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,
#6451
Helmut Ehrenberg
#135576
Overall Influence
#6452
Damir Filipović
#106871
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Damir Filipović is a Swiss mathematician specializing in quantitative finance. He holds the Swissquote Chair in Quantitative Finance and is the director of the Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL . Career Filipović studied mathematics at ETH Zurich and earned his Master's degree in 1995. He joined Freddy Delbaen as PhD student and graduated in 2000 with thesis on mathematical finance titled "Consistency problems for HJM interest rate models".
Go to Profile#6453
Gertie F. Marx
#135605
Overall Influence
#6454
Manabu Mochizuki
#135611
Overall Influence
#6455
James A. Donaldson
#107795
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
James Ashley Donaldson was an American mathematician. He was a professor at Howard University, where he was instrumental in establishing a PhD program in mathematics. He also helped found the National Association of Mathematicians.
Go to Profile#6456
Hans-Bjørn Foxby
#131054
Overall Influence
1947 - 2014 (67 years)
Hans-Bjørn Foxby was a Danish mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at University of Copenhagen. Foxby classes are named after him. Foxby’s research was in commutative algebra. He died from Alzheimer's disease on 8 April 2014.
Go to Profile#6457
Bertram John Walsh
#101619
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Bertram John Walsh is an American mathematician, specializing in locally convex spaces, harmonic analysis, and partial differential equations. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Walsh received in 1960 his master's degree and in 1963 his PhD from the University of Michigan. His doctoral dissertation Structures of Spectral Measures on Locally Convex Spaces was written under the supervision of Helmut H. Schaefer. In the 1960s Walsh was a member of the mathematics faculty at UCLA. He moved to Rutgers University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#6458
Karin Schnass
#110630
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Karin Schnass is an Austrian mathematician and computer scientist known for her research on sparse dictionary learning. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Innsbruck. Education and career Schnass was born in Klosterneuburg. She earned a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 2004, with a thesis surveying Gabor multipliers supervised by Hans Georg Feichtinger. She completed her Ph.D. in communication and information sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2009. Her dissertation was Sparsity & Dictionaries – Algorithms & Design, and ...
Go to Profile#6459
Diane Lynn Fairclough
#135731
Overall Influence
#6460
Wei‐ming Ni
#135742
Overall Influence
#6461
Michal Borkovec
#135754
Overall Influence
#6462
William M. Boothby
#129332
Overall Influence
1918 - 2021 (103 years)
William Munger Boothby was an American mathematician and professor emeritus of mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis, known for his work in differential geometry including the book An introduction to differentiable manifolds and Riemannian geometry .
Go to Profile#6463
Drumi D. Bainov
#135804
Overall Influence
#6464
Eric Jakeman
#94737
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Eric Jakeman is a British mathematical physicist specialising in the statistics and quantum statistics of waves. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. Education Jakeman was educated at The Brunts School in Mansfield, England. He received a degree in mathematical physics from Birmingham University in 1960, and a PhD in superconductivity theory in 1963.
Go to Profile#6465
Michael J. Keough
#135837
Overall Influence
#6466
Loren George. Hepler
#135851
Overall Influence
#6467
Vladimı́r Kučera
#135860
Overall Influence
#6468
Oleg B. Ptitsyn
#135864
Overall Influence
#6469
David Chudnovsky
#107282
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
#6470
Joseph Sgro
#63907
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Joseph A. Sgro is an American mathematician, neurologist / neurophysiologist, and an engineering technologist / entrepreneur in the field of frame grabbers, high-speed cameras, smart cameras, image processors, computer vision, and machine vision and learning technologies.
Go to Profile#6471
Frank Plastria
#121560
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Frank A. A. Plastria is a Belgian operations researcher, a professor in the department of mathematics, operational research, statistics and information systems for management at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, known for his work on facility location. His work has been published in journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Discrete Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Programming.
Go to Profile#6472
Mary E. Thompson
#127213
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Mary Elinore Thompson is a Canadian statistician. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo, the former president of the Statistical Society of Canada, and the founding scientific director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute. Her research interests include survey methodology and statistical sampling; she is also known for her work applying statistics to guide tobacco control policy.
Go to Profile#6473
Howard W. Sprecher
#135999
Overall Influence
#6474
Steven A. Cohen
#35978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Steven A. Cohen is an American academic who has taught public management and environmental policy at Columbia University since 1981. He is the former executive director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and now serves as a senior advisor for the institute. He is a professor in the practice of public affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is also the director of the Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy in the School of International and Public Affairs and the director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management in the School of Professional Studies.
Go to Profile#6475
Richard F. Gunst
#136029
Overall Influence
#6476
Inga Berre
#86640
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Inga Berre is a Norwegian applied mathematician who studies numerical methods for the partial differential equations used to model fractured geothermal systems and porous media more generally. She is a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Bergen, a scientific advisor to the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, and a leading researcher on geothermal energy in Norway.
