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,
#551
Sergei Godunov
#10071
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Sergei Konstantinovich Godunov was a Soviet and Russian professor at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Russia. Biography Godunov's most influential work is in the area of applied and numerical mathematics, particularly in the development of methodologies used in Computational Fluid Dynamics and other computational fields. Godunov's theorem : Linear numerical schemes for solving partial differential equations, having the property of not generating new extrema , can be at most first-order accurate. Godunov's scheme is a conservative numerical scheme for solving partial differential equations.
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Max August Zorn
#9816
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Max August Zorn was a German mathematician. He was an algebraist, group theorist, and numerical analyst. He is best known for Zorn's lemma, a method used in set theory that is applicable to a wide range of mathematical constructs such as vector spaces, and ordered sets amongst others. Zorn's lemma was first postulated by Kazimierz Kuratowski in 1922, and then independently by Zorn in 1935.
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Kannan Soundararajan
#10297
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Kannan Soundararajan is an Indian-born American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Before moving to Stanford in 2006, he was a faculty member at University of Michigan, where he had also pursued his undergraduate studies. His main research interest is in analytic number theory, particularly in the subfields of automorphic L-functions, and multiplicative number theory.
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Richard Palais
#11267
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Richard Sheldon Palais is an American mathematician working in differential geometry. Education and career Palais studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a BA in 1952, a MA in 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1956. His PhD thesis, entitled A Global Formulation of the Lie Theory of Transformation Groups, was supervised by Andrew M. Gleason and George Mackey.
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Martin Aigner
#12932
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Martin Aigner was an Austrian mathematician and professor at Freie Universität Berlin from 1974 with interests in combinatorial mathematics and graph theory. Biography Martin Aigner was born on 28 February 1942. He received his Ph.D from the University of Vienna. His book Proofs from THE BOOK has been translated into 12 languages.
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Herman Wold
#5367
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Herman Ole Andreas Wold was a Norwegian-born econometrician and statistician who had a long career in Sweden. Wold was known for his work in mathematical economics, in time series analysis, and in econometric statistics.
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Jürgen Jost
#9385
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jürgen Jost is a German mathematician specializing in geometry. He has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig since 1996. Life and work In 1975, he began studying mathematics, physics, economics and philosophy. In 1980 he received a Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Bonn under the supervision of . In 1984 he was at the University of Bonn for the habilitation. After his habilitation, he was at the Ruhr University Bochum, the chair of Mathematics X, Analysis. During this time he was the coordinator of the project "Stochastic Analysis and system...
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Jacob Palis
#9826
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jacob Palis Jr. is a Brazilian mathematician and professor. Palis' research interests are mainly dynamical systems and differential equations. Some themes are global stability and hyperbolicity, bifurcations, attractors and chaotic systems.
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Peter Borwein
#9132
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Peter Benjamin Borwein was a Canadian mathematician and a professor at Simon Fraser University. He is known as a co-author of the paper which presented the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe algorithm for computing π.
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Matt Visser
#6136
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Matt Visser is a mathematics Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand. Career Visser completed a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Mary K. Gaillard. Visser's research interests include general relativity, quantum field theory and cosmology.
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Gil Kalai
#5175
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Gil Kalai is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Professor of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and adjunct Professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University, United States.
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Lawrence C. Evans
#12312
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lawrence Craig Evans is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations, primarily elliptic equations. In 2004, he shared the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research with Nicolai V. Krylov. Evans also made significant contributions to the development of the theory of viscosity solutions of nonlinear equations, to the understanding of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation arising in stochastic optimal control theory, and to the theory of harmonic maps. He...
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Allen Knutson
#13215
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Allen Ivar Knutson is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. Education Knutson completed his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 under the joint advisorship of Victor Guillemin and Lisa Jeffrey.
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John Penn Mayberry
#6344
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
John Penn Mayberry was an American mathematical philosopher and creator of a distinctive Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics to which he gave expression in his book The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets. Following completion of a Ph.D. at Illinois under the supervision of Gaisi Takeuti, he took up, in 1966, a position in the mathematics department of the University of Bristol. He remained there until his retirement in 2004 as a Reader in Mathematics.
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Myles Tierney
#12061
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Myles Tierney was an American mathematician and Professor at Rutgers University who founded the theory of elementary toposes with William Lawvere. Tierney obtained his B.A. from Brown University in 1959 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1965. His dissertation, On the classifying spaces for K-Theory mod p, was written under the supervision of Samuel Eilenberg. Following positions at Rice University and ETH Zurich , he became an associate professor at Rutgers in 1968.
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K. S. Chandrasekharan
#10593
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Komaravolu Chandrasekharan was a professor at ETH Zurich and a founding faculty member of School of Mathematics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . He is known for his work in number theory and summability. He received the Padma Shri, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, and the Ramanujan Medal, and he was an honorary fellow of TIFR. He was president of the International Mathematical Union from 1971 to 1974.
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John C. Baez
#4349
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
John Carlos Baez is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, applications of higher categories to physics, and applied category theory. Additionally, Baez is known on the World Wide Web as the author of the crackpot index.
