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,
#601
Gustavo Ponce
#13750
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gustavo A. Ponce is a Venezuelan mathematician. Education and career Ponce graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a bachelor's degree in 1976. At the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University he graduated with a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1982 with thesis Long time stability of solutions of nonlinear evolution equations under the supervision of Sergiu Klainerman . Ponce was a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley from 1982 to 1984, an assistant professor at the Central University of Venezuela from 1984 to 1986, and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 1986 to 1989.
Go to Profile#602
Maryna Viazovska
#8507
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.
Go to Profile#603
Manfred Einsiedler
#13025
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Manfred Leopold Einsiedler is an Austrian mathematician who studies ergodic theory. He was born in Scheibbs, Austria in 1973. Education and career Einsiedler studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1996 and his PhD in 1999 under Klaus Schmidt with thesis Problems in higher dimensional dynamics. He was a postdoc in the academic year 2000–2001 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and in the academic year 2001–2002 at Penn State University. In 2001 he earned his habilitation at the University of Vienna and then became there a professor extraordinarius .
Go to Profile#604
Sergei Konyagin
#13460
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sergei Vladimirovich Konyagin is a Russian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Moscow State University. Konyagin participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad for the Soviet Union, winning two consecutive gold medals with perfect scores in 1972 and 1973. At the age of 15, he became one of the youngest people to achieve a perfect score at the IMO.
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Nicolae Popescu
#10996
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Nicolae Popescu was a Romanian mathematician and professor at the University of Bucharest. He also held a research position at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, and was elected corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy in 1997.
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Vladimir Markovic
#11280
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Vladimir Marković is a Professor of Mathematics at University of Oxford. He was previously the John D. MacArthur Professor at the California Institute of Technology and Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge .
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F. Thomson Leighton
#3311
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Frank Thomson "Tom" Leighton is the CEO of Akamai Technologies, the company he co-founded with the late Daniel Lewin in 1998. As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications and cybersecurity, Dr. Leighton discovered a solution to free up web congestion using applied mathematics and distributed computing.
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Neil Trudinger
#11558
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Neil Sidney Trudinger is an Australian mathematician, known particularly for his work in the field of nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations. After completing his B.Sc at the University of New England in 1962, he continued his graduate studies at Stanford University. He was awarded a Ph.D in 1966 for his thesis "Quasilinear Elliptical Partial Differential Equations in n Variables". After the award of his doctorate from Stanford University, Trudinger became a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University during the academic year 1966–67.
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Ellen Fetter
#4944
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory. Early life and education Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.
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Rajendra Bhatia
#12050
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rajendra Bhatia is an Indian mathematician, author, and educator. He is currently a professor of mathematics at Ashoka University located in Sonipat, Haryana ,India. Education He studied at the University of Delhi, where he completed his BSc degree in physics and MSc degree in mathematics, and moved to the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1982 under the probabilist K. R. Parthasarathy.
Go to Profile#611
Roger Apéry
#8668
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Roger Apéry was a French mathematician most remembered for Apéry's theorem, which states that is an irrational number. Here, denotes the Riemann zeta function. Biography Apéry was born in Rouen in 1916 to a French mother and Greek father. His childhood was spent in Lille until 1926, when the family moved to Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Ledru-Rollin and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He was admitted at the École normale supérieure in 1935. His studies were interrupted at the start of World War II; he was mobilized in September 1939, taken prisoner of war in June 1940, repatriated with pleurisy in June 1941, and hospitalized until August 1941.
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Dmitri Anosov
#10241
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Dmitri Victorovich Anosov was a Russian mathematician active during the Soviet Union, he is best known for his contributions to dynamical systems theory. He was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the USSR State Prize . He was a student of Lev Pontryagin. In 2014, he died at the age of 77.
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Robert Arnott Wilson
#13823
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robert Arnott Wilson is a retired mathematician in London, England, who is best known for his work on classifying the maximal subgroups of finite simple groups and for the work in the Monster group. He is also an accomplished violin, viola and piano player, having played as the principal viola in the Sinfonia of Birmingham. Due to a damaged finger, he now principally plays the kora.
Go to Profile#614
Georges Reeb
#11804
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Georges Henri Reeb was a French mathematician. He worked in differential topology, differential geometry, differential equations, topological dynamical systems theory and non-standard analysis. Biography Reeb was born in Saverne, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, to Theobald Reeb and Caroline Engel. He started studying mathematics at University of Strasbourg, but in 1939 the entire university was evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand due to the German occupation of France.
