Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#6001

Marshall L. Fisher

#124347

Overall Influence

#6002

Fritz Leiber

#5116

Overall Influence

1910 - 1992 (82 years)

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright, and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber is one of the fathers of sword and sorcery and coined the term.

#6003

Shaul Foguel

#103428

Overall Influence

1931 - 2020 (89 years)

Shaul Reuven Foguel was an Israeli mathematician . Shaul Foguel was born to one of the founding families of the City of Tel Aviv and his mother Dora Malkin was a direct descendant of Saul Wahl. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1958. He wrote his dissertation under Nelson Dunford on "Studies in Spectral Operators and the Basis Problem". Shaul Foguel was Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a supporter of the Israeli Left. He ran in the 1969 Knesset elections on the Peace List along with Gadi Yatziv, although it failed to win a seat.

#6004

Antonio Gasparrini

#124389

Overall Influence

#6005

Rebecca Doerge

#75700

Overall Influence

Rebecca Whitbeck Doerge is an American researcher in statistical bioinformatics, known for her research on quantitative traits. She is currently the provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was previously the Trent and Judith Anderson Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Purdue University and then dean of the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with joint appointments in the departments of biology and statistics.

#6006

Ludwig Danzer

#108948

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

Ludwig Danzer was a German geometer working in discrete geometry. He was a student of Hanfried Lenz, starting his career in 1960 with a thesis about "Lagerungsprobleme". Danzer's name is popularized in the concepts of a Danzer set, a set of points that touches all large convex sets, and the Danzer cube, an example of a non-shellable triangulation of the cube. It is an example of a power complex, studied by Danzer in the 1980s. The Danzer cube is example 8.9 in the book "Lectures on Polytopes" by G.M. Ziegler.

#6007

Trevor Pearcey

#29703

Overall Influence

1919 - 1998 (79 years)

Trevor Pearcey was a British-born Australian scientist, who created CSIRAC, one of the first stored-program electronic computers in the world. Born in Woolwich, London, he graduated from Imperial College in 1940 with first class honours in physics and mathematics. He emigrated to Australia in 1945.

#6008

Patti Frazer Lock

#100764

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Patricia Frazer Lock is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, statistician, statistics educator, and textbook author whose research interests include social networks and quantum logic. She is the Cummings Professor of Mathematics at St. Lawrence University.

#6009

Denis Higgs

#88099

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Denis A. Higgs was a British mathematician, Doctor of Mathematics, and professor of mathematics who specialised in combinatorics, universal algebra, and category theory. He wrote one of the most influential papers in category theory entitled A category approach to boolean valued set theory, which introduced many students to topos theory. He was a member of the National Committee of Liberation and was an outspoken critic against the apartheid in South Africa.

#6010

Rudy Horne

#90360

Overall Influence

1968 - 2017 (49 years)

Rudy Lee Horne was an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Morehouse College. He worked on dynamical systems, including nonlinear waves. He was the mathematics consultant for the film Hidden Figures.

#6011

Paul C. Fife

#124512

Overall Influence

#6012

Arthur Everett Pitcher

#124529

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Arthur Everett Pitcher was an American mathematician, known for early pioneering work on exact sequences and applying Morse theory to homotopy theory. Biography Everett Pitcher grew up in Cleveland, where his father, Arthur Dunn Pitcher, headed the mathematics department at Adelbert College of Western Reserve University until he died of heart failure in 1924 at the age of 43. Everett Pitcher's mother was a math teacher, and his father received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago under E. H. Moore. Everett Pitcher received in 1932 an A.B. from Western Reserve University, in 1933 an M.A., and in 1935 a Ph.D.

#6013

Peter Lynch

#77573

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Peter Lynch is an Irish meteorologist, mathematician, blogger and book author. His interests include numerical weather prediction, dynamic meteorology, Hamiltonian mechanics, the history of meteorology, and the popularisation of mathematics.

