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,
#7301
Zhi–qiang Wang
#159404
Overall Influence
#7302
Pentti Saikkonen
#159474
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Pentti Juhani Saikkonen is a Finnish statistician specializing in time series analysis. Since 2004 he is a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki. A native of Lahti, Saikkonen attended the University of Helsinki, where he earned his licentiate in 1981, and his doctorate in 1986.
Go to Profile#7303
Friedrich Paltauf
#159475
Overall Influence
#7304
John Stuart Hunter
#159477
Overall Influence
#7305
Nathaniel Dean
#141746
Overall Influence
1956 - 2021 (65 years)
Nathaniel Dean was an African-American mathematician and educator who made contributions to abstract and algorithmic graph theory, as well as data visualization and parallel computing. Education Dean received his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from Mississippi State University in 1978. He then received his M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Northeastern University in 1983. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1987, with a doctoral thesis titled "Contractible Edges and Conjectures and Path and Cycle Numbers".
Go to Profile#7306
Olivier Bouché
#159511
Overall Influence
#7307
Pawel Keblinski
#159517
Overall Influence
#7308
Newton Howard
#39596
Overall Influence
Newton Howard is a brain and cognitive scientist, the former founder and director of the MIT Mind Machine Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is a professor of computational neurology and functional neurosurgery at Georgetown University. He was a professor of at the University of Oxford, where he directed the Oxford Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. He is also the director of MIT's Synthetic Intelligence Lab, the founder of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies and the chairman of the Brain Sciences Foundation. Professor Howard is also a senior fellow at the John Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford, a senior scientist at INSERM in Paris and a P.A.H.
Go to Profile#7309
C. S. Venkataraman
#108269
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
C. S. Venkataraman , popularly known as CSV, was a mathematician from Kerala, India. He specialised in the theory of numbers, his forte was the theory of arithmetic functions. Known to his friends as CSV, Venkataraman was born at Chelakkara, a small village in Thrissur District, India, on 14 September 1918 as the son of late C V Subbarama Iyer, who was also a professor of mathematics at the University College, Trivandrum, for a long time and later as the principal in 1951.
Go to Profile#7310
Yu-cheng Wu
#159559
Overall Influence
#7311
Sheldon James Press
#159607
Overall Influence
#7312
Madeleine W. Cunningham
#159635
Overall Influence
#7313
Brenda L. Dietrich
#100302
Overall Influence
Brenda Lynn Jorgensen Dietrich is an American operations researcher, the Arthur and Helen Geoffrion Professor of Practice in the School of Operations Research at Cornell University. She has been Vice President of Business Analytics and Mathematical Sciences at IBM, and a president of INFORMS.
Go to Profile#7314
Helmut Pottmann
#159691
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
#7315
Karl Broman
#117659
Overall Influence
Karl Broman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Biostatistics and Medical Informatics departments. He has been employed at UWM since 2007 and previously was employed at Johns Hopkins University from 1999 - 2007. Broman's original research focus was quantitative genetics, although he has also become known for his work on reproducible research. In 2016, Broman was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#7316
Carlo Masi
#103756
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Ruggero Freddi is an Italian mathematics lecturer and former gay pornographic film actor known professionally as Carlo Masi. Early life and education Freddi was born in Rome in 1976 to a poor family. His parents divorced when he was three years old. At the age of 14, he began to work out at a local gym, practicing bodybuilding assiduously. In 2002, when he was about to complete his first cycle of study at the Sapienza University of Rome, he moved to Canada, and subsequently to New York.
Go to Profile#7317
Dan Gabriel Cacuci
#159836
Overall Influence
#7318
Mathilde Touvier
#159871
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
#7319
Dēmētrios N. Christodoulou
#159937
Overall Influence
#7320
Leslie Hill
#21301
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Leslie Hill is professor of French at the University of Warwick. He has written several influential books on French writers and philosophers including Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Derrida. Hill was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2003.
