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,
#5401
László Mérő
#39051
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
László Mérő is a Hungarian research psychologist and popular science author. He has Jewish ancestry. He is a lecturer at the Experimental Psychology Department of Eötvös Loránd University and at the business school Kürt Academy. He is also a founder and leader of a software company producing computer games. One of his projects is a computer game he is developing with Ernő Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube. He is also the leader of the Hungarian team at the World Puzzle Championship. His son is Csaba Mérő, an 8-time Hungarian go champion. His daughter, Vera Mérő, is a human rights activi...
Go to Profile#5402
Juhani Karhumäki
#77717
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Eero Urho Juhani Karhumäki is a Finnish mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to automata theory. He is a professor at the University of Turku. Biography Karhumäki earned his doctorate from the University of Turku in 1976. In 1980–1985, he was a junior researcher of Academy of Finland. Since 1986, he has held teaching positions at the University of Turku, attaining full professorship in 1998. In 1998–2015, Karhumäki was the head of the mathematics department at the University of Turku. He has authored altogether around 200 research papers.
Go to Profile#5403
Jonathan T. Overpeck
#110040
Overall Influence
#5404
Margaret Willerding
#96531
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Margaret Frances Willerding was an American mathematician known for her combinatorial enumeration of quadratic forms, for her mathematics textbooks, and for her editorship of the problems department of the mathematics journal School Science and Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5405
Arnd Scheel
#106084
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Arnd Scheel is a professor with the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. Scheel earned his Ph.D. in 1994 from the Freie Universität Berlin under the supervision of Bernold Fiedler. In 2009 he was awarded the J.D. Crawford Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for outstanding research in nonlinear science.
Go to Profile#5406
Paul van Oorschot
#67024
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Authentication and Computer Security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . He is best known as co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography , together with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone. Van Oorschot was awarded the 2000 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography workshop in 1994.
Go to Profile#5407
Giuseppe Arbia
#67275
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Giuseppe Arbia is an Italian statistician. He is known for his contributions to the field of spatial statistics and spatial econometrics. In 2006 together with Jean Paelinck he founded the Spatial Econometrics Association, which he has been chairing ever since.
Go to Profile#5408
Jesper Lützen
#90067
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Jesper Lützen is a Danish historian of mathematics and the physical sciences. Biography Lützen graduated in mathematics in 1976 from Aarhus University, where he also earned his PhD in 1980 in the history of science under the supervision of Kirsti Andersen. In 1980 he was a visiting scholar at Yale University and became a temporary lecturer at Odense University and from 1985 a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. In 1990 he received his habilitation from the University of Copenhagen. There he has been a lecturer since 1989 and since 2005 a professor of mathematics history at the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5409
Eleanor Mollie Horadam
#95000
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Eleanor Mollie Horadam was an English-Australian mathematician specialising in the number theory of generalised integers. Life Horadam was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. She read mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge. Then, while doing wartime service by day for Rolls-Royce performing stress–strain analysis of jet engines, she took night classes in engineering at the University of London, earning first-class honours there.
Go to Profile#5410
Keith D Paulsen
#110163
Overall Influence
#5411
Valentine Joseph
#82158
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Valentine Joseph was a Sri Lankan Tamil mathematician, noted for his contributions to education. Early life and education Joseph was born in Penang, Malaya to Sri Lankan Tamil parents. His extended family were Roman Catholics, with his cousin, Dominic Vendargon, becoming the first Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur. Joseph commenced school at St. Xavier's Institution in Penang in 1935.
Go to Profile#5412
Frank Deutsch
#90665
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Frank Deutsch is an American academic applied mathematician specializing in approximation theory. He is an emeritus professor at The Pennsylvania State University, and is the author of over 94 journal articles and two books, and on the editorial board of five journals.
Go to Profile#5413
Michael Jeremy Todd
#110234
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
#5414
Robert Kupperman
#83243
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Robert Harris Kupperman was an American government official and academic, and a leading expert on terrorism. Kupperman received his doctorate in applied mathematics from New York University in 1962 and went on to teach at the University of Maryland as well as NYU.
