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,

#7001

Eva Petkova

#108221
Overall Influence
Eva Petkova is a Bulgarian-American biostatistician interested in the application of statistics to psychiatry, and known for her research on regression model comparison, brain imaging, and mental disorders. She is a professor of population health and of child and adolescent psychology at the New York University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.
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#7002

Donald L. Iglehart

#151247
Overall Influence
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#7003

Bibhas Chandra Giri

#151251
Overall Influence
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#7004

Susmita Datta

#84490
Overall Influence
Susmita Datta is an Indian biostatistician. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, and is the former president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics. She is also a musician who has published three CDs of Bengali folk songs.
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#7005

Paul J. Werbos

#151309
Overall Influence
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#7006

Bob Twiggs

Bob Twiggs
#27691
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Robert J. Twiggs is an American professor of Astronautics and Space Science at Morehead State University. He is responsible, along with Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, for co-inventing the CubeSat reference design for miniaturized satellites which became an Industry Standard for design and deployment of the satellites.
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#7007

Jana Jurečková

#111739
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Jana Jurečková is a Czech statistician, known for her work on rankings, robust statistics, outliers and tails, asymptotic theory, and the behavior of statistical estimates for finite sample sizes.
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#7008

Andrey Gonchar

#151367
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Andrey Aleksandrovich Gonchar, was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, specializing in analysis. At the Moscow State University Gonchar graduated in 1954 and received in 1967 his Russian candidate degree under Sergey Mergelyan, He received his Russian doctorate in 1964 from the Steklov Institute. Gonchar was a professor at the Steklov Institute and the Moscow State University. From 1972 to 2002 he was a member of the complex analysis department of the Steklov Institute.
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#7009

Regina Liu

#145937
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Regina Y. Liu is an American statistician. She is a distinguished professor of statistics and chair of the Department of Statistics and Biostatistics at Rutgers University. Her research concerns robust statistics and nonparametric statistics, including the first formulation of simplicial depth.
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#7010

George C. Runger

#151431
Overall Influence
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#7011

Roy Elmer Welsch

#151503
Overall Influence
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#7012

Ker-Chau Li

#151511
Overall Influence
Ker-Chau Li is a Taiwanese statistician. In 1975, Li graduated from National Taiwan University with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. He then pursued graduate study in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a master's of science in 1979, followed by a doctorate in 1981. Li's doctoral dissertation, Contributions to Robust Design and Estimation Problems, was advised by Jack Kiefer. Li began his teaching career as an assistant professor in the statistics department of Purdue University, then joined the mathematics department of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
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#7013

Nicolas Girard

#151609
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
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#7014

Daniel Revuz

#139340
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Daniel Revuz is a French mathematician who deals with stochastics. He is the son of the mathematician André Revuz. He received his doctorate in 1969 at the Sorbonne under Jacques Neveu . He taught at Paris Diderot University at the Laboratory for Probability Theory of the Institut Mathématique de Jussieu.
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#7015

Alemdar Hasanoğlu

#142287
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Alemdar Hasanoğlu is an Azerbaijani mathematician. He was born in 1954. Biography He received the degree B.S. in Mathematics from Baku State University, Azerbaijan and received the degrees of M.S., Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics, Dr. Sc. in Mathematical Modeling and Computational Technology in Science from the Special Scientific Committee at the Moscow State University.
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#7016

Pan-deng Liu

#151746
Overall Influence
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#7017

Colin J. Thompson

#151758
Overall Influence
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#7018

Marc Lemaire

#151790
Overall Influence
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#7019

Jaana Lindström

#151808
Overall Influence
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#7020

Gottfried Schmalz

#151884
Overall Influence
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#7021

Michael Griebel

#84833
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Michael Griebel is a German mathematician. His research focus lies on scientific computing, and he helped develop computer algorithms for sparse grids. Griebel was director of the Institute for Numerical Simulation at the University of Bonn from 2003 to 2016. He is currently director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing in Sankt Augustin.
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#7022

Johannes Jisse Duistermaat

#151920
Overall Influence
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#7023

Vera Maria Rogiers

#151951
Overall Influence
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#7024

Arno Kuijlaars

Arno Kuijlaars
#68782
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Arnoldus Bernardus Jacobus Kuijlaars is a Dutch mathematician, specializing in approximation theory. Kuijlaars completed his undergraduate studies at the Eindhoven University of Technology and received in 1991 his Ph.D. from Utrecht University with thesis Approximation of Metric Spaces with Applications in Potential Theory. Currently he is a professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
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#7025

Martin John Kendall

#151977
Overall Influence
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#7026

