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,

#6101

Maruti Ram Murty

#126830
Overall Influence
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#6102

Arlene Ash

#107610
Overall Influence
Arlene Sandra Ash is an American statistician who works on risk adjustment in health services. She is a professor of Quantitative Health Sciences in the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and chief of the Biostatistics and Health Services Research division there.
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#6103

Gerard Murphy

#114791
Overall Influence
1948 - 2006 (58 years)
Gerard J. Murphy MRIA was a prolific Irish mathematician. His textbooks are internationally acclaimed, and translated into different languages. He died from cancer in October 2006, at the age of 57.
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#6104

Leighton R. Scott

#126901
Overall Influence
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#6105

Ann R. Cannon

#60831
Overall Influence
Ann C. Russey Cannon is an American statistics educator, the Watson M. Davis Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Cornell College in Iowa. , she was the only statistician at Cornell College. Cannon is a graduate of Grinnell College, and completed a doctorate in statistics at Iowa State University in 1994. Her dissertation, Signal Detection Using Categorical Temporal Data, was jointly supervised by William Q. Meeker Jr. and Noel Cressie.
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#6106

Harvey P. Greenspan

#115052
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Harvey P. Greenspan is an applied mathematician and Professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is notable for theoretical and experimental contributions in various subjects such as wave motion, oceanography, magneto-hydrodynamics, rotating fluids, bio-fluid dynamics, mixtures, centrifugal separation and multi-phase flows.
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#6107

Edward Norman Dancer

#123100
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Edward Norman Dancer FAA is an Australian mathematician, specializing in nonlinear analysis. Dancer received in 1969 a Bachelor of Science with Honours from the Australian National University and in 1972 a PhD from the University of Cambridge with thesis advisor Frank Smithies and thesis Bifurcation in Banach Spaces. As a postdoc Dancer was from 1971 to 1972 at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK and from 1972 to 1973 at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. At the University of New England in New South Wales, he was from 1973 to 1975 a lecturer, from...
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#6108

Sivaguru S. Sritharan

#97941
Overall Influence
Sivaguru S. Sritharan is an American aerodynamicist and mathematician. Sritharan served in civilian universities such as University of Southern California and University of Wyoming as faculty member and head of the department and also in the Department of Defense in various capacities ranging from scientist to leadership roles, and also held visiting positions at several international institutions.
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#6109

Klaus Butterbach‐bahl

#127070
Overall Influence
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#6110

Paul. L. Butzer

#127078
Overall Influence
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#6111

Philip Kutzko

#109271
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Philip Caesar Kutzko is an American mathematician. He currently is a professor at the University of Iowa. He is known for his contributions to the Langlands program. Life An alumnus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kutzko earned his doctorate under supervision of Donald McQuillan in 1972.
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#6112

Caren Diefenderfer

#112758
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Caren Lea Diefenderfer was an American mathematician known for her efforts to promote numeracy. Education and career Diefenderfer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She started her undergraduate education at Smith College, but transferred to Dartmouth College among the first women to be admitted as undergraduates to Dartmouth. She graduated with summa cum laude honors in mathematics from Dartmouth in 1973. She went on to graduate study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her 1980 dissertation, Approximation of Functions of Several Variables concerned function approximation for m...
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#6113

T. M. F. Smith

#108513
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Terence Michael Frederick Smith was a British statistician known for his research in survey sampling. Fred Smith gained his first degree in 1959. He succeeded Prof Maurice Quenouille as Professor of Statistics at the University of Southampton in 1975. He received the Guy Medal in bronze from the Royal Statistical Society in 1979. In 1983 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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#6114

Olav Reiersøl

#69319
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Olav Reiersøl was a Norwegian statistician and econometrician, who made several substantial contributions to econometrics and statistics. His works on identifiability and instrumental variables are standard references both in econometrics and statistics, and his work on genetic algebras are frequently cited in genetics.
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#6115

Jun Zhu

#72930
Overall Influence
Jun Zhu is a statistician and entomologist who works as a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Entomology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests involve the analysis of spatial data and spatio-temporal data, and the applications of this analysis in environmental statistics.
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#6116

Jessica Sklar

#94375
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Jessica Katherine Sklar is a mathematician interested in abstract algebra, recreational mathematics, mathematics and art, and mathematics and popular culture. She is a professor of mathematics at Pacific Lutheran University, and former head of the mathematics department at Pacific Lutheran.
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#6117

