yao
#109293
Overall Influence
#5370
Gerald E. Farin
#109308
Overall Influence
#5371
Eleanor Krawitz Kolchin
#95190
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Eleanor Krawitz Kolchin was an American mathematician, computer programmer, author, and teacher. She worked at Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University to calculate the orbit of planets, phases of the moon, and trajectories of asteroids using IBM tabulating machines. Her calculations were used in the Apollo program.
Go to Profile#5372
Sharon-Lise Normand
#75242
Overall Influence
Sharon-Lise Teresa Normand is a Canadian biostatistician whose research centers on the evaluation of the quality of care provided by physicians and hospitals, and on the health outcomes for medical devices and medical procedures. She is a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#5373
Daniel Rider
#90671
Overall Influence
1938 - 2008 (70 years)
Daniel Gisriel Rider, Jr. was a mathematician, specializing in harmonic analysis and Fourier analysis. After spending his childhood in New England, Daniel Rider moved with his family to Santa Ana, California, where he graduated from secondary school. He received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and in 1964 his PhD under Walter Rudin from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with thesis Gap Series, and Measures of Spheres. Rider was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then an assistant professor at Yale University. At the University of Wisco...
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Luis Vázquez Martínez
#95424
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Luis Vázquez Martínez is a Spanish applied mathematician. He is a professor of applied mathematics in the faculty of informatics of the Complutense University of Madrid. Vázquez was born on January 26, 1949, in Narayola, a town in the municipality of Camponaraya. He earned a licenciate in physical sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1971, and a doctorate in physical sciences from the University of Zaragoza in 1975, under the supervision of Antonio Fernández-Rañada Menéndez de Luarca. After working as a Visiting Research Associate at Brown University, he returned to the Complu...
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Victor Isakov
#104436
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Victor Isakov was a mathematician working in the field of inverse problems for partial differential equations and related topics . He was a distinguished professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Wichita State University.
Go to Profile#5376
Peter Salamon
#75578
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Peter Salamon is a mathematics professor at San Diego State University. He has published more than 200 mathematical articles related to biomathematics, thermodynamics in finite time / geometrical thermodynamics, and optimization and mathematical modeling. He has an Erdős number of one and is also known for founding and doing extensive work on Finite Time Thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#5377
Robert J. Naiman
#63630
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Robert J. Naiman is a professor in both the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also holds the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Rivers at the University of Washington. Dr. Naiman was designated Eminent Ecologist by the Ecological Society of America in 2012.
Go to Profile#5378
Kate Tilling
#97054
Overall Influence
Kate Tilling is a British statistician who specialises in developing and applying statistical methods to overcome problems encountered in epidemiological research. Tilling has been a professor in medical statistics. in population health sciences within Bristol Medical School , University of Bristol, since 2011. She joined the University of Bristol in 2002 as a Senior Lecturer, following nine years as a lecturer at King's College London.
Go to Profile#5379
Thomas N. E. Greville
#103726
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Thomas Nall Eden Greville was an American mathematician, specializing in statistical analysis, particularly as it concerned the experimental investigation of psi. Biography/Career Greville was born in New York on December 27, 1910, and died in 1998. Following receipt of a B.A. degree from the University of the South in 1930, and a M.A. degree in 1932, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1933. His Ph.D. thesis concerned Invariance of the Property of Admissiblitiy Under Certain General Types of Transformations. Thereafter Greville worked as actuarial assistant in the company...
Go to Profile#5380
Diane Souvaine
#71909
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Diane L. Souvaine is a professor of computer science and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Tufts University. Contributions Souvaine's research is in computational geometry and its applications, including robust non-parametric statistics and molecular modeling. She has also encouraged women and minorities to study and pursue careers in mathematics and the sciences and advocated gender neutrality in science teaching.
Go to Profile#5381
Gordana Todorov
#99912
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Gordana Todorov is a mathematician working in noncommutative algebra, representation theory, Artin algebras, and cluster algebras. She is a professor of mathematics at Northeastern University. Biography Todorov earned her Ph.D. in 1978, at Brandeis University. Her dissertation, Almost Split Sequences in the Representation Theory of Certain Classes of Artin Algebras, was supervised by Maurice Auslander.
Go to Profile#5382
Achim Zeileis
#109661
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
#5383
Judy L. Walker
#87891
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Judy Leavitt Walker is an American mathematician. She is the Aaron Douglas Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she chaired the mathematics department from 2012 through 2016 and currently serves as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs. Her research is in the area of algebraic coding theory.
Go to Profile#5384
Siamak Yassemi
#76281
Overall Influence
Siamak Yassemi is an Iranian mathematician and is currently the Dean of Faculty of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, University of Tehran, Iran. He has found basic techniques that have played important roles in the field homological algebra. His recent works have established relationships between monomial ideals in commutative algebra and graphs in combinatorics, which have stimulated the development of the new interdisciplinary field combinatorial commutative algebra. Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he has received the COMSTECH International Awa...
Go to Profile#5385
David Firth
#75386
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
David Firth is a British statistician. He is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick. Education Firth was born and went to school in Wakefield. He studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD in Statistics at Imperial College London, supervised by Sir David Cox.
