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,
#7201
Salah Eldin Elmaghraby
#156249
Overall Influence
#7202
Marianna Pensky
#147410
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Marianna Pensky is a professor at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests lie in the areas of theoretical and applied statistics. She is author of The Stress-strength Model and Its Generalizations: Theory and Applications .
Go to Profile#7203
Tatomir Anđelić
#91390
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Tatomir P. Anđelić was a Serbian mathematician, academic and an expert in mechanics. Biography Tatomir P. Anđelić was born on November 11, 1903, in a small village Bukovica, near Mrcajevci between towns of Čačak and Kraljevo in the family of six children. His mother Dmitra was illiterate, but his father Pavle, a landowner with rudimentary schooling, was a people's democratic delegate.
Go to Profile#7204
Ferran Hurtado
#128422
Overall Influence
1951 - 2014 (63 years)
Ferran Hurtado Díaz was a Spanish mathematician and computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. Life Hurtado was born on 8 May 1951 in Valencia, Spain. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona in 1993 under the supervision of Oriol Serra Albó; his dissertation was Problemas geométricos de visibilidad [Geometric problems of visibility]. It won the Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado UPC in 1995.
Go to Profile#7205
Chi–hyuck Jun
#156360
Overall Influence
#7206
Vijay Kumar Gupta
#156372
Overall Influence
#7207
Edoardo Airoldi
#115968
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Edoardo Maria Airoldi is the Millard E. Gladfelter Professor of Statistics and Data Science in the Fox School of Business at Temple University. Prior to fall 2018 he was an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University, where he founded and directed the Harvard Laboratory for Applied Statistics & Data Science, until spring 2017. Additionally, he held visiting positions at MIT and Yale University. His work is primarily in statistics and machine learning.
Go to Profile#7208
Dishant Mayurbhai Pancholi
#156417
Overall Influence
Dishant Mayurbhai Pancholi is a professor in the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai with research interests in contact and symplectic topology. Before taking up the position in The Institute Of Mathematical Sciences in 2016, Pancholi was an assistant professor at Chennai Mathematical Institute. He is also a von Newmann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The Singapore based magazine Asian Scientist selected Pancholi as the top ranking Asian Scientist of the year 2020 in a list of 100 Asia’s most outstanding researchers. Pancholi was awarded the Shanti ...
Go to Profile#7209
Dennis K.J. Lin
#133795
Overall Influence
Dennis K.J. Lin is a Taiwanese-American statistician, who works in the areas of design of experiments, quality assurance, data mining, and data science. Education and early life He was born in Taiwan, ROC, and obtained a bachelor's degree in June 1981 from National Tsing-Hua University, ROC. He received a Ph.D. in December 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a minor in computer science.
Go to Profile#7210
Margaret J. Wright
#156458
Overall Influence
#7211
Joël Coste
#156469
Overall Influence
#7212
Flemming Nielson
#156511
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
#7213
Chang ‐ Shou Lin
#156536
Overall Influence
#7214
Joeri Rogelj
#109636
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
Joeri Rogelj is a Belgian climate scientist working on solutions to climate change. He explores how societies can transform towards sustainable futures. He is a Reader in Climate Science and Policy at the Centre for Environmental Policy and Director of Research at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment, both at Imperial College London. He is also affiliated with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He is an author of several climate reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Environment Programme , and a member of t...
Go to Profile#7215
Thierry Blu
#126833
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Thierry Blu from The Chinese University of Hong Kong was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for fundamental contributions to approximation theory in signal and image processing.
Go to Profile#7216
Vieri Benci
#156586
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
#7217
Montserrat García-Closas
#148765
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Montserrat García-Closas, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.P.H., is a Spanish researcher and academic who is best known for her works on identifying cancer biomarkers and genetic susceptibility to cancer. Dr. García-Closas serves as the deputy director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics of the National Cancer Institute, as well as the Acting Chief of the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch of the DCEG.
Go to Profile#7218
Daniel F. Mccaffrey
#156611
Overall Influence
#7219
Serge Nicaise
#156623
Overall Influence
#7220
Michael D. Breed
#156650
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
#7221
Jeffrey R. Pierce
#156677
Overall Influence
#7222
Aladdin Allahverdiyev
#119045
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Aladdin Allahverdiyev is an Azerbaijani scientist and professor . Soviet, Russian and Azerbaijani scientist in the field of mathematical models development and methods of studying wave and oscillatory processes to create piezoelectric devices and products used in the world's oceans and space studies, in marine seismic exploration, in electronic, defense and medical industries.
Go to Profile#7223
Robert H. Shumway
#156714
Overall Influence
#7224
Claudio Canuto
#156752
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
#7225
Nikolay Korobov
#121389
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Nikolai Mikhailovich Korobov was a Soviet mathematician specializing in number theory and numerical analysis. He is best known for his work in analytic number theory, especially in exponential and trigonometric sums.
Go to Profile#7226
Kazuo Gesi
#156822
Overall Influence
#7227
Sergey Chesnokov
#89688
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Sergey Valerianovich Chesnokov is a Russian mathematician and sociologist who conducted pioneering work in the application of mathematical methods to sociological analysis. He is best known for creating and defining determinacy analysis and the theory of rules.
