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,

#6251

Estate Khmaladze

#81919
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Estate V. Khmaladze is a Georgian statistician. He is best known for his contribution of Khmaladze transformation in statistics. Biography Estate Khmaladze was born October 20, 1944, Tbilisi, Georgia. He graduated from Tbilisi State University in 1966, where the first three years he was studying physics. He finished his PhD in 1971 at V. A. Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow, under supervision of L. N. Bolshev, who was head of department of mathematical statistics at Steklov after N. V. Smirnov. From 1972 until 1990, his work was, mostly, split between the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow, and the A.
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#6252

Ulrich Görtz

#116419
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Ulrich Görtz is a German mathematician specialising in arithmetic geometry. Education and career From 1993 to 1997, Görtz studied mathematics at the University of Münster. He completed his PhD at the University of Cologne in 2000; his advisor was Michael Rapoport. In 2006, Görtz habilitated at the University of Bonn. From 2008 to 2009 he was the recipient of a Heisenberg-Stipendium of the German Research Foundation . He received the Von-Kaven-Ehrenpreis of the DFG. Since 2009, Görtz has been a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
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#6253

E. Jacquelin Dietz

#89411
Overall Influence
E. Jacquelin Dietz was an American statistician, interested in nonparametric and multivariate statistics and in statistics education. She was a professor at North Carolina State University until 2004, when she moved to Meredith College. At Meredith, she was head of the mathematics and computer science department for five years, from approximately 2007 to 2012, and taught statistics for 10 years. Dietz was the founding editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistics Education.
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#6254

Paul D. Sorlie

#130561
Overall Influence
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#6255

Grigori Mints

#60585
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Grigori Mints was a Russian philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. He was born in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union , and received his Ph.D. in 1965 from the Leningrad State University under Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shanin with a thesis entitled "On Predicate and Operator Variants for Building Theories of Constructive Mathematics". In 1990 he received his D.Sc. from Leningrad State University with a thesis entitled "Proof Transformations and Synthesis of Programs". He was a Stanford University professor. Since 1991, Grigori "Grisha" Mints was a professor of philosophy and, by courtesy, of mathematics and of computer science at Stanford University.
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#6256

Xiangyu Zhou

#123165
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Xiangyu Zhou is a Chinese mathematician, specializing in several complex variables and complex geometry. He is known for his 1998 proof of the "extended future tube conjecture", which was an unsolved problem for almost forty years.
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#6257

W. G. Brown

#99032
Overall Influence
William G. Brown is a Canadian mathematician specializing in graph theory. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at McGill University. Education and career Brown earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1963, under the joint supervision of Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter and W. T. Tutte. His dissertation was Enumeration Problems Of Linear Graph Theory .
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#6258

Clare Parnell

#93149
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Clare Elizabeth Parnell is a British astrophysicist and applied mathematician who studies the mathematics of the Sun and of magnetic fields, including the Solar corona and the Sun's magnetic carpet, magnetic reconnection in plasma, and the null points of magnetic fields. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and the former head of the Division of Applied Mathematics at St Andrews.
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#6259

Maria Assumpció Català i Poch

#67356
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
María Assumpció Català i Poch was a Spanish professor, mathematician, and astronomer. She taught from 1952 to 1991. She started as an assistant in the Astronomy Section of the Seminar on Mathematics in Barcelona, related to the Spanish National Research Council . Later, she worked in the Henri Poincaré Institute and she also cooperated in some projects with the special chair of Technology in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
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#6260

Andre Norton

#4207
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Andre Alice Norton was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical and contemporary fiction. She wrote primarily under the pen name Andre Norton, but also under Andrew North and Allen Weston. She was the first woman to be Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy, to be SFWA Grand Master, and to be inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
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#6261

Thomson M. Whitin

Thomson M. Whitin
#56403
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Thomson McLintock Whitin was an American management scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Economics and Social Sciences at Wesleyan University, known for his work on inventory control and inventory management.
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#6262

Donald Y. Yau

#130751
Overall Influence
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#6263

Daniel I. A. Cohen

#63034
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Daniel Isaac Aryeh Cohen is an American mathematician and computer scientist who is now a professor emeritus at Hunter College. Cohen earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1967 and already as an undergraduate published a research paper about Sperner's lemma, which he learned about from Hans Rademacher. He completed his doctorate in 1975 from Harvard University under the joint supervision of Andrew M. Gleason and Gian-Carlo Rota. He was a mathematician at Hunter College in 1981 when the computer science department was founded, and became one of five initial com...
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#6264

Robert E. Kass

#130773
Overall Influence
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#6265

Sándor Csörgő

Sándor Csörgő
#125055
Overall Influence
1947 - 2008 (61 years)
Professor Sándor Csörgő was a Hungarian mathematician, and a professor at the University of Szeged. His main fields were probability, mathematical statistics, and asymptotic theory. He did important research on the St. Petersburg paradox.
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#6266

Mervin E. Muller

#92111
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Mervin Edgar Muller was an American computer scientist and mathematician. The Box–Muller transform is named after him. Biography Muller was born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, on 1 June 1928, as one of four sons to parents Emanuel and Bertha Muller. His parents were both immigrants from Hungary. He studied mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a Ph.D. in 1954 under the supervision of George William Brown.
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#6267

