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,
#5851
Pierre Deligné
#120712
Overall Influence
#5852
Isaiah Kantor
#120723
Overall Influence
1936 - 2006 (70 years)
Isaiah Kantor was a mathematician who introduced the Kantor–Koecher–Tits construction, and the Kantor double, a Jordan superalgebra constructed from a Poisson algebra.
Go to Profile#5853
Gregory R. Hancock
#114697
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Gregory Robert Hancock is a Professor of Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation. He is the current University of Maryland head of the Educational Department of Measurement and Statistics program. Hancock also co-hosts the podcast Quantitude with Patrick Curran. He is internationally known for the voice of Jiffy from the podcast.
Go to Profile#5854
John Fox
#42068
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Anthony John Fox is a British statistician, who has worked in both the public service and academia. He was born on 25 April 1946, the son of Fred Frank Fox OBE. He was educated at Dauntsey's School, University College London and Imperial College London . He was a statistician at the Employment Medical Advisory Service, 1970-5 and then the Medical Statistics Division of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys until 1979. In the latter job, he helped to set up the England and Wales Longitudinal Survey, which monitors the health, address changes and fertility of a 1% sample of the popula...
Go to Profile#5855
Sébastien Boucksom
#113532
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Sébastien Boucksom is a French mathematician. Boucksom studied at the École normale supérieure de Lyon from 1996 to 1999, when he qualified with his agrégation in mathematics. He received his doctorate in 2002 from the Institut Fourier of the Université Grenoble Alpes with thesis Cônes positifs des variétés complexes compactes under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Demailly. As a postdoc Boucksom studied with Simon Donaldson at Imperial College London. From 2003 he did research for the CNRS at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu of the CNRS and the University of Paris VI. Since 2010 he has...
Go to Profile#5856
Ramanathan Gnanadesikan
#86119
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Ramanathan Gnanadesikan was an Indian statistician, known for his work in multivariate data analysis and leadership in the field. He received his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina and headed research groups in statistics at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore. He was a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Royal Statistical Society, and elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He served as President of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the International Association ...
Go to Profile#5857
Marcy Barge
#118336
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Marcy Barge is a professor of mathematics at Montana State University. Barge received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980. In 2012, Barge became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#5858
Knut Borchardt
#16153
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Knut Borchardt was a German researcher, historian and former professor for history and economics at both the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Mannheim from 1962 to 1991. Moreover, he served as rector at the University of Mannheim between 1967 and 1969.
Go to Profile#5859
John Shawe-Taylor
#65674
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
John Stewart Shawe-Taylor is Director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College, London . His main research area is statistical learning theory. He has contributed to a number of fields ranging from graph theory through cryptography to statistical learning theory and its applications. However, his main contributions have been in the development of the analysis and subsequent algorithmic definition of principled machine learning algorithms founded in statistical learning theory. This work has helped to drive a fundamental rebirth in the field of mach...
Go to Profile#5860
Léonard Lewin
#120907
Overall Influence
#5861
Anita Hansbo
#89199
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Anita Hansbo is a Swedish mathematician and academic administrator, the former rector or president of Jönköping University. Education and early career Hansbo earned her Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Gothenburg. Her dissertation, Some Results Related to Smoothing in Discetized Linear Parabolic Equations, was supervised by Vidar Thomée.
Go to Profile#5862
Shelby J. Haberman
#120963
Overall Influence
#5863
Evan Siegel
#54740
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Evan Siegel is a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. Biography Evan Siegel received his PhD in Mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2000, his MSc in Mathematics from New York University, and his BSc in Mathematics from MIT. He is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics at New Jersey City University. In addition to his interest in Mathematics, Siegel is interested in the history of the Middle East and has numerous publications on this topic. Siegel does research in sources in Persian, French, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, German, and Georgian.