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Shoshichi Kobayashi
#12393
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
was a Japanese mathematician. He was the eldest brother of electrical engineer and computer scientist Hisashi Kobayashi. His research interests were in Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.
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Ivo Babuška
#12798
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Ivo M. Babuška was a Czech-American mathematician, noted for his studies of the finite element method and the proof of the Babuška–Lax–Milgram theorem in partial differential equations. One of the celebrated result in the finite elements is the so-called Ladyzenskaja–Babuška–Brezzi condition , which provides sufficient conditions for a stable mixed formulation. The LBB condition has guided mathematicians and engineers to develop state-of-the-art formulations for many technologically important problems like Darcy flow, Stokes flow, incompressible Navier–Stokes, nearly incompressible elasticit...
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Hans Zassenhaus
#10615
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Hans Julius Zassenhaus was a German mathematician, known for work in many parts of abstract algebra, and as a pioneer of computer algebra. Biography He was born in Koblenz in 1912. His father was a historian and advocate for Reverence for Life as expressed by Albert Schweitzer. Hans had two brothers, Guenther and Wilfred, and sister Hiltgunt, who wrote an autobiography in 1974. According to her, their father lost his position as school principal due to his philosophy. She wrote:Hans, my eldest brother, studied mathematics. My brothers Guenther and Wilfred were in medical school. ... only students who participated in Nazi activities would get scholarships.
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Theodore Wilbur Anderson
#10622
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
Theodore Wilbur Anderson was an American mathematician and statistician who specialized in the analysis of multivariate data. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was on the faculty of Columbia University from 1946 until moving to Stanford University in 1967, becoming Emeritus Professor in 1988. He served as Editor of Annals of Mathematical Statistics from 1950 to 1952. He was elected President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1962.
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Narendra Karmarkar
#1971
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Narendra Krishna Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician. Karmarkar developed Karmarkar's algorithm. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher. He invented one of the first provably polynomial time algorithms for linear programming, which is generally referred to as an interior point method. The algorithm is a cornerstone in the field of linear programming. He published his famous result in 1984 while he was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
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Askold Khovanskii
#13205
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Askold Georgievich Khovanskii is a Russian and Canadian mathematician currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada. His areas of research are algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, singularity theory, differential geometry and differential equations. His research is in the development of the theory of toric varieties and Newton polyhedra in algebraic geometry. He is also the inventor of the theory of fewnomials, and the Bernstein–Khovanskii–Kushnirenko theorem is named after him.
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Ronald Brown
#10493
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ronald Brown FLSW is an English mathematician. Emeritus Professor in the School of Computer Science at Bangor University, he has authored many books and more than 160 journal articles. Education and career Born on 4 January 1935 in London, Brown attended Oxford University, obtaining a B.A. in 1956 and a D.Phil. in 1962. Brown began his teaching career during his doctorate work, serving as an assistant lecturer at the University of Liverpool before assuming the position of Lecturer. In 1964, he took a position at the University of Hull, serving first as a Senior Lecturer and then as a Reader be...
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Po-Shen Loh
#11515
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Po-Shen Loh is an American professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in combinatorics, and formerly served as the national coach of the United States' International Math Olympiad team. He is the founder of educational websites Expii and Live, and lead developer of contact-tracing app NOVID.
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Joel David Hamkins
#7948
Overall Influence
Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is O'Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical and philosophical logic, set theory and philosophy of set theory , in computability theory, and in group theory.
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Václav Chvátal
#7692
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Václav Chvátal is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague. He has published extensively on topics in graph theory, combinatorics, and combinatorial optimization.
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Joseph J. Kohn
#11474
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Joseph John Kohn was a Czechoslovakian-born American academic and mathematician. He was professor of mathematics at Princeton University, where he researched partial differential operators and complex analysis.
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Alan Baker
#9732
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Alan Baker was an English mathematician, known for his work on effective methods in number theory, in particular those arising from transcendental number theory. Life Alan Baker was born in London on 19 August 1939. He attended Stratford Grammar School, East London, and his academic career started as a student of Harold Davenport, at University College London and later at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his PhD. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1970 when he was awarded the Fields Medal at the age of 31. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge University, a position he held until 2006 when he became an Emeritus.
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Oded Schramm
#8228
Overall Influence
1961 - 2008 (47 years)
Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory. Biography Schramm was born in Jerusalem. His father, Michael Schramm, was a biochemistry professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Martin Grötschel
#9064
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities .
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Gunnar Carlsson
#11442
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gunnar E. Carlsson is an American mathematician, working in algebraic topology. He is known for his work on the Segal conjecture, and for his work on applied algebraic topology, especially topological data analysis. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University. He is the founder and president of the predictive technology company Ayasdi.
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Ronald Coifman
#7007
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ronald Raphael Coifman is the Sterling professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Coifman earned a doctorate from the University of Geneva in 1965, supervised by Jovan Karamata. Coifman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the 1996 DARPA Sustained Excellence Award, the 1996 Connecticut Science Medal, the 1999 Pioneer Award of the International Society for Industrial and Applied Science, and the 1999 National Medal of Science.
