Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#6801

Adelchi Azzalini

#144793

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

#6802

Aimable Robert Jonckheere

#78258

Overall Influence

1920 - 2005 (85 years)

Aimable Robert Jonckheere , commonly known by friends and colleagues as "Jonck", was a psychologist and statistician at University College London . He is probably best known for his work in nonparametric statistics, where he has a test named after him: Jonckheere's trend test.

#6803

Yaakov Malkin

#50818

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Yaakov Malkin was a Polish-Israeli educator, literary critic, and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University. He was active in several institutions that deal with both cultural and Humanistic Judaism.

#6804

Ilya Kapovich

#142987

Overall Influence

Ilya Kapovich is a Russian-American mathematician and a Professor of Mathematics at the Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is known for his contributions to geometric group theory, geometric topology, and complexity theory.

#6805

David Catlin

#116292

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

David William Catlin is an American mathematician who works on the theory of several complex variables. Catlin received in 1978 his Ph.D. from Princeton University under Joseph Kohn with thesis Boundary Behavior of Holomorphic Functions on Weakly Pseudoconvex Domains. He is a professor at Purdue University.

#6806

Venkat Chandrasekaran

#78856

Overall Influence

Venkat Chandrasekaran is a Professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for work on mathematical optimization and its application to the information sciences.

#6807

Donald Richards

#88545

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Donald St. P. Richards is an American statistician conducting research on multivariate statistics, zonal polynomials, distance correlation, total positivity, and hypergeometric functions of matrix argument. He currently serves as a distinguished professor of statistics at the Pennsylvania State University, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#6808

J. W. Bruce

#109991

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

James William "Bill" Bruce is a British mathematician whose main contributions are in singularity theory and related areas. Mathematical career Bill completed his PhD thesis, titled Some Natural Whitney Stratifications, in 1978 at the University of Liverpool under the supervision of C T C Wall. Following domestic and international appointments, he was appointed to a chair in pure mathematics at the University of Liverpool in 1990.

#6809

Elizabeth A. Thompson

#122125

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Elizabeth Alison Thompson is a British-born American statistician at the University of Washington. Her research concerns the use of genetic data to infer relationships between individuals and populations. She is the 2017–2018 president of the International Biometric Society.

#6810

Takao Nishizeki

#49228

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in graph algorithms and graph drawing. Education and career Nishizeki was born in 1947 in Fukushima, and was a student at Tohoku University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1969, a master's in 1971, and a doctorate in 1974. He continued at Tohoku as a faculty member, and became a full professor there in 1988. He was the Dean of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, from April 2008 to March 2010. He retired in 2010, becoming a professor emeritus at Tohoku University, but continued teaching as a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University until March 2015.

#6811

Peter W. Lampert

#145067

Overall Influence

#6812

Marie-Claude Gaudel

#67880

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Marie-Claude Gaudel is a French computer scientist. She is a professor emerita at the University of Paris-Sud. She helped develop PLUSS language for software specifications and was involved in both theoretical and applied computer science. Gaudel is still active in professional societies.

#6813

Amir Kassam

#93980

Overall Influence

Amir Kassam, FRSB, OBE, is visiting professor in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at the University of Reading, and a member of the global forum of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He was made OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2005 for services to tropical agriculture and rural development. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

#6814

Mei-Cheng Wang

#115885

Overall Influence

Mei-Cheng Wang is a biostatistician in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research includes both theoretical work on survival analysis and statistical truncation, and applications to medical questions including prenatal and infant care, AIDS infection, and kidney disease.

#6815

Rami Ahmad El-nabulsi

#145172

Overall Influence

#6816

Ronald Fintushel

#136632

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Ronald Alan Fintushel is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional geometric topology and the mathematics of gauge theory. Education and career Fintushel studied mathematics at Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1967 and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a master's degree in 1969. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton with thesis -actions on manifolds of dimension less than five under the supervision of Louis McAuley. Fintushel was a professor at Tulane University and is a professor at Michigan St...

