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,
#5451
Ding-Zhu Du
#101254
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Ding-Zhu Du is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has received public recognition when he solved two long-standing open problems on the Euclidean minimum Steiner trees, the proof of Gilbert–Pollack conjecture on the Steiner ratio of the Euclidean plane, and the existence of a polynomial-time heuristic with a performance ratio bigger than the Steiner ratio. The proof of Gilbert-Pollak's conjecture on Steiner ratios was later found to have gaps, thus leaving the problem unsolved.
Go to Profile#5452
Bernhard Keller
#107694
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Bernhard Keller is a Swiss mathematician, specializing in algebra. He is a professor at the University of Paris. Keller received in 1990 his PhD from the University of Zurich under Pierre Gabriel with the thesis On Derived Categories.
Go to Profile#5453
Dmitry Feichtner-Kozlov
#105641
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Dmitry Feichtner-Kozlov is a Russian-German mathematician. He works in the field of Applied and Combinatorial Topology, where he publishes under the name Dmitry N. Kozlov. Biography Feichtner-Kozlov obtained his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm in 1996, with thesis Extremal Combinatorics, Weighting Algorithms, and Topology of Subspaces Arrangements written under the direction of Anders Björner. In 2004, after longer stays at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study in ...
Go to Profile#5454
Mary Wootters
#91249
Overall Influence
Mary Katherine Wootters is an American coding theorist, information theorist, and theoretical computer scientist. She is an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering and a member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#5455
Théophile Lepage
#95218
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Théophile Lepage was a Belgian mathematician. Biography Théophile Henri Joseph Lepage, better known as Théophile Lepage, was born in Limburg on March 24, 1901. Together with Alfred Errera he founded the seminar for mathematical analysis at the ULB. This seminar played an important role in the flourishing of the department of mathematics at this university. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Liège from 1928 till 1930. He taught differential and integral calculus at the ULB from 1931 till 1956 and higher analysis from 1956 till 1971.
Go to Profile#5456
William Gehrlein
#60632
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
William V. Gehrlein is a notable researcher in the areas of social choice theory, decision theory and graph theory. He received his B.S. in physics from Gannon College in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1968, his M.S. in physics from Pennsylvania State University in 1972, and his Ph.D. in business administration from Pennsylvania State University in 1975. His teaching interests are operations management and operations research. He is currently professor of business administration at the University of Delaware.
Go to Profile#5457
Eugenia Cheng
#97129
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Eugenia Loh-Gene Cheng is a British mathematician, educator and concert pianist. Her mathematical interests include higher category theory, and as a pianist she specialises in lieder and art song. She is also known for explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians to combat math phobia, often using analogies with food and baking. Cheng is a scientist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Go to Profile#5458
Michael Woodroofe
#102887
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Michael Barrett Woodroofe was an American probabilist and statistician. He was a professor of statistics and of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where he was the Leonard J. Savage Professor until his retirement. He was noted for his work in sequential analysis and nonlinear renewal theory, in central limit theory, and in nonparametric inference with shape constraints.
Go to Profile#5459
John M. Edmond
#44504
Overall Influence
1943 - 2001 (58 years)
John Marmion Edmond FRS was a professor of marine geochemistry and oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did pioneering work on oceanic particulate matter, the oceanic carbon dioxide cycle, trace elements, and radioisotopes. He explored and analyzed water chemistry from environments as diverse as the mid-ocean ridge hydrothermal vents to the polar oceans to remote rivers and lakes in South America, Africa, Siberia, and Tibet. He and his students and colleagues in his lab measured more chemical elements at lower concentrations in water than had ever been done before.
