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,

#6201

Paul Butzer

#85009
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Paul Leo Butzer is a German mathematician who specializes in Analysis . Life and work Butzer is the son of an engineer, and his mother studied mathematics at RWTH Aachen University. As opponents of the National Socialists , Butzer's parents left Germany with their children in 1937 and moved to England. During World War II, they relocated to Canada, where Butzer attended school in Montreal and studied mathematics at Loyola College , completing his bachelor's degree in 1948. He then pursued further studies at the University of Toronto, including studying under Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter and William Tutte, and obtained his Ph.D.
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#6202

Elena Celledoni

#105836
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Elena Celledoni is an Italian mathematician who works in Norway as a professor of mathematical sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . Her research involves the numerical analysis of numerical algorithms for partial differential equations and for Lie group computations, including the study of structure preserving algorithms.
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#6203

João Marques Silva

#79131
Overall Influence
João Paulo Marques Silva is a Portuguese researcher working on SAT. He developed the SAT solver GRASP during his PhD. Marques-Silva was a Senior Lecturer from October 2005 until June 2007 at the school of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton. In June 2007 he was promoted to Professor, the highest Professorship ranking in the UK. Since 2009 he moved to University College Dublin, Ireland.
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#6204

Federico Rodriguez Hertz

Federico Rodriguez Hertz
#94295
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Federico Rodríguez Hertz is a mathematician working in the United States of Argentinian origin. He is the Anatole Katok Chair professor of mathematics at Penn State University. Rodriguez Hertz studies dynamical systems and ergodic theory, which can be used to described chaos's behaviors over the large time scale and also has many applications in statistical mechanics, number theory, and geometry.
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#6205

Helen Wilson

Helen Wilson
#80865
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Helen Jane Wilson, , is a British mathematician and the first female Head of Mathematics at University College London . Her research focuses on the theoretical and numerical modelling of the flow of non-Newtonian fluids such as polymeric materials and particle suspensions.
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#6206

Ian Stewart. Fraser

#129423
Overall Influence
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#6207

Peter Schnohr

#129434
Overall Influence
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#6208

Richard J. Wood

#101935
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Richard J. Wood is a mathematics professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He graduated from McMaster University in 1972 with his M.Sc. and then later went on to do his Ph.D. at Dalhousie University. He is interested in category theory and lattice theory.
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#6209

Adhemar Bultheel

#120496
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Adhemar François Bultheel is a Belgian mathematician and computer scientist, the former president of the Belgian Mathematical Society. He is a prolific book reviewer for the Bulletin of the Belgian Mathematical Society and for the European Mathematical Society. His research concerns approximation theory.
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#6210

Ming-Jun Lai

#102179
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Ming-Jun Lai is an American mathematician, currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Georgia. His area of research is splines and their numerical analysis. He has published a text on splines called Splines Functions on Triangulations. He was born in Hangzhou, China.
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#6211

Holger Dette

#129564
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
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#6212

Jason Locasale

#74963
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Jason W. Locasale is an American scientist and university professor. His focus is on metabolism. Education Locasale graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University with a dual degree in Chemistry and Physics. While completing his undergraduate degree, he received initial training in research in biochemistry and structural biology under Helen Berman. He earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School under Lewis C. Cantley.
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#6213

You-ju Liu

#129606
Overall Influence
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#6214

Otomar Hájek

#121867
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Otomar Hájek was a Czech-American mathematician, known for his contributions to dynamical systems, game theory and control theory. He was born in Belgrade in Serbia, moving with his family to Prague in 1935, to the Netherlands in 1939 and via Algerie and southern France to London in 1940 where they lived until 1945 when they returned to Prague. After high school in 1949 he studied mathematics at Charles University in Prague, resulting in a Ph.D. in 1963 on a thesis entitled Dynamical systems in the plane. At the same place he joined the mathematics and physics faculty in 1965, before movin...
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#6215

Dugald Macpherson

Dugald Macpherson
#112799
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
H. Dugald Macpherson is a mathematician and logician. He is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. He obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1983 for his thesis entitled "Enumeration of Orbits of Infinite Permutation Groups" under the supervision of Peter Cameron. In 1997, he was awarded the Junior Berwick Prize by the London Mathematical Society. He continues to research into permutation groups and model theory. He is scientist in charge of the MODNET team at the University of Leeds. He co-authored the book Notes on Infinite Permutation Groups.
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#6216