Go to Profile#5864
Thibaut Jombart
#120991
Overall Influence
#5865
Frank Abel Loewus
#121002
Overall Influence
#5866
Hervé Abdi
#121014
Overall Influence
#5867
David Andrich
#121015
Overall Influence
#5868
Asok Ray
#121019
Overall Influence
Asok Ray is a mechanical engineer, an applied mathematician, and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published in numerous academic and scientific journals. His contributions to the fields of signal processing, machine learning, and estimation were focused on anomaly detection and statistical pattern recognition based on the theories of symbolic dynamics, and statistical mechanics.
Go to Profile#5869
Luc Mouthon
#121050
Overall Influence
#5870
Juan José Nieto Roig
#121069
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Juan José Nieto Roig is a Spanish mathematician, professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Santiago de Compostela since 1991 and a Royal Galician Academy of Sciences Fellow. His most influential contributions to date are in the area of differential equations.
Go to Profile#5871
Jürgen Gärtner
#112118
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jürgen Gärtner is a German mathematician, specializing in probability theory and analysis. Gärtner graduated in 1973 with Diplom from TU Dresden. He received in 1976 his Ph.D. from Lomonosov University under the supervision of Mark Freidlin. At the Weierstrass Institute, Gärtner was from 1976 to 1985 a research associate; he habilitated there in 1984 with Dissertation B: Zur Ausbreitung von Wellenfronten für Reaktions-Diffusions-Gleichungen . At the Weierstrass Institute he was from 1985 to 1995 the head of the probability group. He was a professor of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR from 1988 until its disbandment in late 1991.
Go to Profile#5872
Beatrice Rivière
#92577
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Beatrice Marie Riviere is a computational and applied mathematician. She is the Noah Harding Chair and Professor in the department of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University. Her research involves developing efficient numerical methods for modeling fluids flowing through porous media.
Go to Profile#5873
Robert S. Hogg
#120012
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Robert S. Hogg is an HIV researcher focused on improving outcomes for people living with HIV/AIDS through the understanding of barriers to accessing HIV testing, treatment and care in Canada and globally. He is a senior research scientist and the former Director of the HIV/AIDS Drug Treatment Program at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He is a Simon Fraser University Distinguished Professor and the Associate Dean of Research of the faculty of Health Sciences. He is a prolific and highly cited author with an H-index of 111 and over 1000 peer-reviewed papers. He is both a Member of ...
Go to Profile#5874
Julius L. Shaneson
#105655
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Julius L. Shaneson is an American mathematician. He works at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was department chair from 2002 to 2006 and is currently the Class of 1939 Professor of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#5875
Sidney Martin Webster
#121312
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sidney Martin Webster is an American mathematician, specializing in multidimensional complex analysis. After military service, Webster attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, receiving a PhD in 1975 under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern with thesis Real hypersurfaces in complex space. Webster was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1975 to 1980 and at the University of Minnesota from 1980 to 1989. In 1989 he became a full professor at the University of Chicago. He has held visiting positions at the University of Wupper...
Go to Profile#5876
Christine De Mol
#105437
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Christine De Mol is a Belgian applied mathematician and mathematical physicist interested in inverse problems, regularization, wavelets, and machine learning, and known for her work on proximal gradient methods and the application of proximal gradient methods for learning. She is a professor of mathematics at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and the former chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Imaging Science.
Go to Profile#5877
Moshe Jarden
#119118
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Moshe Jarden is an Israeli mathematician, specialist in field arithmetic. Biography Moshe Jarden was born in 1942 in Tel Aviv. His father, Dr. Dov Jarden, was a mathematician, writer and linguist, who transmitted him his love to mathematics. In 1970 he received his Ph.D in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Hillel Furstenberg as his thesis advisor. He accomplished his post doctorate during the years 1971-1973 at the Institut of Mathematics, Heidelberg University, with Peter Roquette as his mentor, and habilitated there in 1972. During these years in Heidelberg, he ...