Go to Profile#5460
Marie Hušková
#98186
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Marie Hušková is a Czech mathematician who worked in theoretical statistics and change-point problem. She was a doctoral student of Jaroslav Hájek. In 2012 she was awarded by title Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau for long term cooperation with Dutch mathematical statisticians. She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#5461
Julia Kempe
#53138
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Julia Kempe is a French, German, and Israeli researcher in quantum computing. She is currently the Director of the Center for Data Science at NYU and Professor at the Courant Institute. Education and career Kempe was born in East Berlin, to a family of Russian descent. She moved to Austria in 1990, and did her undergraduate studies in mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna from 1992 to 1995, with a year as an exchange student in physics at the University of Technology Sydney. She then earned two Master of Advanced Studies degrees in France: one in mathematics in 1996 from Pierre and Marie Curie University and another in 1997 in physics from the École normale supérieure.
Go to Profile#5462
Baruch Barzel
#45912
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Baruch Barzel is an Israeli physicist and applied mathematician at Bar-Ilan University, a member of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center and of the Bar-Ilan Data Science Institute. His main research areas are statistical physics, complex systems, nonlinear dynamics and network science.
Go to Profile#5463
Margaret Sullivan Pepe
#78877
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Margaret Patricia O'Sullivan Pepe is an Irish biostatistician specializing in the evaluation of tests and biomarkers for disease screening. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington School of Public Health and a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Go to Profile#5464
Klavdija Kutnar
#76758
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Klavdija Kutnar is a Slovene mathematician. She received her PhD at the University of Primorska in 2008. She is Rector of the University of Primorska. Biography Klavdija Kutnar was born 23 December 1980, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She graduated from the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana in 2003, and in 2008 received her PhD in mathematics at the University of Primorska under the supervision of Dragan Marušič. From 2010 to 2012 she was head of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Primorska Institute Andrej Marušič . In 2012, she was elected dean of the University o...
Go to Profile#5465
Harald Grobner
#88843
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Harald Grobner is an Austrian mathematician at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Vienna. His research focuses on questions of algebra and number theory within the Langlands program. Career and research Grobner studied mathematics, philosophy and classical philology at the University of Vienna, where he graduated in 2005. From 2005 to 2007 he studied for his doctorate in mathematics at the Université Paris VI and the University of Vienna, with Joachim Schwermer as his supervisor.
Go to Profile#5466
Guido L. Weiss
#111291
Overall Influence
#5467
Barry C. Arnold
#111322
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
#5468
Alain Goriely
#96413
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Alain Goriely is a Belgian mathematician, currently holding the statutory professorship of mathematical modelling at the University of Oxford, Mathematical Institute. He is director of the Oxford Centre for Industrial Mathematics , of the International Brain and Mechanics Lab and Professorial Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford. At the Mathematical Institute, he was the director of external relations and public engagement, from 2013 until 2022, initiating the Oxford Mathematics series of public lectures. In 2022, he was elected to the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#5469
Elaine Koppelman
#81622
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Elaine H. Koppelman Eugster was an American mathematician. She was the James Beall Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College. Early life and education Koppelman was born on March 28, 1937, in Brooklyn, New York. She had two brothers. At the age of 16, Koppelman graduated from high school. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics from Brooklyn College. Koppelman completed a Master of Arts and an all but dissertation in mathematics at Yale University. For two years, she conducted doctoral research on a mathematical problem before uncovering that an obscure mathema...
Go to Profile#5470
Olivia Caramello
#93555
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (41 years)
Olivia Caramello is an Italian mathematician. She holds a national Rita Levi-Montalcini associate professorship at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy. She is known for her work in topos theory and for pioneering the technique of toposes as bridges. She authored the 2017 book Theories, Sites, Toposes: Relating and studying mathematical theories through topos-theoretic bridges.
Go to Profile#5471
Mike Steel
#58315
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Michael Anthony Steel is a New Zealand mathematician and statistician, a Distinguished Professor of mathematics and statistics and the Director of the Biomathematics Research Centre at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is known for his research on modeling and reconstructing evolutionary trees.
Go to Profile#5472
Rajagopalan Parthasarathy
#91713
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Rajagopalan Parthasarathy is an Indian mathematician who specialised in representation theory of Lie groups and algebrass. He was awarded in 1985 the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category.
Go to Profile#5473
Earl A. Coddington
#107817
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Earl Alexander Coddington was an American mathematician and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and an author whose textbook on differential equations, written jointly with Norman Levinson is considered a classic and is used in universities all over the world.
