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,
#5751
Erik Nightingale Næsset
#118485
Overall Influence
#5752
Peter D. Drummond
#118489
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
#5753
Claudia Malvenuto
#100126
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Claudia Malvenuto is an Italian mathematician, one of the namesakes of the Malvenuto–Poirier–Reutenauer Hopf algebra of permutations. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Sapienza University of Rome.
Go to Profile#5754
Rolando Chuaqui
#79648
Overall Influence
1935 - 1994 (59 years)
Rolando Basim Chuaqui Kettlun was a Chilean mathematician who worked on the foundations of probabilities and foundations of mathematics. Throughout his lifetime, he published two books and over 50 journal articles in mathematics and logic. He also spearheaded the creation and expansion of mathematics departments across multiple Chilean universities.
Go to Profile#5755
Margit Rösler
#110608
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Margit Rösler is a German mathematician known for her research in harmonic analysis, special functions, and Dunkl operators. She is a professor of mathematics at Paderborn University. Rösler earned a diploma in mathematics with distinction from the Technical University of Munich in 1988. She completed her PhD at the same university in 1992. Her dissertation, , was jointly supervised by Rupert Lasser and Elmar Thoma.
Go to Profile#5756
John Walter Kusek
#118519
Overall Influence
#5757
Andrea Braides
#100371
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Andrea Braides is an Italian mathematician, specializing in the calculus of variations. He is a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and at the International School for Advanced Studies in Triest.
Go to Profile#5758
Marco Abate
#118522
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Marco Abate is an Italian mathematician. Life He was born in Milan, Italy on 29 August 1962. Career He completed his PhD in 1988 at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. His dissertation thesis was titled Iteration Theory of Holomorphic Maps on Taut Manifolds. His doctoral advisor was Edoardo Vesentini.
Go to Profile#5759
Verdiana Masanja
#80538
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Verdiana Grace Masanja is a Tanzanian mathematician specializing in fluid dynamics. She is the first Tanzanian woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Education Masanja was born in Bukoba, at the time part of the United Nations trust territory of Tanganyika. She was a student at the Jangwani Girls Secondary School in Dar es Salaam and then at the University of Dar es Salaam, completing a degree in mathematics and physics in 1976 and a master's degree in 1981. Her master's thesis was Effect of Injection on Developing Laminar Flow of Reiner–Philippoff Fluids in a Circular Pipe.
Go to Profile#5760
Kristian B. Dysthe
#103637
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Kristian Barstad Dysthe was a Norwegian mathematician. Biography Dysthe took the cand.real. degree at the University of Bergen in 1962, and the dr.philos. degree in 1972. He became professor in applied mathematics at the University of Tromsø in 1972, and at the University of Bergen from 1992 to retirement in 2007. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Stanford University. He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Dysthe died on 30 July 2023, at the age of 85.
Go to Profile#5761
Knut Sydsæter
#103116
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
Knut Sydsæter was a Norwegian mathematician. Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oslo. He is known for having written several books in mathematics for economic analysis, mainly in Norwegian and English. However, his books have been released in several other languages such as Swedish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Hungarian among others.
Go to Profile#5762
Eberhard H. Zeidler
#118593
Overall Influence
#5763
Rosedith Sitgreaves
#98680
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Rosedith Sitgreaves Bowker was an American statistician who taught at Columbia University and Stanford University. Her publications included research on random matrices and Kendall's W. Rosedith Sitgreaves was born in Easton, Pennsylvania. She did her undergraduate studies at Wilson College, a women's college in Pennsylvania. She earned a master's degree from George Washington University and a doctorate from Columbia University, both in statistical mathematics. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled Contributions to the Problem of Classification. When she completed it, in 1953, she became the...
Go to Profile#5764
Vladimir G. Maz’ya
#118606
Overall Influence
#5765
Maria Colombo
#113671
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (36 years)
Maria Colombo is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She is a professor at the EPFL in Switzerland, where she holds the chair for mathematical analysis, calculus of variations and partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#5766
David John William Evans
#118653
Overall Influence
#5767
Michael Viscardi
#108561
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (36 years)
Michael Anthony Viscardi of San Diego, California is an American mathematician who, as a highschooler, won the 2005 Siemens Competition and Davidson Fellowship with a mathematical project on the Dirichlet problem, whose applications include describing the flow of heat across a metal surface, winning $100,000 and $50,000 in scholarships, respectively. Viscardi's theorem is an expansion of the 19th-century work of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. He was also named a finalist with the same project in the Intel Science Talent Search. Viscardi placed Best of Category in Mathematics at the International Science and Engineering Fair in May 2006.