David Ríos Insua

#116181
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
David Ríos Insua is a Spanish mathematician, and son and disciple of Sixto Ríos, the "father of Spanish statistics." He is currently also the youngest Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences , which he joined in 2008. He received a PhD in Computational Sciences at the University of Leeds. He is Full Professor of the Statistics and Operations Research Department at Rey Juan Carlos University , and he has been Vice-dean of New Technologies and International Relationships at URJC . He has worked in fields such as Bayesian inference in neuronal networks, MCMC methods in decision analysis, Bayesian robustness or adversarial risk analysis.
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#6268

Donald Philip Kotler

#130926
Overall Influence
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#6269

Italo Jose Dejter

Italo Jose Dejter
#69163
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Italo Jose Dejter is an Argentine-born American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics and computer science from the University of Puerto Rico, and a researcher in algebraic topology, differential topology, graph theory, coding theory and combinatorial designs. He obtained a Licentiate degree in mathematics from University of Buenos Aires in 1967, arrived at Rutgers University in 1970 by means of a Guggenheim Fellowship and obtained a Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1975 under the supervision of Professor Ted Petrie, with support of the National Science Foundation. He was a profe...
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#6270

Joos Ulrich Heintz

Joos Ulrich Heintz
#102620
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Joos Ulrich Heintz is an Argentinean and Swiss mathematician. He is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Buenos Aires. Biography After studying Mathematics and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich to undergraduate level, he went on to receive a PhD in mathematics in 1982 under the supervision of Volker Strassen. He performed his habilitation in 1986 at the J.W.von Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main where he also studied Turcology and Sephardic history and culture. He was appointed Privatdozent at the J.W. Goethe university Frankfurt am Main. Until his retiremen...
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#6271

Charles Dumontet

#131057
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
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#6272

Irina Shevtsova

Irina Shevtsova
#113763
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Irina Shevtsova is a Russian mathematician, Dr.Sc., Professor of Moscow State University. She graduated from the faculty MSU CMC . She has been working at the Moscow State University since 2006. She defended the thesis "Optimization of the structure of moment estimates of the accuracy of normal approximation for distributions of sums of independent random variables" for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 2013.
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#6273

Dorothee Haroske

Dorothee Haroske
#116146
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Dorothee D. Haroske is a German mathematician who holds the chair for function spaces in the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Jena. Education and career Haroske completed her doctorate at the University of Jena in 1995, and her habilitation at Jena in 2002. Her doctoral dissertation, , Eigenvalue Distributions of Some Degenerate Pseudodifferential Operators, was supervised by .
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#6274

Vyacheslav Rychkov

#101859
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Vyacheslav Rychkov is a Russian-Italian-French theoretical physicist and mathematician. Career In 1996, Rychkov obtained his diploma from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. From 1996 to 1998 he studied at the University of Jena. He received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University, under the supervision of Elias Stein, in 2002 with a thesis titled "Estimates for Oscillatory Integral Operators". Alexander Polyakov was his unofficial supervisor. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he became assistant professor in 2007.
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#6275

Israel Kleiner

#122135
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Israel Kleiner is a Canadian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Kleiner earned an MA at Yale University and a PhD at McGill University under Joachim Lambek with a thesis Lie modules and rings of quotients. Before his retirement as professor emeritus, he spent his career as a mathematics professor at York University, where he was a member of the faculty since 1965 and where he coordinated the training program for mathematics teachers teaching at the secondary school level. He is noted for his work on the history of algebra and on the combination of the history of mathematics and math...
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#6276

Andrew M. Bruckner

Andrew M. Bruckner
#130418
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Andrew Michael Bruckner is an American retired mathematician, known for his contributions to real analysis. He got his PhD in mathematics from University of California, Los Angeles on the dissertation Minimal Superadditive Extensions of Superadditive Functions advised by John Green . He joined the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara. The "Andy Award" is given annually in his name, to significant contributors to real analysis.
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#6277

Yue-si Wang

#131179
Overall Influence
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#6278

Dorothy P. Rice

#95505
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Dorothy P. Rice was an American health statistician whose work contributed to the creation of Medicare in the United States. Rice graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began working with the US government soon after, but left the workforce to begin raising a child. Just over a decade later, she returned to government work with a position at the Social Security Administration, where she was one of the first scientists to study the economic cost of illness and exposed a lack of health insurance among the elderly.
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#6279

Bing-jyun Lu

#131238
Overall Influence
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#6280

Moshe Shaked

#102359
Overall Influence
1945 - 2014 (69 years)
Moshe Shaked was an American mathematician and statistician. He was a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the University of Rochester, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1975, under Albert W. Marshall. Shaked held various positions at the University of New Mexico, the University of British Columbia, and at Indiana University. He became a full professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona in 1986, and he was a Professor Emeritus at Arizona since 2013. Moshe Shaked was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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#6281

Edward G. Gregorich

#131276
Overall Influence
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#6282

