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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#5951
Romano Scozzafava
#92485
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Romano Scozzafava is an Italian mathematician known for his contributions to subjective probability along the lines of Bruno de Finetti, based on the concept of coherence. He taught Probability Calculus at the Engineering Faculty of the Sapienza University of Rome from 1979 to his retirement .
Go to Profile#5952
Teo Mora
#115717
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Ferdinando 'Teo' Mora is an Italian mathematician, and since 1990 until 2019 a professor of algebra at the University of Genoa. Life and work Mora's degree is in mathematics from the University of Genoa in 1974. Mora's publications span forty years; his notable contributions in computer algebra are the tangent cone algorithm and its extension of Buchberger theory of Gröbner bases and related algorithm earlier to non-commutative polynomial rings and more recently to effective rings; less significant the notion of Gröbner fan; marginal, with respect to the other authors, his contribution to th...
Go to Profile#5953
Robert M. Anderson
#54329
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Robert Murdoch Anderson is Professor of Economics and of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is director of the Center for Risk Management Research, University of California, Berkeley and he was chair of the University of California Academic Senate 2011-12. He is also the Co-Director for the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk at UC Berkeley.
Go to Profile#5954
Freda Porter
#61092
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Freda Porter, a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, is an applied mathematician and environmental scientist known as one of the first Native American women to earn a PhD in the mathematical sciences. She is the president and CEO of Porter Scientific, Inc. and president of Lumbee Tribe Enterprises, LLC.
Go to Profile#5955
Morris Marden
#115964
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Morris Marden was an American mathematician. Biography He was born on 12 February 1905 in East Boston, United States. He was the seventh child of Abram and Fannie B. Marden. He died in 1991. Education He completed his PhD dissertation on the Location of the Roots of the Jacobian of Two Binary Forms and of the Derivative of a Rational Function under the supervision of Joseph L. Walsh.
Go to Profile#5956
Antonio Brú
#72788
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Antonio Brú Espino is Theoretical physicist and permanent professor in the Departament of Applied Mathematics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Brú received his PhD in 1995 from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in physics, with advisor Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. He began his research career in 1989 at the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas in the field of anomalous transport and complex systems. In 1993, he established his own research group to study tumor growth. In 2002, he moved to the Spanish National Research Council .
Go to Profile#5957
Olivier Sitbon
#123323
Overall Influence
#5958
Javad Mashreghi
#119819
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Javad Mashreghi is a mathematician and author working in fields of function space theory, functional analysis and complex analysis. He is a professeur titulaire at Université Laval and was the 35th President of the Canadian Mathematical Society .
Go to Profile#5959
Dwight Barkley
#111518
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Dwight Barkley is a professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick. Education and career Barkley obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. He then spent one year at Caltech working with Philip Saffman followed by three years at Princeton University where he worked with Yannís Keverkidis and Steven Orszag. In 1992 he was awarded both NSF and NATO postdoctoral fellowships. In 1994 he joined the faculty at the University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#5960
Edward C. Knobloch
#123446
Overall Influence
#5961
Philip Gressman
#100972
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Philip Thaxton Gressman is an American mathematician at The University of Pennsylvania, working primarily in the field of harmonic analysis. Gressman grew up in Ava, Missouri, where he graduated from Ava High School in 1997. He double majored in Mathematics and Physics at Washington University in St. Louis in 2001. His undergraduate advisors were Guido Weiss and Edward N. Wilson. Gressman completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University in 2005 under the guidance of Elias Stein. He was J. W. Gibbs Assistant Professor at Yale University before earning his permanent position at the Un...
Go to Profile#5962
Tan Lei
#112724
Overall Influence
1963 - 2016 (53 years)
Tan Lei was a mathematician specialising in complex dynamics and functions of complex numbers. She is most well-known for her contributions to the study of the Mandelbrot set and Julia set. Career After gaining her PhD in Mathematics in 1986 at University of Paris-Sud, Orsay, Tan worked as an assistant researcher in Geneva. She then conducted postdoctoral projects at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and University of Bremen until 1989, when she was made a lecturer at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France. Tan held a research position at University of Warwick from 1995 to 1999, before becoming a senior lecturer at Cergy-Pontoise University.