Go to Profile#5878
Peter Grindrod
#74174
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Peter Grindrod is a British mathematician. Career Grindrod was appointed a CBE in 2005 for services to mathematics R&D. He is a former member of the EPSRC Council and chair of the EPSRC's User Panel. He is a former president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the UK's professional and learned society for mathematicians . He is also former member of BBSRC Council . He is a former independent member of the MOD DSAC . He was one of the founding directors of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national centre for Data Science and AI.
Go to Profile#5879
Max Wyman
#107141
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Max Wyman was a Canadian mathematician and academic administrator. He served as president of the University of Alberta from 1969 to 1974. He was educated at the University of Alberta and California Institute of Technology . He rejoined his alma mater in 1943, the University of Alberta as a lecturer, and became a professor in 1956. In 1961, he was chair of the Department of Mathematics, and from 1963 to 1965 was the Dean of Science. He was named Vice President of the university in 1964, and became president in 1969. He was the first former student of the University to become president. Wyman...
Go to Profile#5880
Moses Botarel Farissol
#113589
Overall Influence
Moses Botarel Farissol was a Jewish astronomer and mathematician of the second half of the 15th century. He wrote a work on the calendar entitled Meleket ha-Ḳebi'ah, and compiled, under the title Nofet Ẓufim, calendric tables. Both these works, in manuscript, are preserved in the royal library at Munich.
Go to Profile#5881
Aaron Afia
#91908
Overall Influence
Aaron Afia , also known as Affius, was a sixteenth-century Jewish ex-converso scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and physician living in Salonika. He was the teacher of Daniel ben Perachiah, whom he assisted in the translation from the Spanish into Hebrew of Abraham Zacuto's Almanach perpetuum , and Moses Almosnino, whom he assisted in his Hebrew translation of Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi. Almosnino's Bet Elokim—an astronomical work which draws on Georg von Peuerbach's Theorica planetarium—also contains work by Afia at the end.
Go to Profile#5882
Giovanni Parmigiani
#112543
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Giovanni Parmigiani is a biostatistician. He is a professor of biostatistics at both the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and is also associate director for population sciences at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2009 he and his co-author Lurdes Inoue received a DeGroot Prize from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for their book Decision Theory: Principles and Approaches.
Go to Profile#5883
K Sandeep
#121420
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
K Sandeep is an Indian mathematician specialising in elliptic partial differential equations. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, for the year 2015 in mathematical science category. He is affiliated to the TIFR Centre for Applicable Mathematics, Bangalore.
Go to Profile#5884
Janet Wittes
#89257
Overall Influence
Janet Turk Wittes is an American statistician known for her work on clinical trials. Education Wittes is the daughter of a chemist and a psychologist. She began her studies at Radcliffe College in the biochemistry program, choosing it over chemistry because of its added opportunities for mentorship. Her faculty mentor, John Tileston Edsall, noting her preference for inference over experiment, guided her to aim for a career in statistics. Towards this goal, she switched her major to mathematics, graduating in 1964.
Go to Profile#5885
Antoon Kolen
#98851
Overall Influence
1953 - 2004 (51 years)
Anthonius Wilhelmus Johannes Kolen was a Dutch mathematician and Professor at the Maastricht University, in the Department of Quantitative Economics. He is known for his work on dynamic programming, such as interval scheduling and mathematical optimization.
Go to Profile#5886
Ahmed F. Ghoniem
#121480
Overall Influence
#5887
Wilfred Cockcroft
#92376
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Sir Wilfred Cockcroft was an eminent mathematics educator from the University of Hull. In 1978 he was commissioned by the then Labour government to chair a comprehensive inquiry into the teaching of mathematics in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales. The committee of inquiry produced its report in 1982, published as Mathematics Counts but widely known as "the Cockcroft report".