Go to Profile#7228
Marina Vannucci
#126567
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Marina Vannucci is an Italian statistician, the Noah Harding Professor and Chair of Statistics at Rice University, the past president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the former editor-in-chief of Bayesian Analysis. Topics in her research include wavelets, feature selection, and cluster analysis in Bayesian statistics.
Go to Profile#7229
Albert Cohen
#104091
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Albert Cohen is a French mathematician, specializing in approximation theory, numerical analysis, and digital signal processing. Biography He is, through maternal descent, the grand-nephew of the physicist Jacques Solomon. From 1984 to 1987 Albert Cohen was a student at the École Polytechnique. In 1990 he defended his doctoral thesis at Paris Dauphine University. His thesis, written under the supervision of Yves Meyer, is entitled Ondelettes, analyse multi résolution et traitement numérique du signal From 1990 to 1991 Cohen was a postdoc at Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill. He completed his habilitation in 1992 at Paris Dauphine University.
Go to Profile#7230
Meyer Steinberg
#156880
Overall Influence
#7231
B. A. Joyce
#156889
Overall Influence
#7232
Dan Archdeacon
#141827
Overall Influence
1954 - 2015 (61 years)
Dan Steven Archdeacon was an American graph theorist specializing in topological graph theory, who served for many years as a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Vermont. Archdeacon was born on May 11, 1954, in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Centerville, Ohio. He did his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, graduating in 1975. He completed his Ph.D. in 1980 from Ohio State University, under the supervision of Henry Hatfield Glover, with a dissertation proving an analogue of Kuratowski's theorem for the projective plane. He took a position at the University of Vermo...
Go to Profile#7233
Péter Riesz
#157016
Overall Influence
#7234
Vincent Barabba
#43253
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Vincent Barabba is an American market researcher, author, former head of the United States Census Bureau, and the chairman and co-founder of Market Insight Corporation. He is known for his work in the field of market research and opinion polling.
Go to Profile#7235
Angela Dean
#78216
Overall Influence
Angela Muriel Dean is a British statistician who specializes in the design of experiments. She is a professor emeritus at the Ohio State University, and was the chair of the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences of the American Statistical Association for 2012.
Go to Profile#7236
Sandra Stinnett
#104971
Overall Influence
Sandra Sue Stinnett is an American statistician specializing in the biostatistics of ophthalmology. She is an associate professor in the departments of biostatistics and bioinformatics and of ophthalmology in the Duke University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#7237
John Etnyre
#155220
Overall Influence
John Boyd Etnyre is an American mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his research fields include contact geometry, symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. He earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Texas, Austin under the supervision of Robert Gompf. Etnyre was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 1997-2001. He was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania prior to joining the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#7238
Klaus Deimling
#157136
Overall Influence
#7239
Richard Eliot Chamberlin
#113572
Overall Influence
1923 - 1994 (71 years)
Richard Eliot Chamberlin was an American mathematician, specializing in geometric topology. R. Eliot Chamberlin's father was Ralph Vary Chamberlin. Eliot Chamberlin attended East High School in Salt Lake City. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah. In the early 1940s he was a teaching fellow in physics at the University of Utah and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After serving as an instructor of physics at Northeastern University, he served two years in the United States Navy during World War II. After discharge from the Navy, he entered graduate school in mathematics at Harvard University, and received his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#7240
Paul R. Sparrow
#157152
Overall Influence
#7241
Alessio Farcomeni
#157165
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
#7242
David G. Clayton
#157167
Overall Influence
#7243
Svetlana Selezneva
#125262
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Svetlana Selezneva is a Russian mathematician, Dr.Sc., Associate professor, a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University. She defended the thesis «Polynomial representations of discrete functions» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .
Go to Profile#7244
Allan M. Pinkus
#157218
Overall Influence
#7245
Jacqueline Dewar
#77206
Overall Influence
Jacqueline M. Dewar is an American mathematician and mathematics educator known for her distinguished teaching and her mentorship of women in mathematics. She is a professor emerita of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University.
Go to Profile#7246
Costas A. Courcoubetis
#157388
Overall Influence
#7247
Jacob E. Goodman
#121607
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jacob Eli Goodman was an American geometer who spent most of his career at the City College of New York, where he was professor emeritus. Research Together, he and Richard M. Pollack, his long-term collaborator, introduced concepts such as "allowable sequences of permutations" and "wiring diagrams", which have played an important role in discrete geometry, specifically in the study of arrangements of pseudolines and oriented matroids. His work with Pollack includes such results as the first nontrivial bounds on the number of order types of polytopes, and a generalization of the Hadwiger transversal theorem to higher dimensions.
Go to Profile#7248
Simone Benhamou
#157571
Overall Influence
#7249
Kedar "Bud" Pyatt
#80148
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Kedar "Bud" Pyatt was Project Orion's chief mathematician. He worked on nuclear physics calculations for the project. Having a PhD in nuclear physics from Yale University, he created mathematical models of the processes that were occurring, then setting up equations to simulate those processes and calculate the behavior.
Go to Profile#7250
Jean-pierre Bérenger
#157653
Overall Influence
