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,
#5601
Maria Hoffmann-Ostenhof
#103723
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Maria Hoffmann-Ostenhof is an Austrian mathematician known for her work on the behavior of the Schrödinger equation, and particularly on its asymptotic analysis, nodal lines, and behavior near its singularities.
Go to Profile#5602
O. Timothy O'Meara
#86997
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Onorato Timothy O'Meara was an American mathematician known for his work in number theory, linear groups and quadratic forms. He was provost emeritus and professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame.
Go to Profile#5603
Lynne Billard
#70941
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Lynne Billard is an Australian statistician and professor at the University of Georgia, known for her statistics research, leadership, and advocacy for women in science. She has served as president of the American Statistical Association, and the International Biometric Society, one of a handful of people to have led both organizations.
Go to Profile#5604
Rainer Kress
#114552
Overall Influence
#5605
Andrea Milani
#73346
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Andrea Milani Comparetti was an Italian mathematician and astronomer, based at the University of Pisa. Biography Andrea Milani Comparetti was born in Florence, in 1948. His father, Adriano Milani Comparetti, was a pioneer in child neuro-psychiatric rehabilitation and his uncle was Don Lorenzo Milani. In 1970 he graduated in Mathematics at the University of Milan and later he studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He then became a Full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Pisa.
Go to Profile#5606
Annie Marie Watkins Garraway
#81799
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Annie Marie Watkins Garraway is an American mathematician who worked in telecommunications and electronic data transmission. She is also a philanthropist. Biography Garraway was born Annie Marie Watkins in Parsons, Kansas, the oldest daughter of Levi Watkins and Lillian Bernice Varnado who met when they were both high school teachers.
Go to Profile#5607
Layne T. Watson
#114619
Overall Influence
#5608
Vilma Mesa
#99953
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Vilma María Mesa Narváez is a Colombian-American mathematics educator whose research topics have included secondary-school curriculum development, college-level calculus instruction, mathematics in community colleges, international perspectives in mathematics education, and inquiry-based learning. She is a professor of education and mathematics at the University of Michigan, where she is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Higher and Post-secondary Education.
Go to Profile#5609
Cicely Ridley
#84461
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Elizabeth Cicely Ridley was a British-American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical quantum chemistry and in climate modeling. The Roble–Dickinson–Ridley code that she and her collaborators created at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was the first general circulation model of the thermosphere.
Go to Profile#5610
Maria Korovina
#99530
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Maria Korovina is a Russian mathematician, Professor, Dr. Sc., a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University. She defended the thesis «Elliptic problems in spaces with asymptotics and their applications to the construction of self-adjoint extensions of the Laplace operator» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .
Go to Profile#5611
Yomtov Garti
#86290
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Yomtov Bonjour Garti was a Turkish mathematician and a teacher of mathematics, physics and cosmography in Istanbul, Turkey. Life Yomtov Garti was born in Kadıköy, at the Asian part of Istanbul . His father Maer Garti was a veterinarian doctor, who died in the typhus epidemics during the World War I, while serving in the Ottoman Army. Yomtov Garti was educated at the French high school Lycée Saint-Joseph, Istanbul . After graduating from the Department of Mathematics and Physics of Istanbul University, he was approached by the famous mathematician Richard Edler von Mises, who was then located in Istanbul and proposed him a PhD position.
Go to Profile#5612
Gary Seitz
#104194
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Gary Michael Seitz is an American mathematician, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Mathematics at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1968, where his adviser was Charles W. Curtis. Seitz specializes in the study of algebraic and finite groups. Seitz has been active in the effort to exploit the relationship between algebraic groups and the finite groups of Lie type, in order to study the structure and representations of groups in the latter class. Such information is ...
Go to Profile#5613
Ruey-shen Tsay
#114707
Overall Influence
#5614
Vladimir Burkov
#62163
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Vladimir Nikolaevich Burkov is a Russian control theorist and the author of more than four hundred publications on control problems, game theory, and combinatorial optimization. Laureate of State Prize of USSR, of Prize of Cabinet Council of USSR, he is an Honoured Scholar of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Burkov is a vice-president of Russian Project Management Association , Member of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. A professor at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Head of Laboratory at V.A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of RAS, in the end of the 1960s he pione...
Go to Profile#5615
Kenny Paterson
#66424
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Kenneth G. "Kenny" Paterson is a professor in the Institute of Information Security at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Group. Before joining ETH Zurich in April 2019, he was a professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and an EPSRC Leadership Fellow. He is a cryptographer with a focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice and recently became the Editor in Chief for the IACR's Journal of Cryptology and a 2017 fellow of the IACR.