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Vicente Valor Caselles
#109737
Overall Influence
#5387
Manfred Wagner
#75932
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Manfred Hermann Wagner is the author of Wagner model and the molecular stress function theory for polymer rheology. He is a Professor for Polymer engineering and Polymer physics at the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#5388
Adi Ben-Israel
#94360
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Adi Ben-Israel is a mathematician and an engineer, working in applied mathematics, optimization, statistics, operations research and other areas. He is a Professor of Operations Research at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#5389
Kokichi Sugihara
#41128
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Kōkichi Sugihara is a Japanese mathematician and artist known for his three-dimensional optical illusions that appear to make marbles roll uphill, pull objects to the highest point of a building's roof, and make circular pipes look rectangular. His illusions, which often involve videos of three-dimensional objects shown from carefully chosen perspectives, won first place at the Best Illusion of the Year Contest in 2010, 2013, 2018,and 2020 and second place in 2015 and 2016.
Go to Profile#5390
Nora Federici
#48773
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
Federici Nora was an Italian statistician. Biography Federici obtained a degree in political science at the University of Rome in 1933. In 1934 she took part in Corrado Gini's expedition to study the anthropometrics of Polish minorities such as the Karaites. She subscribed to fascism and was antisemitic, and was responsible for furnishing as a demographer detailed proposals for ‘reducing the number of Jewish individuals resident in Italy and, specifically isolating them spiritually and socially from the life of the nation,’ a measure she openly admired in Nazism.
Go to Profile#5391
Michael Drmota
#103997
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Michael Drmota is an Austrian mathematician and professor at TU Wien. He studied Mathematics at TU Wien and finished his PhD in 1986 under the supervision of Robert F. Tichy. At the same university he acquired habilitation in 1990 and is now full professor at the Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, where he also served as head of institute from 2004 to 2012.
Go to Profile#5392
Jia Rongqing
#68135
Overall Influence
Jia Rongqing is a Canadian mathematician of Chinese origin who is a mathematics professor at the University of Alberta researching approximation theory and wavelet analysis. Life He was an undergraduate student at the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1968. In 1980, he went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and undertook M.Sc and Ph.D work under the supervision of Carl-Wilhelm de Boor, receiving his Ph.D. in 1983.
Go to Profile#5393
Freeman A. Hrabowski III
#34129
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Freeman Alphonsa Hrabowski III is an American educator, advocate, and mathematician. In May 1992, he began his term as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County , one of the twelve public universities composing the University System of Maryland. Hrabowski has been credited with transforming UMBC into an institution noted for research and innovation. Under his leadership, UMBC was ranked the #1 Up and Coming University in the U.S. for six consecutive years by the U.S. News & World Report magazine. When that designation was retired, U.S. News & World Report began including UMBC...
Go to Profile#5394
Don Blasius
#109888
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Don Malcolm Blasius is an American mathematician. Blasius graduated from Harvard University in 1972 with a bachelor's degree and from the University of Oxford in 1977 with a bachelor's degree. He received his PhD in 1981 from Princeton University with thesis Arithmetic of Monomial Relations between the Periods of Abelian Varieties under the supervision of Gorō Shimura. Blasius was an assistant professor from 1981 to 1985 at Columbia University and from 1985 to 1987 at Yale University. He became in 1987 an associate professor at City University of New York and in 1989 a full professor at UCLA.
Go to Profile#5395
Osmo Pekonen
#46815
Overall Influence
1960 - 2022 (62 years)
Osmo Pekonen was a Finnish mathematician, historian of science, and author. He was a docent of mathematics at the University of Helsinki and at the University of Jyväskylä, a docent of history of science at the University of Oulu, and a docent of history of civilization at the University of Lapland. He was the Book Reviews section editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer.
Go to Profile#5396
Ellen Maycock
#53451
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Ellen Johnston Maycock is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. She is the former Johnson Family University Professor and professor emerita of mathematics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her mathematical research was in functional analysis.
Go to Profile#5397
Jan Willem Nienhuys
#80005
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Jan Willem Nienhuys is a Dutch mathematician, book translator and skeptic. He taught mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is also a board member and secretary of Stichting Skepsis and an editor of its magazine Skepter.
Go to Profile#5398
Faina Kirillova
#89662
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Faina Mihajlovna Kirillova is a Belarusian scientist in the field of mathematical theory of optimal control. She was the winner of the USSR Council of Ministers Prize "for the development and implementation of multi-purpose software tools for engineering calculations."
Go to Profile#5399
Wassim Michael Haddad
#77599
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Wassim Michael Haddad is a Lebanese-Greek-American applied mathematician, scientist, and engineer, with research specialization in the areas of dynamical systems and control. His research has led to fundamental breakthroughs in applied mathematics, thermodynamics, stability theory, robust control, dynamical system theory, and neuroscience. Professor Haddad is a member of the faculty of the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he holds the rank of Professor and Chair of the Flight Mechanics and Control Discipline. Dr. Haddad is a member of the Academy of No...
Go to Profile#5400
Pierre Friedlingstein
#109990
Overall Influence
Pierre Friedlingstein is Professor and Chair in Mathematical Modelling of the Climate System at the University of Exeter, and Research Director at the Laboratoire de Météorologie dynamique , Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , France.
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