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,
#701
Nicolai Reshetikhin
#13415
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Nicolai Yuryevich Reshetikhin is a mathematical physicist, currently a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University, China and a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Amsterdam . He is also a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is in the fields of low-dimensional topology, representation theory, and quantum groups. His major contributions are in the theory of quantum integrable systems, in representation theory of quantum groups and in quantum topology. He and Vladimir Turaev constructed invariants of 3-manifolds which are expected t...
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Ajit Iqbal Singh
#15470
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ajit Iqbal Singh is an Indian mathematician, specialising in functional analysis and harmonic analysis. Singh is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy , India's apex body of scientists and technologists. She is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences , based in Allahabad.
Go to Profile#703
Mary Tsingou
#7228
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Mary Tsingou is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known for having coded the celebrated computer experiment with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became an inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing and was a turning point in soliton theory.
Go to Profile#704
George Adomian
#14321
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
George Adomian was an American mathematician of Armenian descent who developed the Adomian decomposition method for solving nonlinear differential equations, both ordinary and partial. The method is explained, among other places, in his book Solving Frontier Problems in Physics: The Decomposition Method . He was a faculty member at the University of Georgia from 1966 through 1989. While at UGA, he started the Center for Applied Mathematics. Adomian was also an aerospace engineer.
Go to Profile#705
Jerry Kazdan
#17252
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jerry Lawrence Kazdan is an American mathematician noted for his work in differential geometry and the study of partial differential equations. His contributions include the Berger–Kazdan comparison theorem, which was a key step in the proof of the Blaschke conjecture and the classification of Wiedersehen manifolds. His best-known work, done in collaboration with Frank Warner, dealt with the problem of prescribing the scalar curvature of a Riemannian metric.
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Jerzy Łoś
#3825
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Jerzy Łoś was a Polish mathematician, logician, economist, and philosopher. He is especially known for his work in model theory, in particular for "Łoś's theorem", which states that any first-order formula is true in an ultraproduct if and only if it is true in "most" factors . In model theory he also proved many preservation theorems, but he gave significant contributions, as well, to foundations of mathematics, Abelian group theory and universal algebra. In the 60's he turned his attention to mathematical economics, focusing mainly on production processes and dynamic decision processes.
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Paul C. Yang
#15873
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul C. Yang is a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and CR manifolds. He is best known for his work in Conformal geometry for his study of extremal metrics and his research on scalar curvature and Q-curvature. In CR Geometry he is known for his work on the CR embedding problem, the CR Paneitz operator and for introducing the Q' curvature in CR Geometry.
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Harold Widom
#12417
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Harold Widom was an American mathematician best known for his contributions to operator theory and random matrices. He was appointed to the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1968 and became professor emeritus in 1994.
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Gerhard Ringel
#12945
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Gerhard Ringel was a German mathematician. He was one of the pioneers in graph theory and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture , a mathematical problem closely linked with the four color theorem.
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Robert Griess
#14712
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Louis Griess, Jr. is a mathematician working on finite simple groups and vertex algebras. He is currently the John Griggs Thompson Distinguished University Professor of mathematics at University of Michigan.
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Yujiro Kawamata
#16774
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Yujiro Kawamata is a Japanese mathematician working in algebraic geometry. Career Kawamata completed the master's course at the University of Tokyo in 1977. He was an Assistant at the University of Mannheim from 1977 to 1979 and a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 1983. Kawamata is now a professor at the University of Tokyo. He won the Mathematical Society of Japan Autumn award and the Japan Academy of Sciences award for his work in algebraic geometry.
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Song Sun
#17026
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Song Sun is a Chinese mathematician whose research concerns geometry and topology. A Sloan Research Fellow, he is a professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 2018. In 2019, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry.
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Greg Moore
#10992
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Gregory W. Moore is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in mathematical physics and string theory. Moore is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Rutgers University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory group.
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Albrecht Dold
#15001
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Albrecht Dold was a German mathematician specializing in algebraic topology who proved the Dold–Thom theorem, the Dold–Kan correspondence, and introduced Dold manifolds, Dold–Puppe stabilization, and Dold fibrations.
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Walter Feit
#12345
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Walter Feit was an Austrian-born American mathematician who worked in finite group theory and representation theory. His contributions provided elementary infrastructure used in algebra, geometry, topology, number theory, and logic. His work helped the development and utilization of sectors like cryptography, chemistry, and physics.
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Carl Pearcy
#16464
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Carl Mark Pearcy, Jr. is an American mathematician whose research has been concentrated on operator theory and operator algebras. He has coauthored several books, including "Introduction to operator theory I", Introduction to analysis", and "Measure and integration", all published by Springer and coauthored by Arlen Brown . Pearcy had 31 Ph. D. students at Michigan and TAMU , several of whom are outstanding mathematicians. Pearcy's bibliography contains more than 150 papers, and his research has concerned the invariant subspace problem and the theory of dual algebras.
