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,
#7151
Patrick Solè
#155177
Overall Influence
#7152
N. S. Rajaram
#76502
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram was an Indian academic and a Hindutva ideologue. He is notable for propounding the "Indigenous Aryans" hypothesis, asserting that the Vedic period was extremely advanced from a scientific view-point, and claiming of having deciphered the Indus script. Academics find his scholarship to be composed of dishonest polemics in service of a communal agenda.
Go to Profile#7153
Susan Horn
#43539
Overall Influence
Susan Helen Dadakis Horn is an American biostatistician. She is the senior scientist at the Institute for Clinical Outcomes Research, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine in the Health Services Innovation and Research Program, and an affiliate faculty member at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She is known for her work in developing computational statistical models for clinicians to use in-practice to improve therapy results.
Go to Profile#7154
Andrei Toom
#126858
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Andrei Leonovich Toom , also known as André Toom, was a mathematician known for the Toom–Cook algorithm and Toom's rule. Toom was a retired professor of the statistics department at Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil. Toom died of prolonged illness in New York.
Go to Profile#7155
Clivе P. Duncan
#155276
Overall Influence
#7156
Charles J. Geyer
#155282
Overall Influence
#7157
Mary C. Meyer
#34743
Overall Influence
Mary C. Meyer is an American statistician. She is known for both theoretical and computational research in nonparametric statistics and density estimation, especially for densities with shape constraints such as convexity or monotonicity. She is a professor of statistics at Colorado State University.
Go to Profile#7158
Raphael E. Freundlich
#38713
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Raphael E. Freundlich was a classical scholar, humanist and Latinist trained in structural linguistics. He was a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University in Israel. His fields of study and teaching included: ancient Greek, Biblical studies and classical Latin.
Go to Profile#7159
Gert Kjaergård Pedersen
#155350
Overall Influence
#7160
Judith D. Singer
#92887
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Judith D. Singer is an American academic - statistician and social scientist. She is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#7161
Franco Taroni
#155365
Overall Influence
#7162
George A. Milliken
#137095
Overall Influence
1943 - 1999 (56 years)
George Albert Milliken is emeritus professor of statistics at Kansas State University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has published many papers in various statistical journals. Milliken is a co-author of the three volume Analysis of Messy Data series and the co-author of the book SAS System for Mixed Models.
Go to Profile#7163
Mary Ellen Bock
#124023
Overall Influence
Mary Ellen Johnston Bock is a retired American statistician, now a professor emeritus at Purdue University after becoming the first female full professor of statistics and the first female chair of the department there. She was president of the American Statistical Association in 2007.
Go to Profile#7164
Deborah J. Rumsey
#135497
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Deborah Jean Rumsey-Johnson is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is an associated professor and program specialist in statistics at the Ohio State University. Education and career Rumsey earned her Ph.D. at Ohio State in 1993. Her dissertation, Nonresponse in Social Network Analysis, was supervised by Elizabeth Stasny. In 2002 she became founding director of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education. She directed the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center at Ohio State from 2000 to 2004, and became a faculty member in the Ohio State Depa...
Go to Profile#7165
Toshihiko Iwanaga
#155481
Overall Influence
#7166
Nancy Gordon
#80475
Overall Influence
Nancy May Gordon is an American economist and statistician who works for the United States Census Bureau. Education and career Gordon majored in economics and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a doctorate in economics from Stanford University. Her dissertation, Ex ante and Ex post Substitutability in Economic Growth, was supervised by Kenneth Arrow.
Go to Profile#7167
Martin And Lindén Johan Dufwenberg
#155499
Overall Influence
#7168
Ami Radunskaya
#134048
Overall Influence
Ami Elizabeth Radunskaya is an American mathematician and musician. She is a professor of mathematics at Pomona College, where she specializes in dynamical systems and the applications of mathematics to medicine, such as the use of cellular automata to model drug delivery. In 2016 she was elected as the president of the Association for Women in Mathematics .
Go to Profile#7169
Stephen Gershom Simpson
#155537
Overall Influence
#7170
Win‐kuang Shen
#155555
Overall Influence
#7171
Richard Proto
#98701
Overall Influence
1940 - 2008 (68 years)
Richard C. Proto was a noted American cryptographer and former Director of Research and Advanced Technology at the United States National Security Agency. He was elected to NSA Hall of Honor in 2013.