Sofiya Ostrovska

#108184
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Sofiya Ostrovska is a Ukrainian mathematician interested in probability theory and approximation theory, and known for her research on q-Bernstein polynomials, the q-analogs of the Bernstein polynomials. She has also published works in computer science concerning software engineering. She is a professor of mathematics at Atılım University in Turkey.
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#6118

Bill Eddy

#109627
Overall Influence
William Eddy is an American author. Currently the John C. Warner Professor of Statistics, Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University and is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association and Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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#6119

Ron Goldman

#101816
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Ronald Neil Goldman is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Professor Goldman received his B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1973.
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#6120

Catherine Doléans-Dade

#120784
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Catherine Doléans-Dade was a French American mathematician. She made significant contributions to the calculus of martingaless, including a general change of variables formula, a theorem on stochastic differential equations, and exponential processes of semimartingales.
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#6121

Pierre Ducimetière

#127263
Overall Influence
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#6122

George Eason

#78488
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Prof George Eason FRSE FIMA was a British mathematician who was Professor of Mathematics at Strathclyde University from 1970 to 1983. He worked on the dynamical theory of elasticity, and wrote papers relating to mathematical solutions of problems of human biology, including heat transfer through skin, the light-scattering effects of blood, and analysis of blood oxygenators.
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#6123

Richard D. Moore

#127341
Overall Influence
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#6124

Ramaiyengar Sridharan

Ramaiyengar Sridharan
#43831
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Ramaiyengar Sridharan is a mathematician at Chennai Mathematical Institute, formerly at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . Early life He was born in Cuddalore in 1935. He obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia under the guidance of Samuel Eilenberg with his thesis on filtered algebras and representations of Lie algebras in 1960.
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#6125

Barbara R. Holland

Barbara R. Holland
#96895
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Barbara Ruth Holland is a New Zealand born Australian scientist. She is a Professor of mathematics and member of the Theoretical Phylogenetics Group at the School of Mathematics & Physics at the University of Tasmania. Barbara is also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture. She has made substantial contributions to the methods for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from DNA and protein sequence data. Holland has published over 50 journal articles, presented over 30 invited or keynote lectures, refereed five conference proceedings, 2 book chapters and 1 book review.
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#6126

Stefan Luding

#127450
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
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#6127

Raymond O. Wells Jr.

#124528
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Raymond O'Neil Wells Jr. , "Ronny", is an American mathematician, working in complex analysis in several variables as well as wavelets. Wells received his BA from Rice University in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1965 from New York University under the supervision of Lipman Bers . He was Professor of Mathematics at Rice University, where he served as chairman of the Department of Mathematics. After becoming Professor Emeritus from Rice, he co-founded the Jacobs University Bremen. He was Professor of Mathematics and Vice-President of External Affairs.
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#6128

Ann Trenk

#97966
Overall Influence
Ann Natalie Trenk is an American mathematician interested in graph theory and the theory of partially ordered sets, and known for her research on proper distinguishing colorings of graphs and on tolerance graphs. She is the Lewis Atterbury Stimson Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College.
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#6129

Xiaoyu Luo

#112149
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Xiaoyu Luo is a Chinese and British applied mathematician who studies biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and the interactions of fluid flows with soft biological tissues. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Glasgow.
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#6130

Wayne A. Ray

#127550
Overall Influence
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#6131

Barry Posner

#125322
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Barry Zane Posner is the Accolti Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Early life and education Posner received a B.A. degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970, a M.A. from The Ohio State University in Public Administration in 1972, and a Ph.D in Organizational Behavior and Administrative Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976;. His doctoral thesis was "Characteristics of individuals' control in organizations"
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#6132

Daniel Stram

#127609
Overall Influence
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#6133

Rebecca DerSimonian

#116540
Overall Influence
Rebecca R. DerSimonian is an American statistician, known for her work with Nan Laird introducing the random-effects model for meta-analysis and, in their 1986 paper "Meta-analysis in clinical trials" applying meta-analysis to clinical trials. She is a biostatistician in the National Institutes of Health.
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#6134

Daniel R. Jeske

#96774
Overall Influence
Daniel Robert Jeske is an American statistician, a Vice Provost at the University of California, Riverside, President of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics, and former editor-in-chief of The American Statistician.
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#6135