Go to Profile#5474
Howard Levene
#89338
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Howard Levene was an American statistician and geneticist. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1947, and joined the faculty there shortly thereafter. He remained on the faculty at Columbia, where he served as professor of mathematical statistics and genetics, until 1982. He is known for developing Levene's test, a modified form of the one-way analysis of variance. He served as president of the American Society of Naturalists in 1976.
Go to Profile#5475
Jerzy Baksalary
#96015
Overall Influence
1944 - 2005 (61 years)
Jerzy Kazimierz Baksalary was a Polish mathematician who specialized in mathematical statistics and linear algebra. In 1990 he was appointed professor of mathematical sciences. He authored over 170 academic papers published and won one of the Ministry of National Education awards.
Go to Profile#5476
Peter Benner
#111486
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
#5477
Mikhail V. Blagosklonny
#111493
Overall Influence
#5478
Nguyen Dinh Ngoc
#44615
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Nguyen Dinh Ngoc was a Vietnamese Army intelligence officer, later a general, and a mathematician. Biography Nguyễn Đình Ngọc was born in Phượng Dực commune, Phú Xuyên District, Hanoi, Vietnam. In 1953, he joined the Intelligence Service and served in the Vietminh Army in the field of public security. He was then assigned to Saigon to work as a spy for North Vietnam . In 1955, he moved to France to complete his studies after being awarded a scholarship. He attended the University of Paris, from which he graduated with three engineering degrees: Hydrology and Meteorology, Shipbuilding and Telecommunications.
Go to Profile#5479
Arkady Onishchik
#111526
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Arkady L'vovich Onishchik was a prominent Soviet and Russian mathematician, who worked on Lie groups and their geometrical applications. Onishchik was a student of Eugene Dynkin, under whose guidance he got his PhD at Moscow State University in 1960. In 1962 Onishchik received the Prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society for young mathematicians. In 1970 he got Habilitation . Since 1975 Onishchik was a professor of Yaroslavl State University.
Go to Profile#5480
Håkan Eliasson
#107852
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Lars Håkan Eliasson is a Swedish mathematician. Biography Eliasson received in 1984 his PhD from the University of Stockholm under Jürgen Moser with thesis Hamiltonian systems with Poisson commuting integrals. He was a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and then became a professor at the University of Paris VII and the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu of the Universities Paris VI and VII and the CNRS.
Go to Profile#5481
Marti Anderson
#51843
Overall Influence
Marti J. Anderson is an ecological statistician whose works is interdisciplinary, from marine biology and ecology to mathematical and applied statistics. Her core areas of research and expertise are: community ecology, biodiversity, multivariate analysis, resampling methods, experimental designs, and statistical models of species abundances. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, she is a Distinguished Professor in the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study at Massey University and also the Director of the New Zealand research and software-development company, PRIMER-e .
Go to Profile#5482
Olga Hadžić
#92459
Overall Influence
1946 - 2019 (73 years)
Olga Hadžić was a Serbian mathematician known for her work on fixed-point theorems. Early life and education Hadžić was born in Novi Sad, on 25 August 1946, the daughter of lawyer Lazar Hadžić and the granddaughter of writer and physician . She attended both the Jovan Jovanović Zmaj Gymnasium and a music school in Novi Sad. She earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Novi Sad in 1968, and continued there as an assistant, earning a master's degree through the Faculty of Natural Sciences And Mathematics at the University of Belgrade in 1970, and completing a doctorate at the University of Novi Sad in 1972.
Go to Profile#5483
Nils Lid Hjort
#95534
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Nils Lid Hjort is a Norwegian statistician, who has been a professor of mathematical statistics at the University of Oslo since 1991. Hjort's research themes are varied, with particularly noteworthy contributions in the fields of Bayesian probability , density estimation and nonparametric regression , model selection , confidence distributions, and change detection. He has also worked with spatial statistics, statistics of remote sensing, pattern recognition, etc.