#6014

Ivan Panin

#122472

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Ivan Aleksandrovich Panin is a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebra, algebraic geometry, and algebraic K-theory. Education and career In 1973 he entered boarding school at D. K. Faddeev Academic Gymnasium and graduated there in 1976 There he graduated in 1981 from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Saint Petersburg State University. At the St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences , he defended in 1984 his thesis for the degree of candidate of physical and mathematical sciences with supervisor Andrei Suslin and then became employed there as a staff member.

#6015

Claudio Baiocchi

#104651

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Claudio Baiocchi was an Italian mathematician. He was a professor at the University of Pavia and since the 1990s he was a professor of mathematical higher analysis at the Sapienza University. He worked on partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. In 1971 he applied his mathematical methods to a free boundary problem in the filtration of liquids through porous media with applications in civil engineering .

#6016

Maurice Heins

#114640

Overall Influence

1915 - 2015 (100 years)

Maurice Haskell Heins was an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis and harmonic analysis. Heins received his bachelor's degree in 1937, his master's degree in 1939, and his Ph.D. in 1940, under Joseph L. Walsh, from Harvard University with thesis Extremal Problems for Functions Analytic and Single-Valued in a Doubly-Connected Region. He then worked on topological methods from 1940 to 1942 as Marston Morse's assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Heins was from 1942 to 1944 an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and in 1944–1945 an applied mathematician at the Chief Ordnance Office of the U.S.

#6017

Clark Barwick

#115955

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Clark Edward Barwick is an American mathematician and professor of pure mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. His research is centered around homotopy theory, algebraic K-theory, higher category theory, and related areas.

#6018

Margot Gerritsen

#94308

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (59 years)

Margot Geertrui Gerritsen is a professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University and a senior associate dean for educational initiatives in the Stanford University School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Her research interests include energy production, ocean dynamics, and sailboat design.

#6019

Amedeo Caflisch

#124652

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

#6020

Amel Ben Abda

#112889

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Amel Ben Abda is a professor of mathematics at the National Engineering School of Tunis. She was the first person in Tunisia to earn a PhD in applied mathematics. She is the Tunisian representative of the steering committee of the International Laboratory for Computer Sciences and Applied Mathematics on the advisory board of the Tunisian Woman Mathematician Association.

#6021

Alison Marr

#103059

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (45 years)

Alison M. Marr is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. Her research concerns graph theory and graph labeling, and she is also an advocate of inquiry-based learning in mathematics. She works as a professor of mathematics and computer science at Southwestern University in Texas.

#6022

Todd Oliynyk

#98725

Overall Influence

Todd Oliynyk is a professor in mathematics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He works in the area of mathematical relativity and partial differential equations. In 2011, he was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal. He received a Fulbright Senior Scholarship in 2017.

#6023

Roberto Triggiani

#124787

Overall Influence

#6024

Richard Tuttle

#13166

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (84 years)

Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, casual, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of formats, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture. He lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.

#6025

Mireille Bousquet-Mélou

#44283

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Mireille Bousquet-Mélou is a French mathematician who specializes in enumerative combinatorics and who works as a senior researcher for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the computer science department of the University of Bordeaux.

#6026

Lis Brack-Bernsen

#108398

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Lis Brack-Bernsen is a Danish and Swiss mathematician, historian of science, and historian of mathematics, known for her work on Babylonian astronomy. She is an extraordinary professor of the history of science at the University of Regensburg.

#6027

Antonella Ferrara

#97377

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Antonella Ferrara is an Italian control theorist and engineer, known for her work on sliding mode control. Education and career Ferrara is originally from Genoa, and studied electrical engineering at the University of Genoa, earning a laurea in 1987 and completing a Ph.D. in 1992. She became an assistant professor at the University of Genoa in 1992, and moved to the University of Pavia in 1998 as an associate professor. She was named professor of automatic control in 2005. At Pavia, she was originally affiliated with the department of computer engineering and systems science, and in 2011 beca...