Richard McGehee

#72488
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Richard Paul McGehee is an American mathematician, who works on dynamical systems with special emphasis on celestial mechanics. McGehee received from Caltech in 1964 his bachelor's degree and from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 his master's degree and in 1969 his Ph.D. under Charles C. Conley with thesis Homoclinic orbits in the restricted three body problem. As a postdoc he was at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. In 1970 he became an assistant professor and in 1979 a full professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he was from...
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#6217

Arthur Bakker

#114047
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Arthur Bakker is a Dutch mathematics education researcher and associate professor at the Freudenthal Institute, Utrecht University, Netherlands. He is Fellow at the University of Bremen. Service and Functions He is editor-in-chief of Educational Studies in Mathematics. Before, he was associate editor of Educational Studies in Mathematics since 2014.
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#6218

David Minda

#129682
Overall Influence
Carl David Minda is an American mathematician, the Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cincinnati. Minda did his undergraduate studies at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor's degree in 1965 and a masters in 1966. He then earned his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Burton Rodin. He taught at the University of Minnesota, and then returned to the Cincinnati faculty. He was given the Taft Professorship in 1999. His research falls within the branch of mathematics known as Complex Analysis. His research i...
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#6219

Andrea Walther

#118277
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Andrea Walther is a German applied mathematician whose research interests include nonlinear optimization, non-smooth optimization, and scientific computing, and who is known in particular for her work on automatic differentiation. She is professor of mathematical optimization in the institute for mathematics of Humboldt University of Berlin.
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#6220

Andreas Seeger

#102154
Overall Influence
Andreas Seeger is a mathematician who works in the field of harmonic analysis. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his PhD from Technische Universität Darmstadt in 1985 under the supervision of Walter Trebels.
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#6221

Vince Gilligan

Vince Gilligan
#749
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
George Vincent Gilligan Jr. is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. He is known for his television work, specifically as creator, head writer, executive producer, and director of AMC's Breaking Bad and its spin-off prequel series Better Call Saul . He was a writer and producer for The X-Files and was the co-creator of its spin-off, The Lone Gunmen .
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#6222

Samuel Yates

#72586
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Samuel Yates was a computer engineer and mathematician who first described unique primes in the 1980s. In 1984 he began the list of "Largest Known Primes" and coined the name titanic prime for any prime with 1,000 or more decimal digits. He also called those who proved their primality "titans". He is the author of Repunits and Repetends.
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#6223

Mark Bretscher

#39632
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Mark Steven Bretscher is a British biological scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. He worked at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom and is currently retired.
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#6224

Gregory Maxwell Kelly

#129845
Overall Influence
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#6225

Donatella Danielli

#118816
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Donatella Danielli is a professor of mathematics at Arizona State University and is known for her contributions to partial differential equations, calculus of variations and geometric measure theory, with specific emphasis on free boundary problems.
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#6226

Tetiana Taran

#90790
Overall Influence
1946 - 2007 (61 years)
Tetiana Arkhipivna Taran was a Soviet and Ukrainian computer scientist who worked in artificial intelligence, published the first Russian-language textbook in artificial intelligence, and founded the series of International Conferences on Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Information.
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#6227

Jim Mauldon

#102923
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
James Grenfell Mauldon MC was a British mathematician who taught at the University of Oxford and in the United States at Amherst College. Life Mauldon was born in 1920 and educated at Ipswich School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied mathematics. Although he matriculated in 1938, he did not complete his studies until 1947 because of the intervention of the Second World War. He served with the Royal Tank Regiment between 1941 and 1946 in the North African and Italian campaigns, reaching the rank of major. He won the Military Cross for his actions at the First Battle of El Alamein in...
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#6228

Sheryl F. Kelsey

#124655
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sheryl F. Kelsey is an American biostatistician and epidemiologist who became the first woman to earn a doctorate in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. She made significant contributions to how heart disease is treated by studying the outcomes of coronary angioplasty.
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#6229

Shelly M. Jones

#101669
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Shelly Monica Jones is an American mathematics educator. She is an associate professor of mathematics education at Central Connecticut State University. Early life and education Jones is African-American; she was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut and went on to study computer science at Spelman College, graduating in 1986. Jones received a master's degree in mathematics education from the University of Bridgeport and a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Illinois State University.
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#6230

Victor M. Markowitz

#66841
Overall Influence
Victor M. Markowitz is chief informatics officer and associate director at DOE Joint Genome Institute , and head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Biological Data Management and Technology Center.
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#6231

Peter Littelmann

Peter Littelmann
#123473
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Peter Littelmann is a German mathematician at the University of Cologne working on algebraic groups and representation theory, who introduced the Littelmann path model and used it to solve several conjectures in standard monomial theory and other areas.
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#6232