#6817

Leszek F. Demkowicz

#145187

Overall Influence

Leszek F. Demkowicz is an American engineer and scientist, and currently the W. A. "Tex" Moncrief Chair in Computational Engineering & Sciences II at University of Texas at Austin.

#6818

John Micklewright

John Micklewright

#90142

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (68 years)

John Micklewright is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Social Statistics at UCL Social Research Institute, University College London. Career Micklewright studied at the University of Exeter and then completed a PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics. He did post-doctoral work as a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. Before joining UCL, he was Professor of Social Statistics in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Southampton, head of research in the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Professor of Economics at the European University Institute in Flore...

#6819

Viola Spolin

#7991

Overall Influence

1906 - 1994 (88 years)

Viola Spolin was an American theatre academic, educator and acting coach. She is considered an important innovator in 20th century American theater for creating directorial techniques to help actors to be focused in the present moment and to find choices improvisationally, as if in real life. These acting exercises she later called Theater Games and formed the first body of work that enabled other directors and actors to create improvisational theater. Her book Improvisation for the Theater, which published these techniques, includes her philosophy and her teaching and coaching methods, and is considered the "bible of improvisational theater".

#6820

Janice Lough

#143029

Overall Influence

Janice Lough is a climate scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science at James Cook University, researching climate change, and impacts of temperature and elevated on coral reefs. She was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2022 for her research in climate change, coral reefs, and developing high resolution environmental and growth histories from corals, particularly the Great Barrier Reef.

#6821

Andrew Gettelman

#145476

Overall Influence

#6822

Igor Vasil’evich Volovich

#145479

Overall Influence

#6823

Monson H. Hayes

#145489

Overall Influence

#6824

Richard Maunder

#104993

Overall Influence

1937 - 2018 (81 years)

Charles Richard Francis Maunder was a British mathematician and musicologist. Early life Maunder was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Jesus College, Cambridge, before going on to complete a PhD at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1962. After teaching at Southampton University he became a fellow of Christ’s in 1964.

#6825

Kathrin Klamroth

#120360

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Kathrin Klamroth is a German mathematician and computer scientist whose research topics include combinatorial optimization and facility location. She is a professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wuppertal.

#6826

Alexander V. Kostochka

#145559

Overall Influence

#6827

Christopher Kim Wikle

#145599

Overall Influence

#6828

Rachel Levy

#111062

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Rachel Levy is an American mathematician and blogger. She currently serves as the inaugural Executive Director of the North Carolina State University Data Science Academy. She was a 2020-21 AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, serving in the United States Senate and sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. From 2018-2020 she served as deputy executive director of the Mathematical Association of America. As a faculty member at Harvey Mudd College from 2007-2019 her research was in applied mathematics, including the mathematical modeling of thin films, and the applications of fluid mechanics to biology.

#6829

Xiaofeng Yang

#145639

Overall Influence

#6830

Amos Fiat

#145641

Overall Influence

#6831

Guriĭ Ivanovich Marchuk

#145653

Overall Influence

#6832

Deirdre Smeltzer

#127565

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (61 years)

Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer is an American mathematician, mathematics educator, textbook author, and academic administrator. A former professor, dean, and vice president at Eastern Mennonite University, she is Senior Director for Programs at the Mathematical Association of America.

#6833

Dianne Cook

#87130

Overall Influence

Dianne Helen Cook is an Australian statistician, the editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, and an expert on the visualization of high-dimensional data. She is Professor of Business Analytics in the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University and professor emeritus of statistics at Iowa State University. The emeritus status was chosen so that she could continue to supervise graduate students at Iowa State after moving to Australia.

#6834

Andrzej Swierniak

#69645

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Andrzej Piotr Świerniak is a Polish mathematician, specializing in bioinformatics and control theory. Biography In 1972 he obtained a master's degree in automation engineering at the Faculty of Automation of the Silesian University of Technology, and in 1975 he received a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Silesia in Katowice. In 1978, at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science of the Silesian University of Technology, he received his doctoral degree technical sciences. There, based on scientific achievements and his habilitation monograph, he was awarded in 1988 his Habilitation .