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Joseph Keller
#6003
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Joseph Bishop Keller was an American mathematician who specialized in applied mathematics. He was best known for his work on the "geometrical theory of diffraction" . Early life and education Born in Paterson, New Jersey on July 31, 1923, Keller attended Eastside High School, where he was a member of the math team. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1943 at New York University, Keller obtained his PhD in 1948 from NYU under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a professor of mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathemat...
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Robin Thomas
#10853
Overall Influence
1962 - 2020 (58 years)
Robin Thomas was a mathematician working in graph theory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Thomas received his doctorate in 1985 from Charles University in Prague, Czechoslovakia , under the supervision of Jaroslav Nešetřil. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and became a Regents' Professor there, briefly serving as the department Chair.
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Jin Akiyama
#12083
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jin Akiyama is a Japanese mathematician, known for his appearances on Japanese prime-time television presenting magic tricks with mathematical explanations. He is director of the Mathematical Education Research Center at the Tokyo University of Science, and professor emeritus at Tokai University.
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Vitali Milman
#9635
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Vitali Davidovich Milman is a mathematician specializing in analysis. He is a professor at the Tel Aviv University. In the past he was a President of the Israel Mathematical Union and a member of the “Aliyah” committee of Tel Aviv University.
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Roger Temam
#13331
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Roger Meyer Temam is a French applied mathematician working in numerical analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. He graduated from the University of Paris – the Sorbonne in 1967, completing a doctorate under the direction of Jacques-Louis Lions. He has published over 400 articles, as well as 12 books.
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Morwen Thistlethwaite
#14840
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Morwen Bernard Thistlethwaite is a knot theorist and professor of mathematics for the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has made important contributions to both knot theory and Rubik's Cube group theory.
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Shihoko Ishii
#14324
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Shihoko Ishii is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the University of Tokyo. Her research area is algebraic geometry. Education Ishii received her bachelor's degree from Tokyo Women's Christian University in 1973 and her master's degree from Waseda University in 1975. She earned her PhD from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1983.
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Jeremy Kahn
#12515
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Jeremy Adam Kahn is an American mathematician. He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics. Education Kahn grew up in New York City and attended Hunter College High School. He was a child prodigy who mastered quadratic equations at the age of 7, at the age of 8 designed an equation identical to the one Carl Gauss designed at the age of 9, and proved the Pythagorean Theorem at the age of 10. Kahn was part of the Johns Hopkins University Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth longitudinal cohort. At the age of 11, he scored a 780 out of a possible 800 on the math portion of the SAT-I exam.
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John Lott
#11092
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
John William Lott is a professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for contributions to differential geometry. Academic history Lott received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and M.A. degrees in mathematics and physics from University of California, Berkeley. In 1983, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics under the supervision of Isadore Singer. After postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan. In 2009, he moved to University ...
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Boris Zilber
#10719
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Boris Zilber is a Soviet-British mathematician who works in mathematical logic, specifically model theory. He is a professor of mathematical logic at the University of Oxford. He obtained his doctorate from the Novosibirsk State University in 1975 under the supervision of Mikhail Taitslin and his habilitation from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1986.
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Heinz von Foerster
#309
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.
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Pierre Bézier
#1187
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Pierre Étienne Bézier was a French engineer and one of the founders of the fields of solid, geometric and physical modelling as well as in the field of representing curves, especially in computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. As an engineer at Renault, he became a leader in the transformation of design and manufacturing, through mathematics and computing tools, into computer-aided design and three-dimensional modeling.
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Michael Aizenman
#11972
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Michael Aizenman is an American-Israeli mathematician and a physicist at Princeton University, working in the fields of mathematical physics, statistical mechanics, functional analysis and probability theory.
Go to Profile#628
Edwin E. Moise
#9855
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Edwin Evariste Moise was an American mathematician and mathematics education reformer. After his retirement from mathematics he became a literary critic of 19th-century English poetry and had several notes published in that field.
Go to Profile#629
George Andrews
#10228
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#630
Dorothy Maharam
#10885
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Dorothy Maharam Stone was an American mathematician born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who made important contributions to measure theory and became the namesake of Maharam's theorem and Maharam algebra.
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János Pintz
#12634
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
János Pintz is a Hungarian mathematician working in analytic number theory. He is a fellow of the Rényi Mathematical Institute and is also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2014, he received the Cole Prize.
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Daniel W. Stroock
#14173
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Daniel Wyler Stroock is an American mathematician, a probabilist. He is regarded and revered as one of the fundamental contributors to Malliavin calculus with Shigeo Kusuoka and the theory of diffusion processes with S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan with an orientation towards the refinement and further development of Itô’s stochastic calculus.