Go to Profile#5963
Merrilyn Goos
#84118
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Merrilyn Goos is an Australian mathematics educator. Since October 2017 she has been Professor of STEM Education and Director of EPI*STEM at the University of Limerick, Ireland. From 2012-2017 Goos was professor and head of the School of Education at the University of Queensland, and prior to this was Director of the Teaching and Educational Development Institute at The University of Queensland. She has taught in mathematics education and in 2003 she received the university's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Go to Profile#5964
Consuelo Martínez
#109383
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Consuelo Martínez López is a Spanish mathematician, and a frequent collaborator of Fields Medalist Efim Zelmanov. Her research topics include abstract algebra including group theory and superalgebras, algebraic coding theory, and cryptography. She is the professor of algebra at the University of Oviedo.
Go to Profile#5965
Theodore J. Rivlin
#95233
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Theodore Joseph Rivlin was an American mathematician, specializing in approximation theory. He is known for his 1969 book An Introduction to the Approximation of Functions , which became a standard text.
Go to Profile#5966
Joyce E. Penner
#81739
Overall Influence
Joyce Penner is an atmospheric scientist known for her research on climate change, especially on the impact of aerosols and clouds. Education and career Penner has a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California Santa Barbara , and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University . Penner moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1977 and remained there until 1996, serving as a group leader from 1987 until her departure for University of Michigan in 1996. At the University of Michigan, Penner was named the Ralph J. Cicerone Distinguished University Professor ...
Go to Profile#5967
Wayne DeSarbo
#91282
Overall Influence
Wayne DeSarbo is the Mary Jean and Frank P. Smeal Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University at University Park and executive director the Center for Sports Business and Research. He is known for his work on multidimensional scaling, and multivariate statistics in relation to marketing research. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#5968
Gotthard Seifert
#123543
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
#5969
Leslie Ann Goldberg
#48039
Overall Influence
Leslie Ann Goldberg is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms for random sampling and approximate combinatorial enumeration.
Go to Profile#5970
Mike Worboys
#54475
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Michael Worboys is a British mathematician and computer scientist. He is professor of spatial informatics at the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Greenwich, London, England.
Go to Profile#5971
Myles Hollander
#118357
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Myles Hollander is an American academic statistician who has made research contributions to nonparametric methods, biostatistics, and reliability. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is Emeritus and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Florida State University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#5972
Julius Borcea
#109628
Overall Influence
1968 - 2009 (41 years)
Julius Bogdan Borcea was a Romanian Swedish mathematician. His scientific work included vertex operator algebra and zero distribution of polynomials and entire functions, via correlation inequalities and statistical mechanics.
Go to Profile#5973
George Tseng
#84274
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
George Chien-Cheng Tseng is a Biostatistician and Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Biostatistics , Computational & Systems Biology and Human Genetics at University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#5974
Bernard Russell Gelbaum
#122081
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Bernard Russell Gelbaum was a mathematician and academic administrator having served as a professor at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine and as well as emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo. When he arrived at Buffalo 1971, he served as vice president for academic affairs as well as being a math professor.
Go to Profile#5975
Victor Panaretos
#52699
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Victor Michael Panaretos is a Greek mathematical statistician. He is currently Professor and Director at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , where he holds the chair of Mathematical Statistics.
Go to Profile#5976
Lloyd S. Nelson
#123742
Overall Influence
#5977
Frank Bonsall
#117959
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Frank Featherstone Bonsall FRS was a British mathematician. Personal life Bonsall was born on 31 March 1920, the youngest son of Wilfred C Bonsall and Sarah Frank. His older brother was Arthur Bonsall. He married Gillian Patrick, a Somerville graduate, in 1947. Bonsall and his wife were keen hill-walkers. He wrote two articles for The Scottish Mountaineering Club on the definition of a Munro. After his retirement, Bonsall and his wife moved to Harrogate.
Go to Profile#5978
Barry Smalley
#123777
Overall Influence
#5979
Louis L. Scharf
#123796
Overall Influence
#5980
Mia Hubert
#97657
Overall Influence
Mia Hubert is a Belgian mathematical statistician known for her research on topics in robust statistics including medoid-based clustering, regression depth, the medcouple for robustly measuring skewness, box plots for skewed data, and robust principal component analysis, and for her implementations of robust statistical algorithms in the R statistical software system, MATLAB, and S-PLUS. She is a professor in the statistics and data science section of the department of mathematics at KU Leuven.
Go to Profile#5981
David J. J. Bartholomew
#123847
Overall Influence
#5982
John Ockendon
#110927
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Professor John Richard Ockendon FRS is an applied mathematician noted especially for his contribution to fluid dynamics and novel applications of mathematics to real world problems. He is a professor at the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford, the first director of the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics and a former director of the Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics and System Engineering.