Carme Torras

Carme Torras
#74618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Carme Torras Genís is a Spanish computer scientist who has contributed to research on robotics and artificial intelligence. A member of Academia Europaea since 2010, she writes technical works in English and fiction in Catalan.
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#6233

Enrico Valdinoci

#130075
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
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#6234

Artur Oscar Lopes

Artur Oscar Lopes
#55637
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Artur Oscar Lopes is a Brazilian writer and mathematician working on dynamical systems and ergodic theory. He is a professor at UFRGS, Porto Alegre. He earned his Ph.D. from the IMPA in 1977 under the supervision of Jacob Palis.
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#6235

Martha M. Gardner

#76540
Overall Influence
Martha M. Gardner is an American statistician associated with GE Global Research, and the former chair of the Quality & Productivity Section of the American Statistical Association. As an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, Gardner majored in both mathematics and classical languages. She liked classics better than mathematics, but was advised by a classics professor that her job prospects would be much better in mathematics, and that she should look harder for a branch of mathematics that she enjoyed. After earning a master's degree in statistics at Alabama, focused on actuarial science, she moved to North Carolina State University for her doctoral studies.
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#6236

Stanislaus S. Uyanto

#109384
Overall Influence
Stanislaus S. Uyanto is an Indonesian statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. He is teaching statistics and mathematics at the Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Jakarta.
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#6237

Sabrina Eberhart

#130111
Overall Influence
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#6238

Jun O'Hara

#100911
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Jun O'Hara, legally named Jun Imai, is a Japanese mathematician who works on the fields of low-dimensional topology and knot theory. He is a professor at Chiba University. He is famous for his discovery of Möbius energy, a type of knot energy.
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#6239

John Andrew Kitchener

#130172
Overall Influence
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#6240

Christiaan Heij

#57701
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Christiaan Heij is a Dutch mathematician, Assistant Professor in statistics and econometrics at the Econometric Institute at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, known for his work in the field of mathematical systems theory, and econometrics.
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#6241

Alex Chigogidze

#125473
Overall Influence
1955 - 2014 (59 years)
Alexander Chigogidze was a Georgian-born general topologist. Chigogidze is best known for his book Inverse Spectra, in which he passed on to the next generation of topologists the results of the Fedorchuk -Schepin Topology seminars held at the Moscow State University during the 1980s. The book also contains important contributions Chigogidze made in the area of General Topology and Geometric Topology . In the area of General Topology, Chigogidze developed extension theory for noncompact nonmetrizable spaces. In the area of Geometric Topology, Chigogidze introduced grading to shape theory by developing a theory n-Shape where n is an arbitrary integer.
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#6242

Nigel Weatherill

#49455
Overall Influence
Nigel Peter Weatherill FIMA, C.Math, FRAeS, C.Eng, C.Sci, FREng, DL is the former Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Liverpool John Moores University. Prior to this he had been Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Head of the School of Engineering at the University of Swansea, then later Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Head of the College of Engineering and Physical Science at the University of Birmingham.
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#6243

Brian D'Amato

#42976
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Brian D'Amato is an American author and sculptor. Biography When he was young, his father taught at Wellesley College. During this time, Hillary Clinton , a student at the college, babysat him. D'Amato went to high school at New Trier High School in the suburbs of Chicago.
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#6244

Ronald D. Snee

#130271
Overall Influence
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#6245

Luigi Fortuna

#130275
Overall Influence
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#6246

Nicky Best

#52056
Overall Influence
Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling. She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline.
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#6247

Nairi Sedrakyan

Nairi Sedrakyan
#87433
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Nairi Sedrakyan is Erdős Award 2022 winner Armenian mathematician involved in national and international Olympiads, including American Mathematics Competitions and IMO, having been the president of the Armenian Mathematics Olympiads, the Leader of Armenian IMO Team, a jury member and problem selection committee member of the International Mathematical Olympiad, a jury member and problem selection committee member of the Zhautykov International Mathematical Olympiad , a jury member and problem selection committee member of the International Olympiad of Metropolises, the president and organizer of the International Mathematical Olympiad Tournament of the Towns in the Republic of Armenia .
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#6248

Jean-François Quint

#108382
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Jean-François Quint is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems theory for homogeneous spaces. He studied at the École normale supérieure de Lyon and then received his Ph.D. from École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Yves Benoist with Thèse de Doctorat: Sous-groupes discrets des groupes de Lie semi-simples réels et p-adiques.
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#6249

Lewi. C. Krey

#130401
Overall Influence
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#6250

Genshirou Kitagawa

#130420
Overall Influence
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