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Martin Eichler
#14938
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Martin Maximilian Emil Eichler was a German number theorist. Eichler received his Ph.D. from the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1936. Eichler and Goro Shimura developed a method to construct elliptic curves from certain modular forms. The converse notion that every elliptic curve has a corresponding modular form would later be the key to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
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Genichi Taguchi
#1673
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Genichi Taguchi was an engineer and statistician. From the 1950s on, Taguchi developed a methodology for applying statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods. Taguchi methods have been controversial among some conventional Western statisticians, but others have accepted many of the concepts introduced by him as valid extensions to the body of knowledge.
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Daniel Lazard
#14483
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Daniel Lazard is a French mathematician and computer scientist. He is emeritus professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Career Daniel Lazard was born in Carpentras, in southern France. His undergraduate education was at the École Normale Supérieure. Following graduate work at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris, he was granted a doctorat d'état in 1968 by the University of Paris. His dissertation was supervised by the commutative algebraist Pierre Samuel, and was titled "Autour de la platitude" .
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Douglas Ravenel
#16957
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Douglas Conner Ravenel is an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology. Life Ravenel received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1972 under the direction of Edgar H. Brown, Jr. with a thesis on exotic characteristic classes of spherical fibrations. From 1971 to 1973 he was a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1974/75 he visited the Institute for Advanced Study. He became an assistant professor at Columbia University in 1973 and at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1976, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1978 and professor in 1981.
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Harold Stark
#13332
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Harold Mead Stark is an American mathematician, specializing in number theory. He is best known for his solution of the Gauss class number 1 problem, in effect correcting and completing the earlier work of Kurt Heegner, and for Stark's conjecture. More recently, he collaborated with Audrey Terras to study zeta functions in graph theory. He is currently on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego.
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Martin Kneser
#18346
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Martin Kneser was a German mathematician. His father Hellmuth Kneser and grandfather Adolf Kneser were also mathematicians. He obtained his PhD in 1950 from Humboldt University of Berlin with the dissertation: Über den Rand von Parallelkörpern. His advisor was Erhard Schmidt.
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Pierre Gabriel
#13168
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Pierre Gabriel , also known as Peter Gabriel, was a French mathematician at the University of Strasbourg , University of Bonn and University of Zürich who worked on category theory, algebraic groups, and representation theory of algebras. He was elected a correspondent member of the French Academy of Sciences in November 1986.
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Vladimir Turaev
#17647
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Vladimir Georgievich Turaev is a Russian mathematician, specializing in topology. Turaev received in 1979 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics his Candidate of Sciences degree under Oleg Viro. Turaev was a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then became a professor at Indiana University. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat
#6106
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.
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Daniel Kan
#16843
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Daniel Marinus Kan was a Dutch mathematician working in category theory and homotopy theory. He was a prolific contributor to both fields for six decades, having authored or coauthored several dozen research papers and monographs.
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W. B. R. Lickorish
#15344
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
William Bernard Raymond Lickorish is a mathematician. He is emeritus professor of geometric topology in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, and also an emeritus fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His research interests include topology and knot theory. He was one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial invariant of links, and proved the Lickorish-Wallace theorem which states that all closed orientable 3-manifolds can be obtained by Dehn surgery on a link.
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Percy Deift
#11368
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Percy Alec Deift is a mathematician known for his work on spectral theory, integrable systems, random matrix theory and Riemann–Hilbert problems. Life Deift was born in Durban, South Africa, where he obtained degrees in chemical engineering, physics, and mathematics, and received a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton University in 1977. He is a Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
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David Singmaster
#6144
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which...
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Daniel Gorenstein
#10899
Overall Influence
1923 - 1992 (69 years)
Daniel E. Gorenstein was an American mathematician. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1950 under Oscar Zariski, introducing in his dissertation a duality principle for plane curves that motivated Grothendieck's introduction of Gorenstein rings. He was a major influence on the classification of finite simple groups.
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Paul Vojta
#17378
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Alan Vojta is an American mathematician, known for his work in number theory on Diophantine geometry and Diophantine approximation. Contributions In formulating Vojta's conjecture, he pointed out the possible existence of parallels between the Nevanlinna theory of complex analysis, and diophantine analysis in the circle of ideas around the Mordell conjecture and abc conjecture. This suggested the importance of the integer solutions aspect of diophantine equations.
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David R. Morrison
#15320
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Robert Morrison is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist. He works on string theory and algebraic geometry, especially its relations to theoretical physics. Morrison studied at Princeton University with bachelor's degree in 1976 and at Harvard University with master's degree in 1977 and PhD under Phillip Griffiths in 1980 with thesis Semistable Degenerations of Enriques' and Hyperelliptic Surfaces. From 1980 he was an instructor and from 1982 an assistant professor at Princeton University and in the academic year 1984–1985 a visiting scientist at the University of Kyoto . ...
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Martin Hellman
#715
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Martin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate, and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.
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Christina Sormani
#9967
Overall Influence
Christina Sormani is a professor of mathematics at City University of New York affiliated with Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is known for her research in Riemannian geometry, metric geometry, and Ricci curvature, as well as her work on the notion of intrinsic flat distance.