Go to Profile#6477
K. R. Parthasarathy
#136069
Overall Influence
K. R. Parthasarathy is a professor emeritus of graph theory from the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He received his Ph.D. in graph theory from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Parthasarathy is known for his work proving the special case of the strong perfect graph conjecture for claw-free graphs. Parthasarathy guided and refereed Ph.D. students in graph theory, among them S. A. Choudum. Parthasarathy wrote a book on graph theory, Basic Graph Theory .
Go to Profile#6478
Richard John Kryscio
#136091
Overall Influence
#6479
Peter Friz
#122227
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Peter K. Friz is a mathematician working in the fields of partial differential equations, quantitative finance, and stochastic analysis. Education and career He studied at the Vienna University of Technology, Ecole Centrale Paris, University of Cambridge and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences , and obtained his PhD in 2004 under the supervision of S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan.
Go to Profile#6480
Dinh Tien-Cuong
#119470
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Dinh Tien-Cuong is a Vietnamese mathematician educated by the French school of mathematics, and Provost’s chair professor at National University of Singapore . He held professorship at Pierre and Marie Curie University , part-time professorship at Ecole Polytechnique de Paris and at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris . He is known for his work on Several Complex Variables and Complex Dynamical Systems in Higher Dimension.
Go to Profile#6481
Vladimir Mikhailovich Zolotarev
#136124
Overall Influence
#6482
Jonathan Marchini
#103256
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Jonathan Laurence Marchini is a Bayesian statistician and professor of statistical genomics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford, a tutorial fellow in statistics at Somerville College, Oxford and a co-founder and director of Gensci Ltd. He co-leads the Haplotype Reference Consortium.
Go to Profile#6483
Anne M. Thompson
#92538
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Anne Mee Thompson is an American scientist, who specializes in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Her work focuses on how human activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, climate forcing, and the Earth's oxidizing capacity. Thompson is an elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and AAAS.
Go to Profile#6484
Shandelle Henson
#115534
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Shandelle Marie Henson is an American mathematician and mathematical biologist known for her work in population dynamics. She is a professor of mathematics and ecology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Natural Resource Modeling.
Go to Profile#6485
Yeol J. E. Cho
#136336
Overall Influence
#6486
Hakan Hedenmalm
#127027
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Håkan Hedenmalm is a Swedish mathematician. Career Hedenmalm has mainly contributed to the development of the theory of Bergman spaces and the associated reproducing kernels in one complex variable. In 1996 he became a professor at Lund University and in 1997 he was elected to KFS, the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund. Later, in 2018, he was elected to DKNVS, the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in Trondheim.
Go to Profile#6487
José Francisco Goméz‐aguilar
#136369
Overall Influence
#6488
Philippe Chanson
#136401
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
#6489
Walter Whiteley
#114847
Overall Influence
Walter John Whiteley is a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at York University in Canada. He specializes in geometry and mathematics education, and is known for his expertise in structural rigidity and rigidity matroids.
Go to Profile#6490
James Beckett
#66525
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
James Beckett III is an American statistician, author, editor, and publisher. His publications are well known in the hobby of sports card collecting. Beckett earned a Ph.D. degree in statistics at Southern Methodist University in 1975 and then joined the faculty of Bowling Green State University as an associate professor. While at Bowling Green, Beckett began preparing baseball card price guides, which he offered free upon request.
Go to Profile#6491
John Joseph Mulvihill
#136422
Overall Influence
#6492
Fabrice Carrat
#136467
Overall Influence
#6493
Susan Hilsenbeck
#136501
Overall Influence
Susan Galloway Hilsenbeck is an American biostatistician whose research interests include biomarkers and the applications of biostatistics in cancer research. She is a professor in the Baylor College of Medicine, where she directs the Quantitative Sciences Share Resource in the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Go to Profile#6494
Yvon Maday
#136507
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#6495
Kevin McCurley
#93204
Overall Influence
Kevin Snow McCurley is a mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer, and a former research scientist at Google. He has written publications about information retrieval, algorithms, parallel computing, cryptography, and number theory.
Go to Profile#6496
David Ervin Blair
#136545
Overall Influence
#6497
Beatrice Meini
#120612
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Beatrice Meini is an Italian computational mathematician and numerical analyst specializing in numerical linear algebra and its applications to Markov chains, matrix equations, and queueing theory. She is Professor of Numerical Analysis in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pisa.
Go to Profile#6498
Henk Lombaers
#67044
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Henk Joseph Maria Lombaers was a Dutch mathematician, Professor at Delft University of Technology and a pioneer in the field of operations research in the Netherlands. Life and work Lombaers undertook teacher training, and earned a degree in mathematics. From 1945 to 1956 he was employed by the Royal Netherlands Army, where he was involved in the introduction of radar-aircraft artillery.
Go to Profile#6499
M. Ichael S. T. Urner
#136599
Overall Influence
#6500
Cort James Willmott
#136635
Overall Influence