Nathan Alexander

#96724
Overall Influence
Nathan Alexander is the James King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Mathematics Teaching at Morehouse College. Alexander is also Associate Director of the James King, Jr. Institute for Student and Faculty Engagement "Communicating by Thinking Effectively in and About Mathematics" . He is currently on leave from his faculty position as Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Education at the University of San Francisco.
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#6136

Henry N. Neufeld

#127751
Overall Influence
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#6137

Gareth M. James

#73396
Overall Influence
Gareth Michael James is the John H. Harland Dean of Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Early life and education Gareth M. James is a native of New Zealand. In 1994, he earned a bachelor of science and a bachelor of commerce from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he majored in statistics and finance. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States and attended Stanford University, where he earned a Ph.D. in statistics in 1998.
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#6138

Chris Holmes

Chris Holmes
#115627
Overall Influence
Christopher C. Holmes is a British statistician. He has held the position of Professor of Biostatistics in Genomics in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford since September 2014, a post that carries with it a Fellowship of St Anne's College, Oxford. Previously he was titular Professor of Biostatistics and a Fellow of Lincoln College. After working in industry he completed his doctorate in Bayesian statistics at Imperial College, London, supervised by Adrian Smith.
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#6139

Salomón Bartnicki-garcía

#127797
Overall Influence
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#6140

Robert J. Serfling

#127801
Overall Influence
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#6141

Adolph Winkler Goodman

#113361
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Adolph Winkler Goodman was an American mathematician who contributed to number theory, graph theory and to the theory of univalent functions: The conjecture on the coefficients of multivalent functions named after him is considered the most interesting challenge in the area after the Bieberbach conjecture, proved by Louis de Branges in 1985.
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#6142

Robert M. Elashoff

#127837
Overall Influence
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#6143

Judith Q. Longyear

#113349
Overall Influence
1938 - 1995 (57 years)
Judith Querida Longyear was an American mathematician and professor whose research interests included graph theory and combinatorics. Longyear was the second woman to ever earn a mathematics Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, where she studied under the supervision of Sarvadaman Chowla and wrote a thesis entitled Tactical Configurations. Longyear taught mathematics at several universities including California Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College and Wayne State University. She worked on nested block designs and Hadamard matrices.
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#6144

Stefano Montaldo

#127889
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Professor Stefano Montaldo is an Italian mathematician working at the University of Cagliari in the fields of differential geometry and global analysis. Montaldo is well known for his research on biharmonic maps.
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#6145

Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn

#90257
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn is a Spanish-German mathematician. From 2000 till 2018, she was a full-time professor at the University of Girona, Spain in the Department of Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics. Since 2018 she is emeritus professor at the same university. She was previously an associate professor at Technology University in Barcelona from 1986 to 2000. Her main areas of research interest include statistical analysis of compositional data, algebraic-geometric approach to statistical inference, and spatial cluster analysis. She was the president of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences during 2008–2012.
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#6146

Stanley Phillip Gudder

#127920
Overall Influence
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#6147

Giuseppe Longo

#74457
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Giuseppe Longo is an Italian mathematician, epistemologist, theoretical biologist, author, and academic. He is the Research Director Emeritus at Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
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#6148

Vyacheslav Lebedev

Vyacheslav Lebedev
#98702
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Lebedev was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, known for his work on numerical analysis. Career Lebedev was a Ph.D. student of Sobolev. He worked at the Kurchatov Institute and Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences, and taught students at the Moscow State University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He authored over a hundred papers and several books, most noticeably "Numerical methods in the theory of neutron transport" jointly with Gury Marchuk and "Functional Analysis in Computational Mathematics," based on his lectures. He graduated over 15 Ph.D.'s. Lebed...
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#6149

Gregory Beylkin

#84282
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Gregory Beylkin is a Russian–American mathematician. Education and career He studied from 1970 to 1975 at the University of Leningrad, with Diploma in Mathematics in November 1975. From 1976 to 1979 he was a research scientist at the Research Institute of Ore Geophysics, Leningrad. From 1980 to 1982 he was a graduate student at New York University, where he received his PhD under the supervision of Peter Lax. From 1982 to 1983 Beylkin was an associate research scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. From 1983 to 1991 he was a member of the professional staff of Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
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#6150

Peter Deuflhard

#127977
Overall Influence
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