Go to Profile#5415
Stanislav George Djorgovski
#50266
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Stanislav George Djorgovski is an American scientist and scholar. He obtained his B.A. in astrophysics in 1979 at the University of Belgrade. After receiving his PhD in astronomy from U.C. Berkeley in 1985, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow until 1987 when he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently a professor of astronomy and data science.
Go to Profile#5416
Dag Tjøstheim
#95211
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Dag Tjøstheim is a Norwegian statistician. He took the cand.real. degree at the University of Bergen in 1970, and the PhD degree at Princeton University. He then worked at NORSAR. He was appointed docent at the Norwegian School of Economics in 1977, and in 1980 he became professor in statistics at the University of Bergen. He has edited the journal Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2009, Tjøstheim was the first ever recipient of the Sverdrup Prize.
Go to Profile#5417
Hao Helen Zhang
#90501
Overall Influence
Hao Helen Zhang is a Chinese statistician. She is a professor at the University of Arizona, in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics Interdisciplinary Program, and Applied Mathematics Interdisciplinary Program there. With Bertrand Clarke and Ernest Fokoué, she is the author of the book Principles and Theory for Data Mining and Machine Learning.
Go to Profile#5418
Michael Wertheimer
#57669
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Michael Wertheimer is a cryptologic mathematician. From October 31, 2005, until June 2009, he was the assistant deputy director and chief technology officer of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for Analysis. Wertheimer oversaw the coordination of Intelligence Community efforts to bring increased depth and accuracy to analysis through technology. He observed and catalogued the autostasis effect in 1968, which is the opposite of the autokinetic effect. In 2008, Wertheimer successfully launched A-Space, the U.S. Intelligence Community's "Facebook for Spies." This new social network opened in September 2008 for U.S.
Go to Profile#5419
John E. Osborn
#105535
Overall Influence
1936 - 2011 (75 years)
John E. Osborn was an American mathematician. He obtained B.S. , M.S. , and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His Ph.D. adviser was Hans Weinberger. Osborn made fundamental contributions to computational mathematics, especially to the theory of numerical solution of partial differential equations, eigenvalue approximations, and the finite element method. He also co-authored several textbooks on differential equations and numerical computation with the goal of introducing computation into sophomore level differential equations courses.
Go to Profile#5420
Alexander Abrosimov
#96173
Overall Influence
1948 - 2011 (63 years)
Alexánder Víktorovich Abrósimov was a Russian mathematician and teacher. Life Dr. Abrosimov was born in 1948 in the city of Kuibyshev . In 1971, he graduated from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of State University of Gorky . Dr. Abrosimov undertook graduate studies in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Lomonosov Moscow State University under the supervision of Professor Boris Shabat. In 1984 he defended his Ph.D. dissertation “Complex Differential Systems and the Tangential Cauchy–Riemann Equations”. Dr. Abrosimov was Associate Professor in the Theory of Functions Su...
Go to Profile#5421
Philip Reeve
#9580
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Philip Reeve is a British author and illustrator of children's books, primarily known for the 2001 book Mortal Engines and its sequels . His 2007 novel, Here Lies Arthur, based on the legendary King Arthur, won the Carnegie Medal.
Go to Profile#5422
Sven Erlander
#69039
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Sven Bertil Erlander was a Swedish mathematician and academic. Biography Erlander was the son of Tage Erlander, who was the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1946 to 1969. He published several of his father's diaries.
Go to Profile#5423
Vivian O'Brien
#51473
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Vivian "Vob" O'Brien was an American applied mathematician and physicist whose research included fluid dynamics and visual perception. She worked for many years as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and is the namesake of the Craik–O'Brien–Cornsweet illusion.
Go to Profile#5424
Nicole Lazar
#102268
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Nicole Alana Lazar is a statistician who holds triple citizenship as an American, Canadian, and Israeli. She is a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia, where she is acting head of the statistics department. Her research interests include empirical likelihood, functional neuroimaging, model selection and the history and sociology of statistics.