Jean Paul Penot

#152022
Overall Influence
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#7027

Stephanie Shipp

#81978
Overall Influence
Stephanie Slepicka Shipp is an American economist and social statistician. She works at the University of Virginia as a research professor in the Social and Decision Analytics Division of the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative.
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#7028

Józef Mayer

#43519
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Józef Mayer was a Polish chemist, specializing in radiation chemistry, the Rector of Lodz University of Technology in 1996–2002. Józef Mayer graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry of Lodz University of Technology , in 1961. In the same year he started work in the Department of Physical Chemistry. Józef Mayer presented his PhD thesis in 1968. In 1988 he became Associate Professor and in 1994 he received the title of Professor of TUL.
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#7029

Salvatore Sessa

#152044
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
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#7030

Mikael Vejdemo Johansson

#152067
Overall Influence
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#7031

Alexandru Ioan Lupaș

#144309
Overall Influence
1942 - 2007 (65 years)
Alexandru Ioan Lupaș was a Romanian mathematician. He was born in Arad, where he attended the Moise Nicoară High School. He pursued his studies at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, obtaining a B.S. degree in Mathematics in 1964. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1972 from the University of Stuttgart, under the direction of and Friedrich Moritz Lösch.
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#7032

Patricia Grambsch

#96371
Overall Influence
Patricia Louise Meller Grambsch is an American biostatistician known for her work on survival models including proportional hazards models. She is an associate professor emerita of biostatistics at the University of Minnesota.
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#7033

Helmut Prodinger

#152193
Overall Influence
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#7034

Evangelos Kranakis

#152228
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
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#7035

Howard D. Dorfman

#152234
Overall Influence
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#7036

David L. Russell

#152294
Overall Influence
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#7037

Imre Tóth

#93467
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Imre Tóth , born in 1921, was a philosopher, mathematician and science historian, who specialized in the philosophy of mathematics. He worked on non-Euclidean geometry, mathematical irrationality, freedom, Plato and Platonism, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Hege. He was born in Satu Mare, the year after the Treaty of Trianon recognized it as a part of Romania, to a very religious Jewish family that had fled from the 1920 pogroms. Resisting with the Communists during the Second World War and then excluded from the Party, he narrowly escaped death in the camps. After the war he studied at Babeș-Bolyai University.
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#7038

Gretchen Matthews

#126218
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Gretchen L. Matthews is a mathematician specializing in algebraic coding theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech. Education and career Matthews graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1995, majoring in mathematics. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at Louisiana State University in 1999. Her dissertation, Weierstrass Pairs and Minimum Distance of Goppa Codes, was supervised by Robert F. Lax.
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#7039

John Philip Burke

#152334
Overall Influence
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#7040

Douglas John White

#152348
Overall Influence
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#7041

Sharon Lohr

#90766
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Sharon Lynn Lohr is an American statistician. She is an Emeritus Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Arizona State University, and an independent statistical consultant. Her research interests include survey sampling, design of experiments, and applications of statistics in education and criminology.
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#7042

Dianne M. Finkelstein

#152409
Overall Influence
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#7043

Babette Brumback

#78243
Overall Influence
Babette Anne Brumback is an American biostatistician known for her work on causal inference. She is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. Education and career Brumback earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Virginia in 1988. She went to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study, originally in electrical engineering and computer science but then switching to statistics; she earned a master's degree in 1992 and completed her Ph.D. in 1996. Her dissertation, Statistical Methods for Hormone Data, was supervised by John A. Rice...
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#7044

D. Avid J. Jeffrey

#152446
Overall Influence
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#7045

Jonathan H. Epstein

#152468
Overall Influence
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#7046

William Crawley-Boevey

#137495
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
William Walstan Crawley-Boevey is an English mathematician. Since 2016, he has been Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Universität Bielefeld, on leave from his position as Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. His research concerns representation theory and the theory of quivers.
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#7047

M. Douglass Anglin

#152476
Overall Influence
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#7048

Elizabeth H. Slate

#113116
Overall Influence
Elizabeth H. Slate is an American statistician, interested in the Bayesian statistics of longitudinal data and applications to health. She is the Duncan McLean and Pearl Levine Fairweather Professor of Statistics at Florida State University. Some of Slate's most heavily cited work concerns the effects of selenium on cancer. Slate's research has also included work on the early detection of osteoarthritis.
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#7049

Zeger Hens

#152510
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
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#7050

Robert J. Berman

#145741
Overall Influence
Robert J. Berman is a Swedish mathematical scientist currently at Chalmers University and was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize in 2017. Berman is known for his constributions to the K-stability of Fano varieties.
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