Go to Profile#5616
Robert Matthews
#22684
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Robert A.J. Matthews , is a British physicist and science writer. After graduating in physics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, in 1981, Matthews took up a dual career in science writing and academic research. He is currently science consultant and columnist for the science magazine BBC Focus, a freelance columnist for The National in Abu Dhabi and Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Aston University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Chartered Physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Go to Profile#5617
Anders Juul
#114755
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#5618
Shashikumar Chitre
#53161
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Shashikumar Madhusudan Chitre FNA, FASc, FNASc, FRAS was an Indian mathematician and astrophysicist, known for his research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The Government of India honored him, in 2012, with Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, for his services to the sciences.
Go to Profile#5619
Antonio Girolami
#114934
Overall Influence
#5620
Albert Hanken
#43583
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Albert Frederik Gerhard Hanken was a Dutch mathematician, inventor, and Emeritus Professor of systems theory at the University of Twente, known for his contributions to the field of systems theory and social analysis.
Go to Profile#5621
Khanindra Chandra Chowdhury
#89281
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Khanindra Chandra Chowdhury is an Indian mathematician who is well known for his extensive research work in Pure Mathematics especially in Algebra. His field of interests includes Mathematical Analysis, Graph Theory, Number Theory, Topology, Axiomatic Projective Geometry and Mathematical Logic.
Go to Profile#5622
Weizhu Bao
#99010
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Weizhu Bao is a Chinese mathematician at the National University of Singapore . He is known for his work in applied mathematics with applications in quantum physics and chemistry and materials science, especially Bose-Einstein condensation and highly oscillatory partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#5623
Patrick Billingsley
#111250
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Patrick Paul Billingsley was an American mathematician and stage and screen actor, noted for his books in advanced probability theory and statistics. He was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946.
Go to Profile#5624
Chawne Kimber
#57260
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Chawne Monique Kimber is an African-American mathematician and quilter, known for expressing her political activism in her quilts. She was a professor at Lafayette College, where she headed the department of mathematics. Kimber is now the Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University.
Go to Profile#5625
Olivier R. Pironneau
#115110
Overall Influence
#5626
Janet D. Elashoff
#86515
Overall Influence
Janet Dixon Elashoff is a retired American statistician, formerly the director of biostatistics for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and professor of biomathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#5627
Richard A. Askey
#115184
Overall Influence
#5628
Douglas C. Heggie
#91061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Douglas Cameron Heggie is a Scottish applied mathematician and astronomer, formerly holding the Personal Chair of Mathematical Astronomy at the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in stellar dynamics.
Go to Profile#5629
Gerlind Plonka
#108904
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Gerlind Plonka-Hoch is a German applied mathematician specializing in signal processing and image processing, and known for her work on refinable functions and curvelets. She is a professor at the University of Göttingen, in the Institute for Numerical and Applied Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5630
Marc van Kreveld
#90378
Overall Influence
Marc Johan van Kreveld is a Dutch computational geometer, known as one of the authors of the textbook Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications . Van Kreveld completed his Ph.D. in 1992 at Utrecht University. His dissertation, New Results on Data Structures in Computational Geometry, was supervised by Mark Overmars. He is a professor of computer science at Utrecht University.
Go to Profile#5631
Sonia Petrone
#105016
Overall Influence
Sonia Petrone is an Italian mathematical statistician, known for her work in Bayesian statistics, including use of Bernstein polynomials for nonparametric methods in Bayesian statistics. With Patrizia Campagnoli and Giovanni Petris she is the author of the book Dynamic Linear Models with R .
Go to Profile#5632
Wolfgang Vogel
#106965
Overall Influence
1940 - 1996 (56 years)
Wolfgang Vogel was a German mathematician who made contributions to commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Biography In 1968 Vogel became a mathematics student at the Halle University. After finishing his degree in 1963 he worked as research scientist at the universities of Halle, Berlin and Innsbruck. In 1965 he received his Ph.D. in Halle. He was appointed to the teaching staff in 1968. He was chairman of the department of pure mathematics from 1977 to 1991. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Pure Mathematics, at Massey University. He died of cancer in Palmerston North at the age o...
Go to Profile#5633
William D. Dupont
#115318
Overall Influence
#5634
Jean Tinguely
#2680
Overall Influence
1925 - 1991 (66 years)
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.