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Michel Talagrand
#10372
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michel Pierre Talagrand is a French mathematician. Docteur ès sciences since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de Mathématique of Paris. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section.
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Richard Leibler
#7072
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Richard A. Leibler was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. Richard Leibler was born in March 1914. He received his A.M. in mathematics from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1939. While working at the National Security Agency, he and Solomon Kullback formulated the Kullback–Leibler divergence, a measure of similarity between probability distributions which has found important applications in information theory and cryptology. Leibler is also credited by the NSA as having opened up "new methods of attack" in the celebrated VENONA code-breaking pro...
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S. Ramanan
#15194
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Sundararaman Ramanan is an Indian mathematician who works in the area of algebraic geometry, moduli spaces and Lie groups. He is one of India's leading mathematicians and recognised as an expert in algebraic geometry, especially in the area of moduli problems. He has also worked in differential geometry: his joint paper with MS Narasimhan on universal connections has been influential. It enabled SS Chern and B Simons to introduce what is known as the Chern-Simons invariant, which has proved useful in theoretical physics.
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William Messing
#18220
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
William Messing is an American mathematician who works in the field of arithmetic algebraic geometry. Messing received his doctorate in 1971 at Princeton University under the supervisions of Alexander Grothendieck with his thesis entitled The Crystals Associated to Barsotti–Tate Groups: With Applications to Abelian Schemes. In 1972, he was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor at the University of Minnesota .
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Loïc Merel
#14661
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Loïc Merel is a French mathematician. His research interests include modular forms and number theory. Career Born in Carhaix-Plouguer, Brittany, Merel became a student at the École Normale Supérieure. He finished his doctorate at Pierre and Marie Curie University under supervision of Joseph Oesterlé in 1993. His thesis on modular symbols took inspiration from the work of Yuri Manin and Barry Mazur from the 1970s. In 1996, Merel proved the torsion conjecture for elliptic curves over any number field . In recognition of his achievement, in 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Con...
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Steven E. Shreve
#9036
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Steven Eugene Shreve is a mathematician and currently the Orion Hoch Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of several major books on the mathematics of financial derivatives.
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Enrico Arbarello
#17780
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Enrico Arbarello is an Italian mathematician who is a leading expert in algebraic geometry. He earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University in New York in 1973. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1993-94. He is now a Mathematics Professor at Sapienza University of Rome. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Ofer Gabber
#14308
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ofer Gabber is a mathematician working in algebraic geometry. Life In 1978 Gabber received a Ph.D. from Harvard University for the thesis Some theorems on Azumaya algebras, written under the supervision of Barry Mazur. Gabber has been at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette in Paris since 1984 as a CNRS senior researcher. He won the Erdős Prize in 1981 and the Prix Thérèse Gautier from the French Academy of Sciences in 2011. In 1981 Gabber with Victor Kac published a proof of a conjecture stated by Kac in 1968.
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Daniel Goldston
#15941
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Daniel Alan Goldston is an American mathematician who specializes in number theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics at San Jose State University. Early life and education Daniel Alan Goldston was born on January 4, 1954, in Oakland, California. In 1972, he matriculated to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor's degree and, in 1981, a Ph.D. in mathematics. His doctoral advisor at Berkeley was Russell Sherman Lehman; his dissertation was entitled "Large Differences between Consecutive Prime Numbers".
Go to Profile#744
Weinan E
#10926
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Weinan E is a Chinese mathematician. He is known for his pathbreaking work in applied mathematics and machine learning. His academic contributions include novel mathematical and computational results in stochastic differential equations; design of efficient algorithms to compute multiscale and multiphysics problems, particularly those arising in fluid dynamics and chemistry; and pioneering work on the application of deep learning techniques to scientific computing. In addition, he has worked on multiscale modeling and the study of rare events.
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Warren Ambrose
#16748
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Warren Arthur Ambrose was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Buenos Aires. He was born in Virden, Illinois in 1914. He received his bachelor of science degree in 1935, his master's in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1939, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
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William Kahan
#2342
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
William "Velvel" Morton Kahan is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.
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Alan J. Hoffman
#12623
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Alan Jerome Hoffman was an American mathematician and IBM Fellow emeritus, T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He was the founding editor of the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications, and held several patents. He contributed to combinatorial optimization and the eigenvalue theory of graphs. Hoffman and Robert Singleton constructed the Hoffman–Singleton graph, which is the unique Moore graph of degree 7 and diameter 2.
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Henryk Iwaniec
#16365
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Henryk Iwaniec is a Polish-American mathematician, and since 1987 a professor at Rutgers University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Polish Academy of Sciences. He has made important contributions to analytic and algebraic number theory as well as harmonic analysis. He is the recipient of Cole Prize , Steele Prize , and Shaw Prize .
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Misha Verbitsky
#11337
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Misha Verbitsky is a Russian mathematician. He works at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. He is primarily known to the general public as a controversial critic, political activist and independent music publisher.
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Henry McKean
#6804
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Henry P. McKean, Jr. is an American mathematician at the Courant Institute in New York University. He works in various areas of analysis. He obtained his PhD in 1955 from Princeton University under William Feller.
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