Go to Profile#5888
Peter W. Bates
#120522
Overall Influence
Peter W. Bates is a professor of mathematics at Michigan State University. Bates received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1976. In 2012, Bates became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#5889
Minoru Tomita
#121543
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Minoru Tomita was a Japanese mathematician who made significant contributions to the theory of operator algebras. He became deaf at the age of two. He was described as a "very singular" personality. Although he published relatively little, his 1967 manuscript on the theory of modular automorphisms of von Neumann algebras was of major importance in the field. The manuscript was difficult to understand, but Masamichi Takesaki was able to revise it. In the summer of 1967 Takesaki communicated the results to Jacques Dixmier, and they became a major influence on the work of his student Alain Connes on the classification of type III factors.
Go to Profile#5890
Katrin Tent
#91725
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Katrin Tent is a German mathematician specializing in group theory, the symmetries of groups, algebraic model theory, and finite geometry. She is a professor of mathematics and mathematical logic at the University of Münster.
Go to Profile#5891
Fatiha Alabau
#105814
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Fatiha Alabau-Boussouira is a French applied mathematician specializing in the control theory of partial differential equations. She is affiliated with the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions of Sorbonne University as an external member, a professor at the University of Lorraine in the mathematics department of its Metz campus, and a former president of the Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles, a French society for applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#5892
Anatoly Libgober
#117493
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Anatoly Libgober is a Russian/American mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and topology of algebraic varieties. Early life Libgober was born in the Soviet Union, and immigrated to Israel in 1973 after active participation in the movement to change immigration policies in Soviet Union. He studied with Yuri Manin at Moscow University and with Boris Moishezon at Tel-Aviv University where he finished his PhD dissertation with Moishezon in 1977, doing his postdoctorate work at the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] . He lectured extensively visiting, among others, l'Institut des h...
Go to Profile#5893
Nadia Heninger
#35869
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Nadia Heninger is an American cryptographer, computer security expert, and computational number theorist at the University of California, San Diego. Contributions Heninger is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routerss and other embedded devices, for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the National ...
Go to Profile#5894
Lois McMaster Bujold
#2573
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is an acclaimed writer, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record . Her novella The Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods.
Go to Profile#5895
Dominique Hulin
#89013
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Dominique Hulin is a French mathematician specializing in differential geometry and known for her textbook on Riemannian geometry. Hulin studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1978 to 1983, working there with Marcel Berger and completing her doctorate in 1983 with the dissertation Pinching and Betti numbers. She was an assistant professor at Paris Diderot University from 1983 to 1985, when she became maître de conferences at Paris-Sud University, which later became Paris-Saclay University. In 2019 she was advanced to the exceptional class of maîtres de conferences.
Go to Profile#5896
Elizabeth Simpson
#55434
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Elizabeth Simpson OBE FRS FMedSci is a British biologist. She is the Emeritus Professor of Transplantation Biology at Imperial College London. Simpson is particularly known for her elucidation of the nature of male-associated minor transplantation antigens, and their roles in the generation of immunological tolerance, graft versus host disease, and transplant rejection.
Go to Profile#5897
Henk Broer
#117104
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Hendrik Wolter Broer is a Dutch mathematician known for contributions to the theory of nonlinear dynamical systems. He was professor at the University of Groningen between 1981 and 2015. Biography Broer was granted a doctorate in the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences in 1979 under the supervision of Floris Takens for a thesis entitled Bifurcations of singularities in volume preserving vector fields. He was a professor at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, from 1981 till his retirement in 2015. In 1985 he spent a semester as a guest professor of Boston University, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#5898
John R. Scully
#121729
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
#5899
Nicole Spillane
#89146
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (37 years)
Nicole Spillane is a French and Irish applied mathematician. She is a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France, where she works in the center for applied mathematics of the École Polytechnique. Her research concerns parallel algorithms for solving large systems of linear equations.
Go to Profile#5900
Estelle Basor
#94098
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Estelle Lucille Basor is an American mathematician interested in operator theory and the theory of random matrices. She is professor emeritus of mathematics at the California Polytechnic State University , and deputy director of the American Institute of Mathematics.
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