#6835

Meyer Dwass

#144883

Overall Influence

1923 - 1996 (73 years)

Meyer Dwass was an American mathematical statistician known for his contributions to applied probability. Dwass was a professor of statistics at Northwestern University. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Dwass attended George Washington University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1948. Under supervision of Wassilij Höffding, he earned a Ph.D. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1952.

#6836

Vitaly A. Volpert

#145801

Overall Influence

#6837

Victoria Stodden

#62751

Overall Influence

Victoria Stodden is a statistician, associate professor of information sciences, and affiliate professor of statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Ottawa, an MS in economics from the University of British Columbia, and both her law degree and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University.

#6838

Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong

#55455

Overall Influence

1938 - 2015 (77 years)

Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong was a Ghanaian academic. He was the first Ghanaian to attain full professorship status in mathematics at the University of Ghana, Legon. In 1966, Daniel Akyeampong and Francis Allotey became the first Ghanaians to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences. He was the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana from 1983 to 1985.

#6839

Robert Gerald Lewis Brennan

#145884

Overall Influence

#6840

Pierre Brémaud

#145920

Overall Influence

#6841

Robert J. Van Glabbeek

#145958

Overall Influence

#6842

Valery Fabrikant

#3398

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Valery Iosifovich Fabrikant is a former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. On 24 August 1992, after years of increasingly disruptive behaviour at the university, he shot and killed four colleagues and wounded one staff member.

#6843

Michael Rotkowitz

#115066

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (51 years)

Michael Charles Rotkowitz is an applied mathematician best known for his work in decentralized control theory. He was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he held appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research , and was also affiliated with the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program .

#6844

Ron Resch

#82929

Overall Influence

1939 - 2009 (70 years)

Ron Resch was an artist, computer scientist, and applied geometrist, known for his work involving folding paper, origami tessellations and 3D polyhedrons. Resch studied art at the University of Iowa receiving his Master of Fine Arts. Subsequently, he was a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He went on to become a professor of computer science at the University of Utah.

#6845

Gunnar Myhre

#146069

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

#6846

Milly Koss

#39005

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Adele Mildred Koss, known as Milly Koss, was an American pioneering computer programmer. The Association for Women in Computing awarded her an Ada Lovelace Award in 2000. She attended Philadelphia High School for Girls and graduated in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania in 1950. Following her first job interview with an insurance company, Koss, who was engaged at the time, was rejected for the reason that married women would have children and leave.

#6847

Michael A. B. Deakin

#127942

Overall Influence

1939 - 2014 (75 years)

Michael Andrew Bernard Deakin was an Australian mathematician and mathematics educator. He was known for his work as a writer and editor of Function, a mathematics magazine aimed at high school students, and as a biographer of ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia. He won the B. H. Neumann award of the Australian Mathematics Trust in 2003 for his "rich and varied commitment to mathematics enrichment".

#6848

Peter A. Markowich

#146125

Overall Influence

#6849

James G. Kalbfleisch

#141072

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

James Grant Kalbfleisch was a Canadian statistician and academic administrator. He was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a president of the Statistical Society of Canada. Education and career Kalbfleisch was born in Galt, Ontario, to Claude and Janet Kalbfleisch, both teachers. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1966 from the University of Waterloo; his thesis was entitled "Chromatic Graphs and Ramsey's Theorem" and was supervised by Ralph Gordon Stanton. He joined the faculty at the University of Waterloo, where he later held several positions, including the followin...

#6850

Andrei Knyazev

#73293

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (66 years)

Andrew Knyazev is an American mathematician. He graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University under the supervision of Evgenii Georgievich D'yakonov in 1981 and obtained his PhD in Numerical Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Vyacheslav Ivanovich Lebedev in 1985. He worked at the Kurchatov Institute between 1981–1983, and then to 1992 at the Marchuk Institute of Numerical Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Gury Marchuk .

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions