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,
#6701
Garnik A. Karapetyan
#129770
Overall Influence
1958 - 2018 (60 years)
Garnik A. Karapetyan was an Armenian scientist and mathematician. His main research was in the fields of mathematical analysis, differential equations and mathematical physics. At the time of his death he was a professor of mathematics at Russian-Armenian University in Yerevan, Armenia, and chaired the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling.
Go to Profile#6702
Mehryar Mohri Mohri
#142177
Overall Influence
#6703
Jerzy Zabczyk
#142200
Overall Influence
#6704
Tanja Bergkvist
#116541
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Tanja-Helena Dessislava Bergkvist is a Swedish mathematician and blogger. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 2007 at Stockholm University, and has served as a professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Uppsala University, and the Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket. She has also worked as a researcher at the Swedish Defence Research Agency. She has gained notoriety for her conservative approach towards gender studies.
Go to Profile#6705
Rafał Weron
#142235
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
#6706
Elizaveta Levina
#122867
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Elizaveta Levina is a Russian and American mathematical statistician. She is the Vijay Nair Collegiate Professor of Statistics at the University of Michigan, and is known for her work in high-dimensional statistics, including covariance estimation, graphical models, statistical network analysis, and nonparametric statistics.
Go to Profile#6707
Mainak Mazumdar
#142283
Overall Influence
#6708
Bruno D'Amore
#103426
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bruno D’Amore is an Italian mathematician and author. Education He has degrees in mathematics, pedagogy, philosophy, and a postgraduate qualification in Elementary Mathematics from a higher point of view, all obtained at the University of Bologna . D'Amore also has a Ph.D. in mathematics education from the University “Constantine the Philosopher” of Nitra in Slovakia.
Go to Profile#6709
Lynne Elaine Wagenknecht
#142314
Overall Influence
#6710
Antoine Van Proeyen
#142365
Overall Influence
#6711
Jean‐pierre Kahane
#142453
Overall Influence
#6712
Stephen Drury
#140051
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Stephen William Drury is a Anglo-Canadian mathematician and professor of mathematics at McGill University. He specializes in mathematical analysis, harmonic analysis and linear algebra. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1970 under the supervision of Nicholas Varopoulos and completed his postdoctoral training at the Faculté des sciences d'Orsay, France. He was recruited to McGill by Professor Carl Herz in 1972.
Go to Profile#6713
Marc Oliver Rieger
#75128
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Marc Oliver Rieger is a German mathematician and finance professor. His research covers the areas of behavioural finance, decision and game theory, financial derivatives, and calculus of variation. Together with Thorsten Hens and Mei Wang, he was one of the authors of the INTRA survey that collected risk and time preferences in 53 countries worldwide leading to various follow-up studies by other researchers and practitioners and media coverage by leading newspapers in Germany and elsewhere.
Go to Profile#6714
Ping-kai Jiang
#142568
Overall Influence
#6715
Shi Zhongci
#93423
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Shi Zhongci , also known as Zhong-Ci Shi, was a Chinese mathematician. He was a computational mathematician and an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences . Career Shi was born in Yin County , Zhejiang on 5 December 1933. In 1955 he graduated from Ningbo Middle School. He first studied mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang University, under the guidance of Professor Su Buqing. Shi then was transferred to Fudan University together with Su Buqing.
Go to Profile#6716
Emilio Spedicato
#76630
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Emilio Spedicato is full professor of operations research at the University of Bergamo in Italy. He attended the Liceo Classico Manzoni, obtaining the highest score in northern Italy at the final exams. He graduated in physics at Milan University and was the first non-Chinese to receive a PhD in a mathematical discipline in China, at Dalian University of Technology. Starting in 1969, he worked for seven years at CISE, a nuclear research center near Milano. He also spent two years in the United Kingdom, University of Essex, and the United States, at Stanford University. He then moved to the...
Go to Profile#6717
Suresh H. Moolgavkar
#142615
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Suresh H. Moolgavkar is an Indian mathematician and epidemiologist who was at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He is a Senior Fellow and Research Scientist at Exponent, a consulting firm. Among his many scientific contributions is the development of the two-stage clonal expansion model of carcinogenesis, also known as the Moolgavkar-Venzon-Knudson model, a stochastic cell-level description of carcinogenesis based on Alfred G. Knudson’s two-hit hypothesis. In its original development the TSCE model represents tumor initiation as the first hit, followed by cell proliferation and malignant transformation as the second hit.
Go to Profile#6718
Stephanie Boehm
#142626
Overall Influence
#6719
Carla Cotwright Williams
#103905
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams is an American mathematician who works as a Technical Director and Data Scientist for the United States Department of Defense. She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Mississippi.
Go to Profile#6720
James K. Knowles
#142654
Overall Influence
#6721
Robert M. Miura
#142680
Overall Influence
#6722
Uri Michael Ascher
#142710
Overall Influence
#6723
Hartley Rogers Jr.
#66104
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Hartley Rogers Jr. was an American mathematician who worked in computability theory, and was a professor in the Mathematics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography Born in 1926 in Buffalo, New York, he studied under Alonzo Church at Princeton, and received his Ph.D. there in 1952. He served on the MIT faculty from 1956 until his death, July 17, 2015. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Adrianne E. Rogers, by his three children, Hartley R. Rogers, Campbell D.K. Rogers, and Caroline R. Broderick, and by his 10 grandchildren.
Go to Profile#6724
Jan Douwe Van Der Ploeg
#142727
Overall Influence
#6725
Pierre Rochette
#142775
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#6726
Sybil P. Seitzinger
#33192
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sybil P. Seitzinger is an oceanographer and climate scientist at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. She is known for her research into climate change and elemental cycling, especially nitrogen biogeochemistry.
Go to Profile#6727
Elisabetta Matsumoto
#109570
Overall Influence
Elisabetta Matsumoto is an American physicist whose scientific interests include the study of knitted fabrics' special mathematical and mechanical properties. After earning her PhD Matsumoto accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Go to Profile#6728
Joseph Glover
#63701
Overall Influence
for the 1630s pioneer of the printing press in the New World see Jose Glover. Joseph Glover is an American professor and served as the Provost for the University of Florida from 2008 to 2023. Glover attended Cornell University for his bachelor's degree, and he received his Master's and Doctorate in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego. Glover began his academic career at University of California, Berkeley, and he would go on to serve as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester from 1979-1982.
Go to Profile#6729
Jo Hardin
#92841
Overall Influence
Johanna Sarah Hardin is an American statistician who works as a professor of mathematics at Pomona College. Her research involves high-throughput analysis for human genome data. Education and career Hardin is a Pomona graduate, earning a bachelor's degree there in mathematics in 1995. She initially planned to do actuarial science, but was led to statistics by a faculty mentor, Donald Bentley. She went to the University of California, Davis for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1997 and a Ph.D. in 2000. Her dissertation, supervised by David Rocke, was Multivariate Outlier Dete...
Go to Profile#6730
Donglin Zeng
#143134
Overall Influence
#6731
Chih‐ping Chou
#143144
Overall Influence
#6732
Guosheng Yin
#116956
Overall Influence
Guosheng Yin is a statistician, data scientist, educator and researcher in Biostatistics, Statistics, machine learning, and AI. Presently, Guosheng Yin is Chair in Statistics in Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. Previously, he served as the Head of Department and the Patrick S C Poon Endowed Chair in Statistics and Actuarial Science, at the University of Hong Kong. Before he joined the University of Hong Kong, Yin worked at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center till 2009 as a tenured Associate Professor of Biostatistics.
Go to Profile#6733
Nairanjana Dasgupta
#87725
Overall Influence
Nairanjana Dasgupta is an Indian statistician at Washington State University, where she is Boeing Distinguished Professor in Mathematics and Statistics. Her research interests include large-scale multiple testing in bioinformatics, as well as applications involving nutrition and lactation, and the growth of apples.
Go to Profile#6734
Yasunaru Kawashima
#143230
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
#6735
Anna Marciniak-Czochra
#130383
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Anna Marciniak-Czochra is a Polish applied mathematician and mathematical biologist. Since 2011 she has been a professor of applied mathematics in the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Sciences at Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#6736
Catherine Sugar
#103826
Overall Influence
Catherine Ann Sugar is an American biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is Professor in Residence in the Departments of Biostatistics, Statistics and Psychiatry and director of the biostatistics core for the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Her research concerns cluster analysis, covariance, and the applications of statistics in medicine and psychiatry.
Go to Profile#6737
Frederick J. Dorey
#143253
Overall Influence
#6738
María Dolores Ugarte
#120750
Overall Influence
María Dolores Ugarte Martínez is a Spanish statistician specializing in spatial analysis, spatio-temporal analysis, epidemiology, and small area estimation. She is a professor in the Statistics, Computer Science, and Mathematics Department at the Public University of Navarre.
Go to Profile#6739
Jon Craig Helton
#143276
Overall Influence
#6740
Helmut Alt
#97429
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Helmut Alt is a German computer scientist whose research concerns graph algorithms and computational geometry. He is known for his work on matching geometric shapes, including methods for efficiently computing the Fréchet distance between shapes. He was also the first to use the German phrase "Algorithmische Geometrie" [algorithmic geometry] to refer to computational geometry. He is a professor of computer science at the Free University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#6741
Hans van Houwelingen
#138742
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Johannes Cornelis "Hans" van Houwelingen is a Dutch mathematician and a professor emeritus of medical statistics at Leiden University. Career After graduating from Utrecht University in 1968 with a major in mathematics and a minor in theoretical physics and mathematical statistics, Van Houwelingen started working at Utrecht University at the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. In 1969 he joined Philips. A year later he returned to the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. Van Houwelingen earned his PhD at Utrecht University in 1973; his dissertation, entitled On empirical Bayes rules for the continuous one-parameter exponential family, was supervised by Gerard Jan Leppink.
Go to Profile#6742
Chia-ven Pao
#143300
Overall Influence
#6743
David A. McAllester
#42719
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David A. McAllester is an American computer scientist who is Professor and former chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, 1979 and 1987 respectively. His PhD was supervised by Gerald Sussman. He was on the faculty of Cornell University for the academic year 1987-1988 and on the faculty of MIT from 1988 to 1995. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research from 1995 to 2002. He has been a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence since 1997.
Go to Profile#6744
Kehe Zhu
#143312
Overall Influence
#6745
Shi. Jin
#143354
Overall Influence
#6746
Bill Brass
#117710
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
William Brass was a Scottish demographer. He developed indirect methods for estimating mortality and fertility in populations with inaccurate or incomplete data, often dubbed "Brass methods" after him.
Go to Profile#6747
Nicușor Dan
#93674
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Nicușor Dan is a Romanian activist, mathematician, former member of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania as well as founder and former leader of the Romanian political party Save Romania Union . He is currently serving as the Mayor of Bucharest following the 2020 Romanian local elections as independent politician.
Go to Profile#6748
Makoto Matsumoto
#143418
Overall Influence
#6749
Tamás Terlaky
#117866
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Tamás Terlaky is a Hungarian-Canadian-American professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University. He is especially well known for his work on criss-cross algorithms, interior-point methods, Klee-Minty examples for path following algorithms, and optimization.
Go to Profile#6750
Henryk Woźniakowski
#143477
Overall Influence