Go to Profile#5768
Mari Palta
#110147
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Mari Soekõrv Palta is a Swedish-Estonian biostatistician, known for her research on model specification in longitudinal studies, especially in epidemiologic studies of diabetes, sequelae of prematurity and sleep. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Population Health Sciences and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as vice-chair of Population Health Sciences, and director of graduate studies 2016-2018. She is the author of Quantitative Methods in Population Health: Extensions of Ordinary Regression .
Go to Profile#5769
Roger B. Nelsen
#118679
Overall Influence
#5770
Dilip Bal Madan
#118685
Overall Influence
#5771
Albert Crumeyrolle
#92458
Overall Influence
1919 - 1992 (73 years)
Albert J. Crumeyrolle was a French mathematician and professor of mathematics at the Paul Sabatier University, known for his contributions to spinor structures and Clifford algebra. Work Crumeyrolle was a student of André Lichnerowicz under whose supervision he completed a thesis in 1961.
Go to Profile#5772
George Matheron Matheron
#118740
Overall Influence
#5773
Virginia Warfield
#104401
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Virginia "Ginger" Patricia McShane Warfield is an American mathematician and mathematical educator. She received the Louise Hay Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2007. Education Warfield's father was mathematician Edward J. McShane. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University in 1971. Her doctoral advisor was Wendell Fleming and the title of her dissertation was A Stochastic Maximum Principle.
Go to Profile#5774
Friedrich Grimminger
#118829
Overall Influence
#5775
Aissa Wade
#101961
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Aissa Wade is a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. She was the President of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences centre in Senegal . Early life and education Wade was born in Dakar, Senegal. She studied mathematics at Cheikh Anta Diop University and graduated in 1993. She had to leave Senegal to earn a Ph.D. as there were no opportunities in Africa. Wade earned her Ph.D. at the University of Montpellier in 1996. Her thesis, "Normalisation formelle de structures de Poisson", considered symplectic geometry. Her doctoral advisor was Jean Paul Dufour.
Go to Profile#5776
Dominique Picard
#103604
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Dominique Brigitte Picard is a French mathematician who works as a professor in the Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modèles Aléatoires of Paris Diderot University. Her research concerns the statistical applications of wavelets.
Go to Profile#5777
David Soudry
#40223
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
David Soudry is a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University working in number theory and automorphic forms. Career Soudry was born in 1956. He received his PhD in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1983 under the supervision of Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro. From 1983 to 1984, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He is a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#5778
Beth Chance
#87854
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Beth L. Chance is an American statistics educator. She is a professor of statistics at the California Polytechnic State University. Education and career Chance is originally from San Diego, California. She graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 1990, majoring in mathematics with a minor in psychology. She completed a Ph.D. in operations research, concentrating in statistics, at Cornell University in 1994. Her dissertation, Behavior Characterization and Estimation for General Hierarchical Multivariate Linear Regression Models, was supervised by Martin Wells.
Go to Profile#5779
Evelyn Silvia
#97612
Overall Influence
1948 - 2006 (58 years)
Evelyn Marie Silvia was an American mathematician specializing in functional analysis and particularly in starlike functions. She was a professor at the University of California, Davis, and as well as teaching mathematics at the undergraduate and graduate levels there, was active in the improvement of secondary-school mathematics education.
Go to Profile#5780
Birge Huisgen-Zimmermann
#89697
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Birge Katharina Huisgen-Zimmermann is a mathematician at University of California, Santa Barbara specializing in representation theory and ring theory. Life and career Huisgen-Zimmerman was born in Germany. Her father was the chemistry professor Rolf Huisgen. She received her Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1974 under the supervision of Friedrich Kasch. Huisgen-Zimmerman received her habilitation from Technical University of Munich in 1979, and stayed on the faculty at the Technical University of Munich until 1981. She became a researcher at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeins...
Go to Profile#5781
Alfred John Menezes
#119078
Overall Influence
#5782
Theoni Pappas
#105984
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Theoni Pappas is an American mathematics teacher known for her books and calendars concerning popular mathematics. Pappas is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a master's degree at Stanford University. She became a high school mathematics teacher in 1967.
Go to Profile#5783
Ingar Morten K. Holme
#119113
Overall Influence
#5784
Joel Shapiro
#96580
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Joel H. Shapiro is an American mathematician, active in the field of composition operators. He is the author of the book Composition Operators and Classical Function Theory , and the American Mathematical Society memoir "Cyclic Phenomena for Composition Operators" , with Paul Bourdon.
Go to Profile#5785
Ioan Dzițac
#73864
Overall Influence
1953 - 2021 (68 years)
Ioan Dzițac was a Romanian professor of mathematics and computer science. He obtained his B.S. and M.Sc. in Mathematics and PhD in Computer Science from Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. He was a professor at the Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad and part of the leadership of Agora University in Oradea until his sudden death in 2021.