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Frederick Mosteller
#4938
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Charles Frederick Mosteller was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 1957 to 1971, and served as the president of several professional bodies including the Psychometric Society, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the International Statistical Institute.
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Christoph Thiele
#14410
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Christoph Thiele is a German mathematician working in the field of harmonic analysis. After completing his undergraduate studies at TU Darmstadt and Bielefeld University,he obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 at Yale under the supervision of Ronald Coifman. After spending time at UCLA, where he was promoted to full professor, he occupied the Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn.
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Anders Björner
#14425
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Anders Björner received his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1979, under Bernt Lindström. He is a Swedish professor of mathematics, in the Department of Mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests are in combinatorics, as well as the related areas of algebra, geometry, topology, and computer science.
Go to Profile#636
Maryam Mirzakhani
#4076
Overall Influence
1977 - 2017 (40 years)
#637
Israel Halperin
#7992
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Israel Halperin, was a Canadian mathematician and social activist. Early life and education Israel Halperin was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Solomon Halperin and Fanny Lundy. Halperin attended Malvern Collegiate Institute, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1932, and later was a graduate student of John von Neumann at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in mathematics.
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Kenneth E. Iverson
#943
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice".
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Ákos Császár
#13521
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Ákos Császár was a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in general topology and real analysis. He discovered the Császár polyhedron, a nonconvex polyhedron without diagonals. He introduced the notion of syntopogeneous spaces, a generalization of topological spaces.
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M. Ram Murty
#12354
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Maruti Ram Pedaprolu Murty, FRSC is an Indo-Canadian mathematician at Queen's University, where he holds a Queen's Research Chair in mathematics. Biography M. Ram Murty is the brother of mathematician V. Kumar Murty.
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James Cooley
#1588
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
James William Cooley was an American mathematician. Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from 1953 to 1956, where he notably programmed the Blackman–Tukey transformation.
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David George Kendall
#8297
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
David George Kendall FRS was an English statistician and mathematician, known for his work on probability, statistical shape analysis, ley lines and queueing theory. He spent most of his academic life in the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge . He worked with M. S. Bartlett during World War II, and visited Princeton University after the war.
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Jacques-Louis Lions
#7699
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Jacques-Louis Lions was a French mathematician who made contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and to stochastic control, among other areas. He received the SIAM's John von Neumann Lecture prize in 1986 and numerous other distinctions. Lions is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
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Leon Simon
#14497
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Leon Melvyn Simon , born in 1945, is a Leroy P. Steele Prize and Bôcher Prize-winning mathematician, known for deep contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, geometric measure theory, and partial differential equations. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#645
Melvin Dresher
#10349
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Melvin Dresher was a Polish-born American mathematician, notable for developing, with Merrill Flood, the game theoretical model of cooperation and conflict known as the Prisoner's dilemma while at RAND in 1950 .
Go to Profile#646
Ennio de Giorgi
#13006
Overall Influence
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Ennio De Giorgi was an Italian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and the foundations of mathematics. Mathematical work De Giorgi's first work was in geometric measure theory, on the topic of the sets of finite perimeters which he called in 1958 as Caccioppoli sets, after his mentor and friend. His definition applied some important analytic tools and the De Giorgi's theorem for the sets established a new tool for set theory as well as his own works. This achievement not only brought Ennio immediate recognition but displayed his ability to attack problems using complete...
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Peter Whittle
#6807
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Peter Whittle was a mathematician and statistician from New Zealand, working in the fields of stochastic nets, optimal control, time series analysis, stochastic optimisation and stochastic dynamics. From 1967 to 1994, he was the Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#648
Arthur Mattuck
#14819
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Arthur Paul Mattuck was an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He may be best known for his 1998 book, Introduction to Analysis and his differential equations video lectures featured on MIT's OpenCourseWare.
Go to Profile#649
Tony F. Chan
#4626
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Tony Fan-Cheong Chan is a Chinese American mathematician who has been serving as President of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology since 2018. Prior that, he was President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 2009 to 2018.
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Rodney Hill
#13869
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
Rodney Hill FRS was an applied mathematician and a former Professor of Mechanics of Solids at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Career In 1953 he was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Nottingham. His 1950 The Mathematical Theory of Plasticity work forms the foundation of plasticity theory. Hill is widely regarded as among the foremost contributors to the foundations of solid mechanics over the second half of the 20th century. His early work was central to founding the mathematical theory of plasticity. This deep interest led eventually to general studies of...
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