#6028

Giovanni Alberti

#124934

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (60 years)

Giovanni Alberti is an Italian mathematician who is active in the fields of calculus of variations, real analysis and geometric measure theory. Scientific activity Alberti has studied at Scuola Normale Superiore under the guide of Giuseppe Buttazzo and Ennio De Giorgi; he is professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa. Alberti is mostly known for two remarkable theorems he proved at the beginning of his career, that eventually found applications in various branches of modern mathematical analysis. The first is a very general Lusin type theorem for gradients asserting that every Borel v...

#6029

Hilary Finucane

#69244

Overall Influence

Hilary Kiyo Finucane is an American computational biologist who is Co-Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute. Her group combines genetic data with molecular data to understand the origins and mechanisms of disease.

#6030

Ulrich Kulisch

#102013

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (92 years)

Ulrich W. Kulisch is a German mathematician specializing in numerical analysis, including the computer implementation of interval arithmetic. Experience After graduation from high school in Freising, Kulisch studied mathematics at the University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich where in 1961 he completed his dissertation under Josef Heinhold. After his postdoctoral qualification in 1963, he was acting Professor for Numerical Mathematics of the University of Munich from 1964 to 1966, and from 1966 Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics at...

#6031

Rudolf M. Tromp

#116380

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Dr. Rudolf Maria "Ruud" Tromp is a Dutch American scientist at IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center and a Physics Professor at Leiden University. Education He attended Petrus Canisius College The Lyceum .1982 Ph.D. in physics from the University of Utrecht 1982, completed a thesis on medium-energy ion scattering studies of the structure of silicon surfaces.

#6032

Yaiza Canzani

#117281

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (38 years)

Yaiza Canzani García is a Spanish and Uruguayan mathematician known for her work in mathematical analysis, and particularly in spectral geometry and microlocal analysis. She is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#6033

Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck

#42968

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck is a UK mathematician of Belgian origin. He is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University College, London. Early life and education Vanden-Broeck was born in Liège, Belgium on 11 September 1951. He received a degree in engineering and physics from the University Of Liège in 1974 and another one in oceanology in 1975. He then became a Ph.D. student at the University of Adelaide, Australia, where he worked with Ernie Tuck and Leonard Schwartz. His Ph.D. thesis entitled Two-dimensional nonlinear free surface flows past semi-infinite bodies, was defended in 1978 ...

#6034

Gérard Iooss

#106275

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (81 years)

Gérard Iooss is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems and mathematical problems of hydrodynamics. Education and career Iooss attended school in Clermont-Ferrand and studied at the École Polytechnique from 1964 to 1966. From 1967 to 1972 he was with the Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales . In 1971 he received his doctorate from the Pierre and Marie Curie University with thesis Théorie non linéaire de la stabilit des écoulements laminaires under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Guireaud. Iooss was a professor from 1972 to 1974 at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, and from 1974 at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, where he retired in 2007.

#6035

Robert L. Constable

#53251

Overall Influence

Robert Lee Constable is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and first and former dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. He is known for his work on connecting computer programs and mathematical proofss, especially the Nuprl system. Prior to Nuprl, he worked on the PL/CV formal system and verifier. Alonzo Church was supervising the junior thesis of Robert while he was studying in Princeton. Constable received his PhD in 1968 under Stephen Kleene and has supervised over 40 students, including Edmund M. Clarke, Robert Harper, Kurt Mehlhorn, Steven Muchnick, Pavel Naumov, and Ryan Stansifer.

#6036

Mark Pinsker

#98527

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Mark Semenovich Pinsker or Mark Shlemovich Pinsker was a noted Russian mathematician in the fields of information theory, probability theory, coding theory, ergodic theory, mathematical statistics, and communication networks.

#6037

Silas D. Alben

#87076

Overall Influence

Silas D. Alben is an American mathematician. His is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics Program at the University of Michigan. His research addresses problems from biology and engineering that can be studied with the tools of applied mathematics and continuum mechanics.

#6038

Ludovic Lebart

#47611

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Ludovic Lebart is a French statistician. He is a senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and a professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris. His research interests are the exploratory analysis of qualitative and textual data. He has coauthored several books on descriptive multivariate statistics, survey methodology, and exploratory analysis of textual data. He was a part of a research group in France led by Jean-Paul Benzécri that made significant contributions to the development of correspondence analysis.