Go to Profile#5635
Luiz Velho
#92551
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Luiz Carlos Pacheco Rodrigues Velho is a Brazilian applied mathematician working primarily on computer graphics and computer vision. He is a full researcher and professor at Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada and leading scientist of VISGRAF, laboratory that conducts researches in the field of modeling, rendering, imaging, and animation.
Go to Profile#5636
J. E. Greene
#82290
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Joseph "Joe" E. Greene, known in his professional writing as J. E. Greene was an American materials scientist, specializing in thin films, crystal growth, surface science, and advanced surface engineering. His research and scientific contributions in these areas have been described as "pioneering" and "seminal" and that his work "revolutionized the hard-coating industry".
Go to Profile#5637
Andrea Saltelli
#82552
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Andrea Saltelli is an Italian scholar studying quantification with statistical and sociological tools, extending the theory of sensitivity analysis to sensitivity auditing. Bio Saltelli received his degrees in inorganic chemistry from the Sapienza University of Rome in summer 1976. He then worked at the Italian Nuclear Authority ENEA and for one year at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. Till 2015 he worked at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, leading for fifteen years a team devoted to econometrics and applied statistics. Between 2016 and 2020 he was as...
Go to Profile#5638
Melanie Wall
#106880
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Melanie Marie Wall is an American psychiatric biostatistician, psychometrician, and mental health data scientist who works at Columbia University as a professor in the departments of biostatistics and psychiatry, and as director of Mental Health Data Science, a joint project of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research has included topics such as grief and depression, eating disorders, marijuana use and abuse, and correlations between school performance and athletic activity, studied using latent variable models, spatial analysis, and longitudinal data.
Go to Profile#5639
John A. Thorpe
#109318
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
John Alden Thorpe was an American mathematician, known for contributions to the field of differential geometry. Thorpe obtained his Bachelor's degree in 1958 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. was done at Columbia University, under the direction of James Eells . From 1963 to 1965, he was Moore Instructor at MIT and Assistant Professor at Haverford College in 1965. In 1967 and 1968 he was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1968, he was Associate Professor and then Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . From 1987 he was Professor ...
Go to Profile#5640
Colin Lingwood Mallows
#85495
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Colin Lingwood Mallows was an English statistician, who worked in the United States since 1960. He was known for Mallows's Cp, a regression model diagnostic procedure, widely used in regression analysis and the Fowlkes–Mallows index, a popular clustering validation criterion.
Go to Profile#5641
Avner Ash
#115691
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Avner Ash is a professor of mathematics at Boston College. Ash received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975 under the supervision of David Mumford. In 2012, Ash became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#5642
Kieka Mynhardt
#100914
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Christina Magdalena Mynhardt is a South African born Canadian mathematician known for her work on dominating sets in graph theory, including domination versions of the eight queens puzzle. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Go to Profile#5643
George Bear Graen
#115769
Overall Influence
#5644
Gerald S. Frankel
#115772
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#5645
Geneviève Gauthier
#98606
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Geneviève Gauthier is a Canadian mathematician, statistician, and decision scientist, known for her work in mathematical finance including the valuation of options and financial risk management. She is a professor of statistics in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal.
Go to Profile#5646
Inge Henningsen
#95662
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Inge Biehl Henningsen is a Danish statistician, academic and writer. A former researcher and lecturer at the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, she has also been active in politics and women's rights, most recently in connection with the PISA approach to student assessment. As editor of the socialist journal Naturkampen in the 1980s, she covered subjects as varied as the management of cancer research and the European Union's approach to agriculture in the third world.
Go to Profile#5647
Manfred F. R. Kets De Vries
#115809
Overall Influence
#5648
B. O. Tian
#115813
Overall Influence
#5649
John H. Walter
#75829
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
John Harris Walter was an American mathematician known for proving the Walter theorem in the theory of finite groups. Born in Los Angeles, Walter received from California Institute of Technology his bachelor's degree in 1951. He received from the University of Michigan his master's degree in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1954 with thesis Automorphisms of the Projective Unitary Groups under the supervision of Leonard Tornheim. Walter was a visiting professor in 1960/61 and 1965/66 at the University of Chicago, 1967/68 at Harvard University, and 1972/73 at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was a prof...
Go to Profile#5650
Sara Negri
#65755
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Sara Negri is a mathematical logician who studies proof theory. She is Italian, worked in Finland for several years, where she was a professor of theoretical philosophy in the University of Helsinki, and currently holds a position as professor of mathematical logic at the University of Genoa.
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