Go to Profile#7172
Nancy E. Heckman
#86984
Overall Influence
Nancy E. Heckman is a Canadian statistician, interested in nonparametric regression, smoothing, functional data analysis, and applications of statistics in evolutionary biology. From 2008 to 2018, she served as head of the statistics department at the University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#7173
Vlad Voroninski
#130136
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (40 years)
Vlad Y. Voroninski is a Russian-American mathematician and entrepreneur. Academic biography Voroninski received his B.S. and M.A degrees in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 2008, summa cum laude. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2013, under the supervision of Emmanuel Candes and John Strain. He was on the faculty at the MIT Mathematics Department from 2013 to 2016.
Go to Profile#7174
Franz Daniel Kahn
#113781
Overall Influence
1926 - 1998 (72 years)
Franz Daniel Kahn was a mathematician and astrophysicist at the University of Manchester. He was Professor of Astronomy from 1966 to 1993, then Emeritus thereafter in the School of Physics and Astronomy.
Go to Profile#7175
Dennis Allison
#19102
Overall Influence
Dennis Allison is a lecturer at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1976. Allison was a founding member of the People's Computer Company. Allison in 1975 wrote a specification for a microcomputer interpreter for the BASIC programming language which became known as Tiny Basic. Allison was urged to create the standard by Bob Albrecht of the Homebrew Computer Club who had seen BASIC on minicomputers and felt it would be the perfect match for new machines like the MITS Altair 8800, which had been released in January 1975. This design did not support text strings or floating point arithmetic, thus only using integer arithmetic.
Go to Profile#7176
Olivier Klein
#155646
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#7177
Benedetto Piccoli
#155716
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
#7178
Stefan Rolewicz
#155755
Overall Influence
#7179
Subrata Ghose
#155792
Overall Influence
#7180
Sidney J. Yakowitz
#155797
Overall Influence
#7181
Jan Mycielski
#155829
Overall Influence
#7182
Pierre Ernst
#155835
Overall Influence
#7183
Angela Mariotto
#79207
Overall Influence
Angela Bacelar Mariotto is a statistician who researches the development and improvement of cancer progress measures. She is chief of the data analytics branch at the National Cancer Institute. Mariotto was a researcher at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità.
Go to Profile#7184
Lars Grüne
#155878
Overall Influence
#7185
Maria Antònia Canals
#101997
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Maria Antònia Canals was a Spanish mathematician. Her work in recreational mathematics served as the basis for the eponymous Canals Project. Among other honors, she has been awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi and the .
Go to Profile#7186
Kurt Paul Spindler
#155884
Overall Influence
#7187
Paul Muhly
#110029
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Paul Muhly is an American mathematician. In 2015 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society for his contributions to operator theory as well as mentoring and service to the community. He has supervised over 20 Ph.D. students.
Go to Profile#7188
Henri Doucet
#155917
Overall Influence
#7189
André Lacroix
#155940
Overall Influence
#7190
Giacomo Grasselli
#155983
Overall Influence
#7191
Otmar Scherzer
#155999
Overall Influence
#7192
Masaaki Kijima
#79723
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Masaaki Kijima is a Japanese economist and mathematician. The Dean of the School of Informatics and Data Science at Hiroshima University, he has made significant contributions to applied probability and financial engineering. The most familiar of his contributions in the field of applied probability was the development of the G-renewal process. Kijima graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1980, then obtained a Ph.D. in business from the University of Rochester in 1986.
Go to Profile#7193
Isador M. Sheffer
#156023
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Isador Mitchell Sheffer was an American mathematician best known for the Sheffer sequence of polynomials. Born in Massachusetts, he lived a large portion of his life in State College, Pennsylvania, where he was a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.
Go to Profile#7194
Doron S. Lubinsky
#156034
Overall Influence
#7195
Haskell P. Rosenthal
#156084
Overall Influence
#7196
Chao-qing Yang Dai
#156106
Overall Influence
#7197
Dean P. Foster
#156114
Overall Influence
#7198
Donald W. Peaceman
#156157
Overall Influence
#7199
Helmut Hasse
#156159
Overall Influence
#7200
Sidney Graham
#148499
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Sidney West Graham is a mathematician interested in analytic number theory and professor at Central Michigan University. He received his Ph.D., which was supervised by Hugh Montgomery, from the University of Michigan in 1977. In his Ph.D. thesis he lowered the upper bound for Linnik's constant to 36 and subsequently reduced the bound further to 20.
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