Go to Profile#5484
Sten Madsbad
#111615
Overall Influence
#5485
Paul Zimmermann
#62407
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Paul Zimmermann is a French computational mathematician, working at INRIA. Zimmermann co-authored the book Computational Mathematics with SageMath used by Mathematical students worldwide. His interests include asymptotically fast arithmetic—he wrote a book on algorithms for computer arithmetic with Richard Brent. He has developed some of the fastest available code for manipulating polynomials over GF, and for calculating hypergeometric constants to billions of decimal places. He is associated with the CARAMEL project to develop efficient arithmetic, in a general context and in particular in ...
Go to Profile#5486
Isabella Novik
#106323
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Isabella Novik is a mathematician who works at the University of Washington as the Robert R. & Elaine F. Phelps Professor in Mathematics. Her research concerns algebraic combinatorics and polyhedral combinatorics.
Go to Profile#5487
Edward C. Waymire
#104457
Overall Influence
Edward C. Waymire is an American mathematician, and professor of mathematics at Oregon State University. He was the chief editor of the Annals of Applied Probability between 2006 and 2008. From 2011 to 2013, he was president of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability. He is the recipient of the 2014 Carver Medal from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Go to Profile#5488
Francis Brown
#72334
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Francis Brown is a Franco-British mathematician who works on Arithmetic geometry and Quantum Field Theory. Career Brown studied at the University of Cambridge and the École normale supérieure and University of Bordeaux, with Pierre Cartier, graduating in 2006 with a Ph.D. He then spent time at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and Mittag-Leffler Institute. In 2007 he moved to Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche where he won a European Research Council starter grant in 2010. In 2012, he moved to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and was awarded a CNRS Bronze Medal and Élie Cartan Prize for his proof of two conjectures related to multiple zeta functions.
Go to Profile#5489
David Drasin
#87582
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
David Drasin is an American mathematician, specializing in function theory. Drasin received in 1962 his bachelor's degree from Temple University and in 1966 his doctorate from Cornell University supervised by Wolfgang Fuchs and Clifford John Earle, Jr. with thesis An integral Tauberian theorem and other topics. After that he was an assistant professor, from 1969 an associate professor, and from 1974 a full professor at Purdue University. He was visiting professor in 2005 at the University of Kiel and in 2005/2006 at the University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#5490
Snehalata V. Huzurbazar
#73639
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Snehalata V. Huzurbazar is an American statistician, known for her work in statistical genetics, and also interested in applications of statistics to geology. She is a professor of biostatistics, and chair of the biostatistics department, at the West Virginia University School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#5491
Stanley Paul Azen
#111873
Overall Influence
#5492
Lawrence Fred Shampine
#111940
Overall Influence
#5493
Garry Arthur Rechnitz
#111979
Overall Influence
#5494
Claude Dellacherie
#84471
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Claude Dellacherie is a French mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Dellacherie received in 1970 from the University of Strasbourg his doctorate under Paul-André Meyer with thesis Contribution à la théorie générale des processus stochastiques.
Go to Profile#5495
Dany Leviatan
#93078
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Dany Leviatan is an Israeli mathematician and former rector of Tel Aviv University. Biography Dany Leviatan completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A participant in the Academic Atuda program, Leviatan served as a mathematician in the Israel Air Force while working on his doctorate at the Hebrew University, which he completed in 1966.
Go to Profile#5496
Xiaole Shirley Liu
#24723
Overall Influence
Xiaole Shirley Liu is computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is now the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics.
Go to Profile#5497
Michael N. G. James
#112068
Overall Influence
#5498
Constantine Caramanis
#112083
Overall Influence
#5499
Joan Leitzel
#97322
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Joan Ruth Leitzel is an American mathematician and university administrator. She was the president of the University of New Hampshire from 1996 to 2002. She received the Charles Holmes Pettee Medal in 2002 for her contributions to the University of New Hampshire. She attended Hanover College , Brown University , and Indiana University .
Go to Profile#5500
Henk A. Van Der Vorst
#112207
Overall Influence