Go to Profile#5425
Denis Osin
#92664
Overall Influence
Denis Osin is a mathematician at Vanderbilt University working in geometric group theory and geometric topology. Career Osin received a PhD at Moscow State University in 1999 under the supervision of Aleksandr Olshansky. He worked at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, at the City College of CUNY, and joined Vanderbilt in 2008. He was promoted to a Full Professor in 2013. He is an editor at Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics.
Go to Profile#5426
Vladimir Mazya
#31248
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Vladimir Gilelevich Maz'ya is a Russian-born Swedish mathematician, hailed as "one of the most distinguished analysts of our time" and as "an outstanding mathematician of worldwide reputation", who strongly influenced the development of mathematical analysis and the theory of partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#5427
Adrian Bejan
#6046
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Adrian Bejan is a Romanian-American professor who has made contributions to modern thermodynamics and developed his constructal law. He is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University and author of the books Design in Nature, The Physics of Life , Freedom and Evolution and Time And Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies
Go to Profile#5428
Sheila Bird
#62053
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance studies in prisons.
Go to Profile#5429
Michael Christopher Wendl
#57641
Overall Influence
Michael Christopher Wendl is a mathematician and biomedical engineer who has worked on DNA sequencing theory, covering and matching problems in probability, theoretical fluid mechanics, and co-wrote Phred. He was a scientist on the Human Genome Project and has done bioinformatics and biostatistics work in cancer. Wendl is of ethnic German heritage and is the son of the aerospace engineer Michael J. Wendl.
Go to Profile#5430
Roger Zelazny
#3244
Overall Influence
1937 - 1995 (58 years)
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American poet and writer of fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, best known for The Chronicles of Amber. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times , including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad , subsequently published under the title This Immortal and then the novel Lord of Light .
Go to Profile#5431
Charles F. Dunkl
#110602
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Charles F. Dunkl is a mathematician at the University of Virginia who introduced Dunkl operators. Selected works with Donald E. Ramirez: with Donald E. Ramirez: with Donald E. Ramirez: with M. F. E. de Jeu; E. M. Opdam: with Yuan Xu: with E. M. Opdam:
Go to Profile#5432
Thiruvenkatachari Parthasarathy
#104107
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Thiruvenkatachari Parthasarathy , known and published as T. Parthasarathy, was a game theorist and distinguished Indian mathematician and the co-author of a book on game theory with T. E. S. Raghavan, and of two research monographs, one on optimization and one on univalence theory, published by Springer-Verlag. He was a former president of the Indian Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#5433
Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan
#59697
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Jill Suzanne Barnholtz-Sloan is an American biostatistician and data scientist specialized in cancer epidemiology and etiologic investigations of brain tumors. She is a senior investigator and associate director for informatics and data science at the National Cancer Institute.
Go to Profile#5434
John Casti
#109152
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
John L. Casti is an author, complexity scientist, systems theorist, mathematician and entrepreneur. As an author Over the course of his extensive career, Casti has dedicated himself to writing across a variety of fields. Casti has written more than 120 scientific articles, seven technical monographs and textbooks on mathematical modeling. He was also the former editor of the journals Applied Mathematics & Computation and Complexity.
Go to Profile#5435
Alexander H. G. Rinnooy Kan
#110681
Overall Influence
#5436
Ailana Fraser
#108518
Overall Influence
1998 - Present (27 years)
Ailana Margaret Fraser is a Canadian mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia. She is known for her work in geometric analysis and the theory of minimal surfaces. Her research is particularly focused on extremal eigenvalue problems and sharp eigenvalue estimates for surfaces, min-max minimal surface theory, free boundary minimal surfaces, and positive isotropic curvature.
Go to Profile#5437
Fern Hunt
#55683
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Fern Yvette Hunt is an American mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. She currently works as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she conducts research on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#5438
Michael Winkler
#110726
Overall Influence
#5439
Barbara Trader Faires
#97024
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Barbara Trader Faires is an American mathematician who served as professor, department chair, and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Westminster College in Pennsylvania and served for 8 years as Secretary of the Mathematical Association of America . She received the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics from the MAA in 2022. She is now retired and living in Pulaski Township, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#5440
Frank Matthews Leslie
#69779
Overall Influence
1935 - 2000 (65 years)
Professor Frank Matthews Leslie FRS FRSE was a Scottish mathematical physicist specializing in continuum mechanics. He is remembered for the Ericksen–Leslie Theory which he developed with Jerald Ericksen to describe the viscosity of mesophases associated with liquid crystals. The parameters of this theory are viscosities called "Leslie coefficients", and the angle at which a nematic orientates with respect to the direction of flow in a steady shear flow is called the "Leslie angle".
