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,

#6601

Roberto Longo

#92201
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Roberto Longo is an Italian mathematician, specializing in operator algebras and quantum field theory. Education and career Roberto Longo graduated in Mathematics at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1975 under the supervision of the mathematical physicist Sergio Doplicher. From 1975 to 1977 Longo was a predoctoral fellow of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and later assistant professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he became an associate professor in 1980. In 1987 he was nominated full professor of functional analysis at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and since 2010 he...
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#6602

Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer
#2088
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers and Riverworld series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family books, ...
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#6603

Simon Gindikin

Simon Gindikin
#128237
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Simon Grigorevich Gindikin is a mathematician at Rutgers University who introduced the Gindikin–Karpelevich formula for the Harish-Chandra c-function. Publications External links Interview with Simon GindikinHome page of Simon Gindikin
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#6604

Thomas A. Romberg

#98949
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Thomas "Tom" Albert Romberg was Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and former director of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science, Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
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#6605

Philippe Huybrechts

#139270
Overall Influence
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#6606

Shih-Hsien Yu

#139283
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Shih-Hsien Yu is a mathematician at the National University of Singapore . He is known for his work on hyperbolic conservation laws and kinetic equations. Biography Yu attended Taichung first senior high School. He did his undergraduate studies and master courses at National Taiwan University, followed by graduate studies at Stanford University, working under Tai-Ping Liu and obtaining his PhD in 1994. He was subsequently a postdoc fellow at University of Minnesota , faculty member at University of California, Los Angeles , Osaka University , City University of Hong Kong , before moving to the...
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#6607

Chih-Ling Tsai

#103389
Overall Influence
Chih-Ling Tsai is an American business management professor and author, currently a Distinguished Professor and Robert W. Glock Endowed Chair in Management, at University of California, Davis, and has been both cited and collected by libraries. He is a Fellow of the International Statistical Institute, American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Statistical Association and has also been included in the Who's Who in the America, Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in the West and Who's Who in Science and Engineering. In 2012, he also held the Distinguished Visiting Profes...
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#6608

Leon S. Lasdon

#139311
Overall Influence
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#6609

Roger Wolcott Richardson

#127832
Overall Influence
1930 - 1993 (63 years)
Roger Wolcott Richardson was a mathematician noted for his work in representation theory and geometry. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and educated at Louisiana State University, Harvard University and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1958 under the supervision of Hans Samelson. After a postdoc appointment at Princeton University, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington in Seattle. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1970, taking up a chair at Durham University. In 1978 he moved to the Australian National University in Canberra, w...
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#6610

Charles Craig Manz

#139383
Overall Influence
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#6611

Cun‐hui Zhang

#139446
Overall Influence
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#6612

Pierre Degond

#139492
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
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#6613

Carol K. Redmond

#91810
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Carol K. Redmond is an American biostatistician known for her research on breast cancer. She is Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
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#6614

Richard Meyer

#114851
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Richard Ernst Meyer was a mathematician and engineer. Born in Berlin, Germany, Meyer received his PhD in aeronautical engineering from ETH Zürich in 1946. He worked at the University of Manchester and in 1953, he got a job as a senior lecturer in aeronautical engineering at the University of Sydney. He studied turbines, which led him to the research of supersonic aeronautics and the theory of characteristics. Meyer did both theoretical and experimental research; he set up a supersonic laboratory in Australia. He was elected into the Australian Academy of Science in 1956.
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#6615

Galit Shmueli

#82221
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Galit Shmueli is a data scientist who works in Taiwan as Tsing Hua Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Service Science, National Tsing Hua University. She is the author of many textbooks in business statistics and is known for her work on information quality, and on clarifying the difference between explanations and predictions in statistical analyses.
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#6616

Charles E. Heckler

#139612
Overall Influence
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#6617

Ki-Hang Kim

#108305
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Ki-Hang Kim , also known as Kim Ki-Hang Butler, Hang Kim, Keyhany Keem, or Kim Ki-Hang was a Korean-American Mathematician and Alabama State University professor known for his contributions in semigroups, Boolean matrices, and Social Sciences. He frequently co-wrote with Fred Roush.
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#6618

Zhenyang Yan

#139755
Overall Influence
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#6619

Sharon Arroyo

#120792
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Sharon Filipowski Arroyo is an American applied mathematician and operations researcher who works for Boeing as a Boeing Technical Fellow. She works in the Applied Mathematics Group of Boeing Research and Technology on mathematical optimization applications in aircraft manufacturing and management.
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#6620

Heide Gluesing-Luerssen

#123333
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Heide Gluesing-Luerssen is a German mathematician specializing in algebraic coding theory. She is currently the Royster Research Professor at University of Kentucky. Education and career Gluesing-Luerssen earned her doctorate in 1991 from the University of Bremen, and taught in the mathematics department of the University of Oldenburg from 1993 to 2004. While there, she completed a habilitation in 2000. She moved to the University of Groningen in 2004, and to Kentucky in 2007.
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#6621

Vadim Mogilnitsky

#111807
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
Vadim Anatolyevich Moghilnitsky — mathematics teacher, musicologist, translator, poet. The author of the first Russian biography of Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Sister - Moghilnitskaya Galina Anatolyevna, Ukrainian pedagog, publicist and poet.
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#6622

Peter Paul Carr

#139881
Overall Influence
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#6623

George Alleyne

#38473
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Sir George Allanmore Ogarren Alleyne served as United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean region 2003–2010. He was appointed to the position by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in February 2003.
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#6624

Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis
#13653
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
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#6625

Małgorzata Peszyńska

#118595
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Małgorzata Peszyńska is a Polish and American applied mathematician specializing in the mathematical modeling and computational solution of flows through porous media and their geological applications, including the effects of global warming on methane locked in permafrost. She is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University, on leave as program director for computational and data-enabled science and engineering and computational mathematics at the National Science Foundation.
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#6626

Alan Wilson

#46396
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Sir Alan Geoffrey Wilson FAcSS is a British mathematician and social scientist, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds and a professor at University College London. Early life and education Wilson was born in Bradford on 8 January 1939, and educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Darlington and the University of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and studied the Mathematical Tripos, graduating in 1960.
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#6627

Jukka Corander

#140074
Overall Influence
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#6628

Riho Terras

#103579
Overall Influence
1939 - 2005 (66 years)
Riho Terras was an Estonian-American mathematician. He was born in Tartu, Estonia and moved to Ulm, Germany before starting school. In 1951 he emigrated to the United States along with his mother. In 1965, he was given the Milton Abramowitz award for his studies at the University of Maryland. He finished his PhD in 1970 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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#6629

Maury Bramson

#125581
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Maury Daniel Bramson is an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory and mathematical statistics. Education and career Bramson grew up in the Los Angeles area and graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley after having also attended the University of California, San Diego and having participated in the University of California's Education Abroad Program at the University of Göttingen. He graduated with a master's degree in statistics from Stanford University. In 1977 he received his PhD from Cornell University with thesis Maximal Displacement of Branching Brownian Motion under the supervision of Harry Kesten.
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#6630

Vaclav Zizler

#101661
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Vaclav Zizler, Ph.D., Dr.Sc. , is a Czech mathematics professor specializing in Banach space theory and non-linear spaces. As of 2006, Dr. Zizler holds the position of Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Formerly he was at the Mathematical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences where he was Head of Research. In 2001 the Czech Minister of Education named his Functional Analysis and Infinite Dimensional Geometry the university textbook of the year. In 2008 he was, for his excellent lifelong work in mathematical analysis and selfless activities in fav...
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#6631

Chris Burden

Chris Burden
#4619
Overall Influence
1946 - 2015 (69 years)
Christopher Lee Burden was an American artist working in performance art, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot , where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015.
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#6632

Xian-hua Tang

#140329
Overall Influence
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#6633

Oskar Sandberg

#87298
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Oskar Sandberg is a key contributor to the Freenet Project, and a PhD graduate of the Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg, Sweden. Oskar collaborated with Ian Clarke to design the new "darknet" model employed in Freenet 0.7, work which was presented at the DEF CON security conference in July 2005. Oskar recently completed a Ph.D. about the mathematics of complex networks, especially with regard to the small world phenomenon. Besides this he has an active interest in distributed computer networks and network security, and has been an active contributor to the Freenet Project since 1999.
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#6634

Michael Ruzhansky

#140363
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
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#6635

Šarūnas Raudys

#45021
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Šarūnas Raudys is head of the Data Analysis Department at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics in Vilnius, Lithuania. Within the department, he is guiding the data mining and artificial neural networks group. His group's research interests include multivariate analysis, statistical pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, data mining methods and biological information processing systems with applications to analysis of technological, economical and biological problems.
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#6636

Craig K. Enders

#140390
Overall Influence
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#6637

Mitchell I. Weinstein

#140417
Overall Influence
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#6638

Enno Mammen

#140442
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
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#6639

Pinchas Cohen

#140454
Overall Influence
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#6640

Lučka Kajfež Bogataj

Lučka Kajfež Bogataj
#71445
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Lučka Kajfež Bogataj is a Slovenian climatologist, specialist in agricultural meteorology. Early life and education She graduated in 1980 from the Ljubljana Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology and received her doctorate from the Faculty of Biotechnology. She then pursued post-doctoral training in the U.S. and Sweden.
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#6641

Robert McCallum Blumenthal

Robert McCallum Blumenthal
#104746
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Robert "Bob" McCallum Blumenthal was an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory. He is known for Blumenthal's zero-one law. Biography He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University in 1956 under Gilbert Hunt with thesis An Extended Markov Property.
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#6642

Judith Rousseau

#111134
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Judith Rousseau is a Bayesian statistician who studies frequentist properties of Bayesian methods. She is a professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and a Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
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#6643

David P. Byar

#140509
Overall Influence
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#6644

Keith Briggs

#68068
Overall Influence
Keith Briggs is a mathematician notable for several world-record achievements in the field of computational mathematics:The most accurate calculation of the Feigenbaum constants, which was published in "A precise calculation of the Feigenbaum constants", Mathematics of Computation, 57, 435–439.The worst known badly approximable irrational pair .The simplest known universal differential equationA significant number of contributions in the last 5 years to Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences . Many of these have involved major computations, such as the number of unlabelled graphs o...
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#6645

Hédy Attouch

#140574
Overall Influence
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#6646

Delia North

#109763
Overall Influence
Delia North is a South African statistician and a leader in statistics education in South Africa. She is the dean of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
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#6647

William Norman Venables

#140633
Overall Influence
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#6648

Curtis Philip Rinsland

#140682
Overall Influence
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#6649

Walter H. Pitts

#140686
Overall Influence
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#6650

Da Qing Jiang

#140717
Overall Influence
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