Go to Profile#5786
Lynne Butler
#87579
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Lynne Marie Butler is an American mathematician whose research interests include algebraic combinatorics, group theory, and mathematical statistics. She is a professor of mathematics at Haverford College.
Go to Profile#5787
Robert E. Tarone
#119170
Overall Influence
#5788
Kung‐yee Liang
#119178
Overall Influence
#5789
Gilah Leder
#93240
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Gilah Chaja Leder is an adjunct professor at Monash University and a professor emerita at La Trobe University. Her research interests are in mathematics education, gender, affect, and exceptionality. Leder was the 2009 recipient of the Felix Klein Medal.
Go to Profile#5790
Jana Rodriguez Hertz
#57172
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Jana Rodriguez Hertz born February 1977 is an Argentine and Uruguayan mathematician, professor, and researcher. Biography María Alejandra Rodriguez Hertz Frugoni was born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina, February 11, 1977. She is the daughter of Mariana Frugoni and Adolfo Rodriguez Hertz. Jana is the oldest of five siblings, one of whom, Federico is also a mathematician.
Go to Profile#5791
Nathan Dunfield
#110498
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Nathan Michael Dunfield is an American mathematician, specializing in Topology. Career Dunfield did his undergraduate studies at Oregon State University, obtaining a B.S. in mathematics in 1994. For his graduate studies, he went to the University of Chicago, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1999, with a thesis on Cyclic Surgery, Degrees of Maps of Character Curves, and Volume Rigidity for Hyperbolic Manifolds written under the supervision of Peter Shalen and Melvin Rothenberg.
Go to Profile#5792
Rui Loja Fernandes
#112264
Overall Influence
Rui António Loja Fernandes is a Portuguese mathematician working in the USA. Education and career Fernandes obtained a bachelor's degree in Physics Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in 1988. He then moved to the USA and earned a master's degree in Mathematics in 1991 and a PhD in Mathematics in 1994 from the University of Minnesota. His PhD thesis was entitled "Completely Integrable bi-Hamiltonian Systems" and has been written under the supervision of Peter J. Olver.
Go to Profile#5793
Ali Teoman Germaner
#33421
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Ali Teoman Germaner , was a Turkish sculptor. He is also known as Aloş. Life He was born in 1934 in İstanbul. Between 1949 and 1954 he was educated in the İDGSA Sculpture Department in the studios of Rudolf Belling, Zühtü Müridoğlu and Ali Hadi Bara. In 1960 he went to Paris with a scholarship from the French government. Between the years 1961 and 1965 he could be found at the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied sculpture in the studio of René Collamarini and gravür in the studio of W. S. Hayter.
Go to Profile#5794
Bianca Falcidieno
#106970
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Bianca Falcidieno is an Italian applied mathematician whose research interests include computer graphics, geometric modeling, shape analysis, and mesh generation; she has been called a pioneer of semantics-driven shape representation. She is retired as a research director for the Italian National Research Council , where she led the Shape Modeling Group of the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies .
Go to Profile#5795
Annie Raoult
#50639
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Annie Raoult is a French applied mathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling of cell membranes, graphene sheets, and other thin nanostructures. She is vice president of the Centre International de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées and professor emerita at Paris Descartes University, where she directed the laboratory for applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#5796
Frank H. Berkshire
#69388
Overall Influence
Frank H. Berkshire is a British mathematician, an expert on fluid dynamics, biomechanics, and the mathematics of gambling. He is also known as a coauthor of the textbook Classical Mechanics. Education and career Berkshire is an alumnus of St John's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#5797
W. Forrest Stinespring
#114710
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
William Forrest "Woody" Stinespring was an American mathematician, specializing in operator theory. He is known for the Stinespring factorization theorem. While studying in Harvard University, Stinespring twice became a Putnam fellow, in 1947 and 1949. After graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree, Stinespring received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1957. His thesis Integration for gages and duality theorems was written under the supervision of Irving Segal. Stinespring was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1957 to 1959. After teachin...
Go to Profile#5798
Alexey Ivakhnenko
#17265
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Alexey Grigoryevich Ivakhnenko was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician most famous for developing the group method of data handling , a method of inductive statistical learning, for which he is sometimes referred to as the "Father of deep learning".
Go to Profile#5799
Joan Ferrini-Mundy
#36405
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Joan Ferrini-Mundy is a mathematics educator. Her research interests include calculus teaching and learning, mathematics teacher learning, and STEM education policy. She is currently the president of the University of Maine.
Go to Profile#5800
Philip Jackson
#13833
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Philip Henry Christopher Jackson CVO DL is a Scottish sculptor, noted for his modern style and emphasis on form. Acting as Royal Sculptor to Queen Elizabeth II, his sculptures appear in numerous UK cities, as well as Argentina and Switzerland.
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