Go to Profile#5441
A. W. Kuchler
#5772
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
August William Kuchler was a German-born American geographer and naturalist who is noted for developing a plant association system that has become widely used in the United States. Some of this database has been digitized for integration into GIS mapping systems. Kuchler received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Munich in 1935. In 1978, he received the Association of American Geographers' Honors award. He is the author of the book Vegetation Mapping.
Go to Profile#5442
Mirka Miller
#77362
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Mirka Miller was a Czech-Australian mathematician and computer scientist interested in graph theory and data security. She was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Newcastle.
Go to Profile#5443
Valentina Gorbachuk
#72037
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Valentina Ivanivna Gorbachuk is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician, specializing in operator theory and partial differential equations. Education and career Gorbachuk was born in Mogilev on 25 June 1937; then part of the Soviet Union, it has since become part of Belarus. Her parents worked as an accountant and a telegraphist; in search of better work, they moved to Lutsk in what is now Ukraine when Gorbachuk was a child, and that is where she was schooled.
Go to Profile#5444
Roswitha März
#93820
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Roswitha März is a German mathematician known for her research on differential-algebraic systems of equations. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Education and career März was born on October 15, 1940, in Varnsdorf, now part of the Czech Republic. Beginning in 1960 she studied mathematics at the University of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg State University, earning a diploma in 1965. She earned a doctorate from the Chemnitz University of Technology in 1970. Her dissertation, Interpolation mit Parameteroptimierung, was supervised by Frieder Kuhne...
Go to Profile#5445
Michael P. Drazin
#99021
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Michael Peter Drazin is an American mathematician of British background, working in noncommutative algebra. Background The Drazins were a Russian Jewish family who moved to the United Kingdom in the years before World War I. Isaac Drazin founded in 1927 a well-known electrical goods shop in Heath Street, Hampstead, which existed for over 50 years.
Go to Profile#5446
Richard J. Sylvester
#110851
Overall Influence
#5447
Michel Mandjes
#101972
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Michael Robertus Hendrikus "Michel" Mandjes is a Dutch mathematician, known for several contributions to queueing theory and applied probability theory. His research interests include queueing models for telecommunications,traffic management and analysis, and network economics.
Go to Profile#5448
Ernesto Mordecki
#97202
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Ernesto Mordecki Pupko is a Uruguayan mathematician and professor. Biography Mordecki is Professor at the Centro de Matemática of the University of the Republic, Uruguay. He received his Ph.D in statistics of stochastic processes in 1994 from the Steklov Mathematical Institute, under the supervision of Albert Shiryaev. His research interests include optimal stopping of stochastic processes and applications to finance. During 2000–2001 Mordecki was the director of the Centro de Matemática , Science Faculty, Montevideo.
Go to Profile#5449
Dorte Olesen
#71094
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Dorte Marianne Olesen is a Danish mathematician. In 1988 at Roskilde University, she became the first Danish woman to be appointed a full professor of mathematics. She has also played a leading role in the development of education and research networks, both in Denmark and at the European level.
Go to Profile#5450
Dean Oliver
#51821
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Lawrence Dean Oliver is an American statistician and assistant coach for the NBA's Washington Wizards. Oliver is a prominent contributor to the advanced statistical evaluation of basketball. He is the author of Basketball on Paper, the former producer of the defunct Journal of Basketball Studies. More recently, Oliver has served in front office roles with the Sacramento Kings, Seattle SuperSonics and Denver Nuggets of the NBA . In October 2015 Dean Oliver joined TruMedia Networks as Vice President of Data Science. TruMedia Networks is an engineering firm specializing in sports analytics solut...
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