#6039

Benjamin Drake Wright

Benjamin Drake Wright

#33754

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Benjamin Drake Wright was an American psychometrician. He is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of Georg Rasch's measurement principles and models. In the wake of what Rasch referred to as Wright's “almost unbelievable activity in this field” in the period from 1960 to 1972, Rasch's ideas entered the mainstream in high-stakes testing, professional certification and licensure examinations, and in research employing tests, and surveys and assessments across a range of fields. Wright's seminal contributions to measurement continued until 2001, and included articulation of philosophi...

#6040

Marisa Fernández

#98530

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

María Luisa Fernández Rodríguez is a Spanish mathematician specializing in differential geometry, symplectic geometry, and -structures. She is the professor of geometry and topology in the department of mathematics at the University of the Basque Country.

#6041

Dieter Held

#125182

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (89 years)

Dieter Held is a German mathematician. He is known for discovering the Held group, one of the 26 sporadic finite simple groups. Held was a speaker at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians. He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 from Goethe University Frankfurt, under the supervision of Reinhold Baer. From June 1965 to October 1967 Held first was lecturer at the Australian National University till July 1966 and then lecturer at Monash University, Clayton, Victoria. After having resigned from his position at Monash University, he returned to Germany and took up a research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft .

#6042

James O. Ramsay

#87039

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

James O. Ramsay is a Canadian statistician and Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Montreal, who developed much of the statistical theory behind multidimensional scaling . Together with co-author Bernard Silverman, he is widely recognized as the founder of functional data analysis. He wrote four influential books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles in statistical and psychometric journals.

#6043

Tian Ye

#125212

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (54 years)

Tian Ye or Ye Tian is a Chinese mathematician known for his research in number theory and arithmetic geometry. Career Tian received his PhD in mathematics under Shou-Wu Zhang at Columbia University in 2003 and is currently a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

#6044

Sylvestre Gallot

Sylvestre Gallot

#103722

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (77 years)

Sylvestre F. L. Gallot is a French mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. He is an emeritus professor at the Institut Fourier of the Université Grenoble Alpes, in the Geometry and Topology section.

#6045

Daniel Abibi

#81928

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

Daniel Abibi is a Congolese politician, mathematician and diplomat. During the 1980s, he served in the government of Congo-Brazzaville as Minister of Information and as Minister of Secondary and Higher Education. Later, during the 1990s, he was Congo-Brazzaville's Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

#6046

Frederic M. Lord

#25234

Overall Influence

1912 - 2000 (88 years)

Frederic Mather Lord was a psychometrician for Educational Testing Service. The SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT and TOEFL are all based on Lord's research. Early life Lord was born on November 12, 1912, in Hanover, New Hampshire. His great-great-grandfather, Nathan Lord, served as the sixth president of Dartmouth College, from which Lord graduated with a bachelor's degree in Sociology in 1936. He later earned a master's degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota, followed by a PhD in Psychology from Princeton University in 1951.

#6047

David Pointcheval

#108632

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (55 years)

David Pointcheval is a French cryptographer. He is currently a Senior Researcher at CNRS. He is head of the Computer Science Department and Cryptography Laboratory at the École normale supérieure. He is mainly known for his contributions in the area of provable security, including the Forking lemma, the Pointcheval-Stern signature algorithm, and his contributions to Password-authenticated key agreement.

#6048

Monica Nevins

#114235

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (52 years)

Monica A. Nevins is a Canadian mathematician, and a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include abstract algebra, representation theory, algebraic groups, and mathematical cryptography.

#6049

David Larbalestier

David Larbalestier

#105346

Overall Influence

David C. Larbalestier is an American scientist who has contributed to research in superconducting materials for magnets and power applications. He is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Applied Superconductivity Center at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University. He also holds emeritus status in the Materials Science and Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which was his academic home until 2006.

#6050

Georgia Salanti

#125409

Overall Influence

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