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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#6351
Viktor Brabec
#133345
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
#6352
Wacław Marzantowicz
#120800
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Wacław Bolesław Marzantowicz is a Polish mathematician known for his contributions in number theory and topology. He was President of the Polish Mathematical Society from 2014 to 2019. Biography In 1967 he became the finalist of the 18th Mathematical Olympiad. In 1972, he graduated in mathematics at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He obtained his doctorate in Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1977, based on the work Lefschetz Numbers of Maps Commuting with an Action of a Group written under the direction Kazimierz Gęba. He got habilitation there in 1991, base...
Go to Profile#6353
Eduardo Casas-Alvero
#133392
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Eduardo Casas-Alvero is a Spanish mathematician and a professor at the University of Barcelona. His work lies in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, especially curve theory. One of his main contributions has been the Casas-Alvero conjecture characterizing certain polynomials whose factors match their derivatives as powers of a linear polynomial.
Go to Profile#6354
Gisèle Ruiz Goldstein
#116663
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Gisèle Ruiz Goldstein is an American mathematician known for her research in partial differential equations, operator theory, and applications of mathematics to physics and finance. Goldstein has won multiple awards; in particular, one of her papers was given the Editors' Choice Award from the editors of Mathematische Nachrichten in 2010, and she was the University of Memphis Faudree Chair from 2011-2014. In December 2020, Discrete and Dynamical Systems - Series S created a special issue in honor of Goldstein's 60th birthday.
Go to Profile#6355
Babak Anasori
#133401
Overall Influence
#6356
Pierre Gaspard
#133433
Overall Influence
#6357
Cornelius H. M. Van Bavel
#133434
Overall Influence
#6358
Alexey Georgiyevich Postnikov
#127088
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Alexey Georgiyevich Postnikov was a Russian mathematician, who worked on analytic number theory. He is known for the Postnikov character formula, which expresses the value of a Dirichlet character by means of a trigonometric function of a polynomial with rational coefficients.
Go to Profile#6359
Joan R. Rosenblatt
#101837
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Joan Raup Rosenblatt was an American statistician who became Director of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She was president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics in 1976.
Go to Profile#6360
Freddy Delbaen
#128107
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Freddy Delbaen is a Belgian-Swiss mathematician. He is professor emeritus of financial mathematics at ETH Zurich. Delbaen made fundamental contributions to the mathematical theory of arbitrage including proving, together with Walter Schachermayer, a general version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing. He also introduced in a jointly written paper the notion of the risk measure.
Go to Profile#6361
Robert I. Jennrich
#133525
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
#6362
Peter Constantin
#133530
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
#6363
Hamidou Tembine
#90894
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Hamidou Tembine is a French game theorist and researcher specializing in evolutionary games and co-opetitive mean-field-type games. He has been a Global Network Assistant Professor at New York University. He has been also the principal investigator and director of the Game Theory and Learning Laboratory at New York University.
Go to Profile#6364
Parviz Tanavoli
#11347
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Parviz Tanavoli is an Iranian sculptor, painter, educator, and art historian. He is a pioneer within the Saqqakhaneh school, a neo-traditionalist art movement. Tanavoli has been one of the most expensive Iranian artists in sales. Tanavoli series of sculpture work are displayed in prestigious museums and public places, such as the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hamline University, Aga Khan Museum, and as public art in the city of Vancouver. Additionally Tanavoli has written extensively on this history of Persian art and Persian crafts. Since 1989, Tanavoli has held dual nationali...