Go to Profile#5983
Linda Gilbert Saucier
#107625
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Linda Phillips Gilbert Saucier is an American mathematician and textbook author, a distinguished professor emerita of mathematics and computer science at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Education and career Linda Phillips was the daughter of Rudd George Phillips, an education specialist for the United States Air Force. She grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, and earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Louisiana Tech University in 1970, 1972, and 1977 respectively. Her dissertation applied linear algebra to epidemiology; it was titled An application of the Jordan canonical form to the epidemic problem.
Go to Profile#5984
Ulla Dinger
#109417
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Ulla Margarete Dinger is a Swedish mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Gothenburg. Dinger completed her doctorate at the University of Gothenburg in 1989. Her dissertation, On the ball problem and the Laguerre maximal operators, was jointly supervised by Christer Borell and Peter Sjögren.
Go to Profile#5985
Jenny Baglivo
#109858
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Jenny Antoinette Baglivo is an American mathematician, statistician, and book author. She is retired as a professor of mathematics at Boston College, where she retains an affiliation as research professor.
Go to Profile#5986
Clara Claiborne Park
#33513
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Clara Claiborne Park was an American college English teacher and author who was best known for her writings about her experiences raising her autistic daughter, the artist Jessica Park. Her 1967 book, The Siege was credited as one of the first books to allay the blame that parents, especially mothers, were made to feel at having caused their child's autism through their cold detachment.
Go to Profile#5987
Graham Noctor
#124012
Overall Influence
#5988
Yulia Gel
#91447
Overall Influence
Yulia R. Gel is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and an adjunct professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#5989
Richard Bird
#36262
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Richard Simpson Bird was an English computer scientist. Posts He was a Supernumerary Fellow of Computation at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in Oxford England, and former director of the Oxford University Computing Laboratory . Formerly, Bird was at the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#5990
Tatiana Roque
#108820
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Tatiana Marins Roque is a Brazilian historian of mathematics and politician. Academic career Roque is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro , with a Ph.D. in Production Engineering from the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute of Graduate Studies and Research in Engineering , also at UFRJ. Her research area covers the historiography of mathematics, the relationship between history and mathematics education, and the history of differential equations and celestial mechanics theories at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Her book História da m...
Go to Profile#5991
Edward Neuman
#91137
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Edward Neuman is a Polish-American mathematician, currently a professor emeritus of mathematics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Academic career Neuman received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wrocław in 1972 under the supervision of wmpl:Stefan Paszkowski. His dissertation was entitled "Projections in Uniform Polynomial Approximation." He held positions at the Institute of Mathematics and the Institute of Computer Sciences of the University of Wroclaw, and the Institute of Applied Mathematics Bonn in Germany. In 1986, he took a permanent faculty position at Souther...
Go to Profile#5992
Louise M. Ryan
#72022
Overall Influence
Louise Marie Ryan is an Australian biostatistician, a distinguished professor of statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, president-elect of the International Biometric Society, and an editor-in-chief of the journal Statistics in Medicine. She is known for her work applying statistics to cancer and risk assessment in environmental health.
Go to Profile#5993
Robert P. Gilmore
#124087
Overall Influence
#5994
Anna-Karin Tornberg
#88249
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Anna-Karin Tornberg is a Swedish mathematician currently at Royal Institute of Technology who was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize and Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis and elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Her research concerns computational mathematics.
Go to Profile#5995
Alan Weiss
#84942
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Alan Weiss is an American mathematician, a pioneer in the usage of large deviations theory in performance evaluation and related areas. Weiss received his B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from Case Western Reserve University taking courses from Lajos Takács and being advised by Arthur J. Lohwater . He received his M.Sc. in mathematics from Courant Institute and Ph.D. from New York University in 1981; his advisor was S. R. S. Varadhan, and his dissertation was entitled Invariant Measures of Diffusion Processes on Domains with Boundaries. He worked at Bell Labs , before joining MathWorks of Natick.
Go to Profile#5996
Philippe Brouqui
#124192
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
#5997
L. Eonid A. Pastur
#124227
Overall Influence
#5998
John R. Hauser
#35075
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
John Richard Hauser is the Kirin Professor of Marketing and Head of the Marketing Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is one of the founders of the field of Marketing Science and was Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Marketing Science from 1989 to 1995.
Go to Profile#5999
Valery Alexeev
#119131
Overall Influence
Valery Alexeev is an American mathematician who is currently the David C. Barrow Professor at University of Georgia and an Elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He received his Ph.D from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1990.
Go to Profile#6000
Vasilii Sergeevich Vladimirov
#124301
Overall Influence