Go to Profile#7321
E. Rolland Dickson
#159949
Overall Influence
#7322
Robyn L. Mcclelland
#159961
Overall Influence
#7323
Paul T. Francis
#159973
Overall Influence
#7324
William H. Bossert
#39951
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
William H. Bossert is an American mathematician. He is the David B. Arnold, Jr. Professor of Science, Emeritus at Harvard University. He was the housemaster of Lowell House for 23 years. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1963.
Go to Profile#7325
Steven T. Zalesak
#160106
Overall Influence
#7326
Valérie Masson‐delmotte
#160110
Overall Influence
#7327
Henning Rodhe
#160183
Overall Influence
#7328
Sophia Blau
#160198
Overall Influence
#7329
Murat Tuncali
#123567
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Murat Tuncali is a Mathematics Professor at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario. He is also the chair of the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics. He graduated with his Bachelor of Science at Boğaziçi University, in Turkey. He then graduated from University of Saskatchewan with an MSc, and a PhD. He has won many awards over the years, including the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research 1999–2000, Research Achievement Award 2001–2002. He took a break from his position between the months of January and June 2006.
Go to Profile#7330
Charles Castonguay
#99164
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Charles Castonguay is a retired associate professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Ottawa. Biography A native English speaker, Castonguay was sent by his parents to a French Catholic primary school. He took his first English courses in high school. Enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces to pursue university-level studies, he obtained a masters of mathematics from the University of Ottawa. During the three years of his military service, he was posted to National Defence headquarters in Ottawa as counsellor in mathematics and also taught young officers at the Collège militair...
Go to Profile#7331
Arnaud Perrier
#160243
Overall Influence
#7332
Jacques Demongeot
#160258
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
#7333
Marcia C. Haigis
#160463
Overall Influence
#7334
Alexander J. Zaslavski
#160474
Overall Influence
#7335
Stuart Brian Hooper
#160480
Overall Influence
#7336
Li-shan Liu
#160482
Overall Influence
#7337
András Sebő
#130465
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
András Sebő is a Hungarian-French mathematician working in the areas of combinatorial optimization and discrete mathematics. Sebő is a French National Centre for Scientific Research Director of Research and the head of the Combinatorial Optimization. group in Laboratory G-SCOP, affiliated with the University of Grenoble and the CNRS.
Go to Profile#7338
F. B. Peter Wooding
#160536
Overall Influence
#7339
Ronald A. (ronald Aaron) Thisted
#160545
Overall Influence
#7340
Ian Andrew Gardner
#160574
Overall Influence
#7341
Scott Denning
#48927
Overall Influence
A. Scott Denning is a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, whose faculty he joined in 1998. He is known for his research into atmosphere-biosphere interactions, the global carbon cycle, and atmospheric carbon dioxide. He firmly supports action to avoid climate change. He has also argued that, if no action is taken on the matter, global warming could make the climate of Colorado resemble that of southern New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.
Go to Profile#7342
Jean‐h. Dussault
#160670
Overall Influence
#7343
Jean-baptiste Hiriart-urruty
#160681
Overall Influence
#7344
Philippe Coussot
#160690
Overall Influence
#7345
Jerzy Respondek
#121365
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Jerzy Respondek is a Polish computer scientist and mathematician, professor at Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice. His research interests cover numerical methods and mathematical control theory. Respondek is best known for his works on special matrices and their applications in control theory.
Go to Profile#7346
Susan R. Wilson
#127015
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Susan Ruth Wilson was an Australian statistician, known for her research in biostatistics and statistical genetics, and for her work on the understanding of AIDS in Australia. She edited the bulletin of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics from 1993 to 1998, and was president of the International Biometric Society from 1998 to 1999.
Go to Profile#7347
Jenny Bryan
#73916
Overall Influence
Jennifer "Jenny" Bryan is a data scientist and an associate professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia where she developed the Master in Data Science Program. She is a statistician and software engineer at RStudio from Vancouver, Canada and is known for creating open source tools which connect R to Google Sheets and Google Drive.
Go to Profile#7348
Germund G. Dahlquist
#160841
Overall Influence
#7349
Patrick Denis Lincoln
#160847
Overall Influence
#7350
Pavel Řehák
#160848
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