Go to Profile#6365
Graham Kalton
#133618
Overall Influence
#6366
Gennadiy Feldman
#81162
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Gennadiy Mykhailovych Feldman is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician, corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Doctor of Science in Physics and Mathematics, Professor, Head of the Mathematical Division of B. Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Go to Profile#6367
Tatsuaki Okamoto
#133655
Overall Influence
#6368
Wolfram Ruf
#133682
Overall Influence
#6369
Fiona Steele
#108710
Overall Influence
Fiona Alison Steele, is a British statistician. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics . After graduating with a degree in mathematics and statistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1992, Steele completed her master's degree and doctorate in statistics at the University of Southampton. She then joined the LSE as a lecturer in statistics and research methodology. She was appointed to a research lectureship at the Institute of Education in 2001. In 2005 moved to the University of Bristol to be a reader in social statistics; she was promoted to professor three years later.
Go to Profile#6370
Umapada Pal
#133715
Overall Influence
#6371
Julia R. Greer
#88970
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Julia Rosolovsky Greer is a materials scientist and is the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology . As of 2019, Greer is also the director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech.
Go to Profile#6372
Robert Zink
#129771
Overall Influence
Robert Edwin Zink was Professor emeritus of Mathematics at Purdue University. Biography Zink is a native of Minneapolis. He attended Lake Harriet Elementary School and earned his B. A., M.A., and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Minnesota. His Ph.D. was awarded in 1953. He was supervised by Bernard Russell Gelbaum and his dissertation was entitled Direct Unions of Measure Spaces.
Go to Profile#6373
Xiao‐li Meng
#133748
Overall Influence
#6374
Bernard Shiffman
#124181
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Bernard Shiffman is an American mathematician, specializing in complex geometry and analysis of complex manifolds. Education and career Shiffman received in 1964 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology a bachelor's degree and in 1968 from the University of California, Berkeley a PhD under Shiing-Shen Chern with thesis On the removal of singularities in several complex variables. Shiffman was at MIT a C.L.E. Moore Instructor from 1968 to 1970 and at Yale University an assistant professor from 1970 to 1973. At Johns Hopkins University he was from 1973 to 1977 an associate professor and is f...
Go to Profile#6375
Alan Davies
#94069
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Alan Davies is a British professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Hertfordshire. He obtained a first class honours degree in mathematics from Southampton University. He followed that with a master's degree, with distinction, in structural engineering and a doctorate in numerical computation from Imperial College. He has spent most of his working life as an academic at the University of Hertfordshire , formerly the Hatfield Polytechnic. He had short spells in industry working as a research engineer in the aircraft industry and as a process engineer in the food industry.
Go to Profile#6376
Hervé Tilly
#133821
Overall Influence
#6377
Gastone Giovanni Nussdorfer
#133836
Overall Influence
#6378
Surender Kumar Malik
#120076
Overall Influence
1942 - 2001 (59 years)
Surender Kumar Malik was an Indian mathematician who specialised in applied mathematics, especially in nonlinear phenomena. He was awarded in 1983 the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category.
Go to Profile#6379
Gianluigi Rozza
#124276
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Gianluigi Rozza is an aerospace engineer and mathematician best known for his work on reduced-order modeling. He is currently full professor of Numerical Analysis at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, where he serves as head of SISSA Mathematics Area and SISSA Director's Delegate for Research Valorisation, Innovation, and Industrial Cooperation.
Go to Profile#6380
Philip G. Hodge
#47590
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Philip Gibson Hodge Jr. was an American engineer who specialized in mechanics of elastic and plastic behavior of materials. His work resulted in significant advancements in plasticity theory including developments in the method of characteristics, limit-analysis, piecewise linear isotropic plasticity, and nonlinear programming applications. Hodge was the technical editor of American Society of Mechanical Engineers Journal of Applied Mechanics from 1971-1976. From 1984 to 2000 he was the secretary of the U. S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, its longest serving Secretary.
Go to Profile#6381
Mir Maswood Ali
#76569
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Mir Maswood Ali was a Canadian statistician and mathematician of Bengali origin. He is known for co-discovering the Ali-Mikhail-Haq copula, which is a topic of active research, both in theory and application. Ali played a key role in establishing the Journal of Statistical Research, of which the first issue appeared in 1970. The December 2008 issue of the Journal of Statistical Research was dedicated in honor of Ali. In 2008, Ali received the Qazi Motahar Husain Gold Medal Award in recognition of his contributions to statistics.