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Ulf Grenander
#5096
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ulf Grenander was a Swedish statistician and professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. His early research was in probability theory, stochastic processes, time series analysis, and statistical theory . In recent decades, Grenander contributed to computational statistics, image processing, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. He coined the term pattern theory to distinguish from pattern recognition.
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Robert L. Devaney
#9048
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Luke Devaney is an American mathematician who is the Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Boston University. His research involves dynamical systems and fractals. Early life and career Devaney was born on April 9, 1948, and grew up in Methuen, Massachusetts.
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Thomas Jech
#11379
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thomas J. Jech is a mathematician specializing in set theory who was at Penn State for more than 25 years. Life He was educated at Charles University and from 2000 is at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
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Andrew Browder
#11928
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Andrew Browder was an American mathematician at Brown University. Background Andrew Browder was born in Moscow, Russia, where his father Earl Browder, an American communist from Kansas, United States, was living and working for a period. His mother was Raissa Berkmann, a Russian Jewish woman from St. Petersburg. His brothers were Felix Browder , also born in Moscow, and William Browder . All three brothers had careers in mathematics. Their father returned to the United States in the early 1930s, bringing his family with him. The senior Browder became head of the Communist Party USA. He ran fo...
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Jean Cerf
#12710
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Jean Cerf is a French mathematician, specializing in topology. Education and career Jean Cerf was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1928. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in sciences in 1947. After passing his agrégation in mathematics in 1950, he obtained a doctorate with thesis supervised by Henri Cartan. Cerf became a maître de conférences at the University of Lille and was later appointed a professor at the University of Paris XI. He was also a director of research at CNRS.
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Ingram Olkin
#12496
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Ingram Olkin was a professor emeritus and chair of statistics and education at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is known for developing statistical analysis for evaluating policies, particularly in education, and for his contributions to meta-analysis, statistics education, multivariate analysis, and majorization theory.
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Richard M. Karp
#2754
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.
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David Eppstein
#6837
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
David Arthur Eppstein is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. In 2011, he was named an ACM Fellow.
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Herbert Busemann
#13976
Overall Influence
1905 - 1994 (89 years)
Herbert Busemann was a German-American mathematician specializing in convex and differential geometry. He is the author of Busemann's theorem in Euclidean geometry and geometric tomography. He was a member of the Royal Danish Academy and a winner of the Lobachevsky Medal , the first American mathematician to receive it. He was also a Fulbright scholar in New Zealand in 1952.
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Helena Rasiowa
#6444
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Helena Rasiowa was a Polish mathematician. She worked in the foundations of mathematics and algebraic logic. Early years Rasiowa was born in Vienna on 20 June 1917 to Polish parents. As soon as Poland regained its independence in 1918, the family settled in Warsaw. Helena's father was a railway specialist. She exhibited many different skills and interests, from music to business management and the most important of her interests, mathematics.
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Brian Conrad
#13188
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Brian Conrad is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at Stanford University. Previously, he taught at the University of Michigan and at Columbia University. Conrad and others proved the modularity theorem, also known as the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. He proved this in 1999 with Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, while holding a joint postdoctoral position at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Abbas Bahri
#10075
Overall Influence
1955 - 2016 (61 years)
Abbas Bahri was a Tunisian mathematician. He was the winner of the Fermat Prize and the Langevin Prize in mathematics. He was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He mainly studied the calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. He introduced the method of the critical points at infinity, which is a fundamental step in the calculus of variations.
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David X. Li
#4720
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
David X. Li is a Chinese-born Canadian quantitative analyst and actuary who pioneered the use of Gaussian copula models for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations in the early 2000s. The Financial Times has called him "the world’s most influential actuary", while in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, to which Li's model has been partly credited to blame, his model has been called a "recipe for disaster" in the hands of those who did not fully understand his research and misapplied it. Widespread application of simplified Gaussian copula models to financial products such as securities may have contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.
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George B. Thomas
#9544
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
George Brinton Thomas Jr. was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at MIT. Internationally, he is best known for being the author of the widely used calculus textbook Calculus and Analytical Geometry, known today as Thomas' Calculus.
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George Piranian
#6922
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
George Piranian was a Swiss-American mathematician. Piranian was internationally known for his research in complex analysis, his association with Paul Erdős, and his editing of the Michigan Mathematical Journal.
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Stanislav Smirnov
#5199
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Stanislav Konstantinovich Smirnov is a Russian mathematician currently working as a professor at the University of Geneva. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010. His research involves complex analysis, dynamical systems and probability theory.
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John McKay
#9938
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
John K. S. McKay was a British-Canadian mathematician and academic who worked at Concordia University, known for his discovery of monstrous moonshine, his joint construction of some sporadic simple groups, for the McKay conjecture in representation theory, and for the McKay correspondence relating certain finite groups to Lie groups.
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