Askold Vinogradov

#131331
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov was a Russian mathematician who worked in analytic number theory. The Bombieri–Vinogradov theorem is partially named after him. External links Publications of A.I. Vinogradov
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#6283

Donald W. Bouldin

#131337
Overall Influence
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#6284

Roderick S. C. Wong

#127669
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Roderick S. C. Wong is a mathematician who works in classical analysis. His research mainly focuses on asymptotic analysis, singular perturbation theory, special functions and orthogonal polynomials, integral transforms, integral equations, and ordinary differential equations. He is currently a chair professor at City University of Hong Kong and director of the Liu Bie Ju Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
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#6285

Stella M. Hurtley

#131421
Overall Influence
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#6286

Tony Lévy

#93432
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Tony Lévy is an historian of mathematics, specializing particularly in Hebrew mathematics. His family left Egypt in 1957 for Belgium and France after the Suez Crisis but his elder brother Eddy Levy remained in Egypt. A political activist, the latter converted to Islam and took the name Adel Rifaat. He would join France in the 80s and form with Bahgat Elnadi the binomial of political scientists and scholars of Islam known under the pseudonym Mahmoud Hussein. His other brother is the activist, philosopher and writer Benny Levy. Like his younger brother Benny, Tony was an extreme left militant i...
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#6287

Mike Keith

#81118
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Michael Keith is an American mathematician, software engineer, and author of works of constrained writing. Keith was employed at Sarnoff Corporation from 1980 until 1990 and Intel Corporation from 1990 to 1998, both tenures involving work in multimedia software. He was part of the original team at Sarnoff that developed Digital Video Interactive, the first PC digital video system, and at Intel he was a member of the group that developed Indeo, another video compression standard. As a result of this work Keith is credited as inventor or co-inventor on 60 US patents. he works as a software ...
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#6288

Sergei Vostokov

#125342
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Sergei Vladimirovich Vostokov is a Russian mathematician. He made major contributions to local number theory. He is a professor at St. Petersburg State University. Work Vostokov developed an important class of explicit formulas for the Hilbert symbol on local fields, which have a wide range of applications in number theory.
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#6289

Ragnar Winther

#124469
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Ragnar Winther is a Norwegian mathematician. He took his PhD in 1977, and was appointed professor at the University of Oslo in 1991. In 2002 he became the leader of the Centre of Mathematics for Applications there. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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#6290

Emmett Keeler

#108913
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Emmett Brown Keeler is an American mathematician who works as a senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation. He is also a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, he is known for his work on the RAND Health Insurance Experiment.
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#6291

Korbinian Strimmer

#90673
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Korbinian Strimmer is a German statistician specialising in biomedical data science. He is a professor in statistics at the University of Manchester. Education Strimmer earned his PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1997 under the supervision of Arndt von Haeseler. His thesis is entitled Maximum Likelihood Methods in Molecular Phylogenetics.
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#6292

John Lehoczky

#131486
Overall Influence
John Paul Lehoczky is an American statistician, currently the Thomas Lord Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in 1969 at Stanford under Herbert Solomon.
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#6293

William Abikoff

#110221
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
William Abikoff is an American mathematician. He has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut since 1981. Abikoff earned his Ph.D. in 1971 from the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering under the supervision of Georges Gustave Weill. In 2012, Abikoff became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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#6294

Michael Renardy

#131592
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
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#6295

Philip Batchelor

Philip Batchelor
#101607
Overall Influence
1967 - 2011 (44 years)
Philip Batchelor , was a Swiss-British academic in the fields of mathematics and medical imaging. Life Batchelor was born in St Austell, Cornwall and grew up in Vouvry, a village in Switzerland. He graduated from ETH Zurich with a Masters in Theoretical Physics in 1992 and continued studying in Zurich for a PhD in Mathematics, which he obtained in 1997. In 1998, Batchelor joined United Medical and Dental School, which later became part of King's College London , to work on the application of mathematical principles to magnetic resonance imaging at Guy's Hospital. He rapidly made an impact by ...
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#6296

K. S. (kristin Sharon) Shrader-frechette

#131706
Overall Influence
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#6297

Philip H. Gaskell

#131728
Overall Influence
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#6298

Laurel Beckett

#78245
Overall Influence
Laurel Alison Beckett is an American biostatistician specializing in Alzheimer's disease and other age-related causes of cognitive impairment. Beyond biostatistics, she has also worked as an activist for women in medicine, including the advocacy of flexible career options allowing women to balance medical careers with childrearing. She is retired as distinguished professor emerita from the UC Davis School of Medicine, where she was chief of biostatistics and directed the biostatistics core of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative.
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#6299

Nalini Ravishanker

#116539
Overall Influence
Nalini Ravishanker is an Indian statistician interested in time series analysis and in applications of statistics to actuarial science, business, and transportation. She is a professor of statistics at the University of Connecticut, co-editor-in-chief of International Statistical Review, and president of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics for 2015–2017.
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#6300

Laurence Baxter

#91563
Overall Influence
1954 - 1996 (42 years)
Laurence Alan Baxter was professor of statistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Early life Baxter was born at the Bearstead Jewish Maternity Hospital, Stoke Newington. His family lived in Ilford, Essex. He was educated at University College London .
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