Go to Profile#6382
Christopher J. Bishop
#133929
Overall Influence
Christopher Bishop is an American mathematician on the faculty at Stony Brook University. He received his bachelor's in mathematics from Michigan State University in 1982, going on from there to spend a year at Cambridge University, receiving at Cambridge a Certificate of Advanced Study in mathematics, before entering the University of Chicago in 1983 for his doctoral studies in mathematics. As a graduate student in Chicago, his advisor, Peter Jones, took a position at Yale University, causing Bishop to spend the years 1985–87 at Yale as a visiting graduate student and programmer. Nonetheless...
Go to Profile#6383
Vadim Yankov
#90878
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Vadim Anatolyevich Yankov is a Russian mathematician, philosopher and former political prisoner. In 1968, Yankov co-signed a letter of 99 Soviet mathematicians asking for the release of imprisoned mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin.
Go to Profile#6384
Volodymyr Mazorchuk
#127087
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Volodymyr Mazorchuk is a Ukrainian-Swedish mathematician at Uppsala University and was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize in 2016. He received his PhD in mathematics from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1996 with advisor Yuriy Drozd.
Go to Profile#6385
Anatoli Vladimirovich Skorokhod
#134044
Overall Influence
#6386
Edward Ian George
#134051
Overall Influence
#6387
Radhika Kulkarni
#117924
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Radhika Vidyadhar Kulkarni is a retired Indian and American operations researcher, and the 2022 president of INFORMS. The Bechhofer–Kulkarni selection procedure or Bechhofer–Kulkarni stopping rule, a stopping rule for maximization in Bernoulli processes, is named after her work with her doctoral advisor, Robert E. Bechhofer.
Go to Profile#6388
Dionne Price
#80034
Overall Influence
Dionne L. Price is an American statistician who works as a division director in the Office of Biostatistics of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in the US Food and Drug Administration. Her division provides statistical advice "used in the regulation of anti-infective, anti-viral, ophthalmology, and transplant drug products".
Go to Profile#6389
Dawn Anita Hunter
#134069
Overall Influence
#6390
Herbert W. Hethcote
#134104
Overall Influence
#6391
Jian-guo Liu
#134149
Overall Influence
#6392
Claude Berge
#134182
Overall Influence
#6393
Walter Murch
#4961
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. With a career stretching back to 1969, including work on THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins .
Go to Profile#6394
Sergueï A. Nazarov
#134293
Overall Influence
#6395
Weili Lin
#134354
Overall Influence
#6396
R. K. Rubugunday
#134408
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Raghunath Krishna Rubugunday was an Indian mathematician specializing in number theory notable for his contribution to Waring's problem. Rubugunday was born in Madras in 1918. The famous mathematician K. Ananda Rau was an uncle on his father's side. He completed his B.A. Hons from Presidency College, Madras and Tripos from Cambridge in 1938. He returned to India and among other positions he was the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Saugar university.
Go to Profile#6397
Gerard de Zeeuw
#60147
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Gerard de Zeeuw is a Dutch scientist and Emeritus professor Mathematical modelling of complex social systems at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is known for his work on the theory and practice of action research, particularly on the "Problems of increasing competence", "Second order organisational research" and "Three phases of science: A methodological exploration".
Go to Profile#6398
Gail Letzter
#119675
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Gail Letzter is an American mathematician specializing in the representation theory of quantum groups. Letzter is technical director of the mathematics research group of the National Security Agency.
Go to Profile#6399
C. J. Cherryh
#10754
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Carolyn Janice Cherry , better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen , both set in her Alliance–Union universe, and her Foreigner series. She is known for worldbuilding, depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archeology.
Go to Profile#6400
Antonin Chambolle
#134458
Overall Influence
