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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#7451
Ralph Conover Smith
#164119
Overall Influence
#7452
Elwood Spencer Buffa
#164195
Overall Influence
#7453
Joseph A. Ball
#164212
Overall Influence
#7454
Thomas P. Minka
#164230
Overall Influence
#7455
Patricio Letelier
#151433
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Patricio Anibal Letelier Sotomayor was a Chilean mathematical physicist and professor at University of Campinas . Work Letelier was born in Santiago. Early in his career Letelier worked with Dmitrii Vladimirovich Gal'tsov to define what has become known as the Letelier-Gal'tsov spacetime. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Boston University in 1977 under John Stachel. He joined the faculty of the University of Brasília until 1988 when became a Professor of Mathematical Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics of UNICAMP.
Go to Profile#7456
Steve Jackson
#113861
Overall Influence
Steve Jackson is an American set theorist at the University of North Texas. Much of his most notable work has involved the descriptive set-theoretic consequences of the axiom of determinacy. In particular he is known for having calculated the values of all the projective ordinals under the assumption that the axiom of determinacy holds.
Go to Profile#7457
Steven Lalley
#145138
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Steven Paul Lalley is an American statistician and mathematician. Lalley graduated in 1976 with B.S. from Michigan State University. He received in 1981 his Ph.D. from Stanford University with thesis Repeated Likelihood Ratio Tests for Curved Exponential Families under the supervision of David Siegmund. After teaching at Columbia University and Purdue University, Lalley became in 1998 a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago and served as department chair from 2001 to 2005.
Go to Profile#7458
Kenneth S. Miller
#164301
Overall Influence
#7459
Wm. R. Buckland
#164351
Overall Influence
#7460
Arnljot Høyland
#145626
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Arnljot Høyland was a Norwegian mathematical statistician. Biography Høyland was born in Bærum. He studied at the University of Oslo and later at the University of California, Berkeley in the USA. While a student he worked for the intelligence department at the Norwegian High Command, a military officer with the rank of Major. He lectured at the University of Oslo from 1959 to 1965, and then at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, eventually as a Professor of mathematical statistics. He published the textbooks Sannsynlighetsregning og statistisk metodelære in 1972 and 1973.
Go to Profile#7461
Vladas Sidoravicius
#157208
Overall Influence
1963 - 2019 (56 years)
Vladas Sidoravicius was a Lithuanian-Brazilian mathematician, specializing in probability theory. Education and career At Vilnius University, Sidoravicius graduated in mathematics with Diplom in 1985 and Magister degree in 1986. At Lomonosov State University he matriculated in 1986 and received his doctoral degree in 1990 with thesis advisor Vadim Aleksandrovich Malyshev. At Heidelberg University and at Paris Dauphine University, Sidoravicius was a postdoc from 1991 to 1993. In the early 1990s he gained an international reputation for his research in probability theory. In 1993 he moved to Brazil.
Go to Profile#7462
Laurent Philippot
#164383
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
#7463
Nancy Selvin
#81741
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art , Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art...
Go to Profile#7464
Yasuhiro Takeuchi
#164427
Overall Influence
#7465
Cavell Brownie
#97780
Overall Influence
Cavell Brownie is a Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the North Carolina State University. Her research considered biometric methods and wildlife sampling. Education and career Brownie is African-American, and was born in Jamaica. She earned her doctoral degree at Cornell University in 1973, developing mathematical models to estimate bird populations. Her dissertation, Stochastic Models Allowing Age-Dependent Survival Rates for Banding Experiments on Exploited Bird Populations, was supervised by D. S. Robson.
Go to Profile#7466
Arthur J. Hartz
#164459
Overall Influence
#7467
Elaine Chew
#116646
Overall Influence
Elaine Chew is an operations researcher and pianist focused on the study of musical structures as they apply to musical performance, composition and cognition, the analysis of electrocardiographic traces of arrhythmia, and digital therapeutics. She is currently Professor of Engineering at King's College London, where she is jointly appointed in the Department of Engineering and the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences .
Go to Profile#7468
Irene Beyerlein
#61180
Overall Influence
Irene Jane Beyerlein is an American materials scientist who is the Mehrabian Interdisciplinary Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society.
Go to Profile#7469
Joseph P. Costantino
#164508
Overall Influence
#7470
Morgan D. Bazilian
#164525
Overall Influence
#7471
Christophe Béné
#164530
Overall Influence
#7472
Grzegorz Świątek
#155591
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Grzegorz Świątek is a Polish mathematician, currently a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology. He is known for his contributions to dynamical systems. Świątek earned his PhD from the University of Warsaw under supervision of Michał Misiurewicz in 1987. Then he has held academic positions in Poland and the US . He is currently a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology. He published his scientific work in such journals as Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae and Duke Mathematical Journal. With Jacek Graczyk he provided a rigorous proof of the real Fatou conjectur...
Go to Profile#7473
Leang‐san Shieh
#164628
Overall Influence
#7474
Jonathan Eckstein
#164666
Overall Influence
#7475
Thomas Hugh Pulliam
#164690
Overall Influence
#7476
Éric D. Taillard
#164698
Overall Influence
#7477
Philip L. Powell
#164723
Overall Influence
#7478
Richard Verrall
#147311
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Professor Richard Verrall is Vice-President of City, University of London. He took up this post in 2011 and was previously Head of the Department of Actuarial Science, then Associate Dean of Cass Business School, City, University of London. Professor Verrall joined City, University of London, as a lecturer in 1987.
Go to Profile#7479
Masakazu Kojima
#164850
Overall Influence
#7480
David J. Patterson
#70384
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
David Joseph Patterson is a Northern Irish taxonomist specializing in protozoa and the use of taxonomy in biodiversity informatics. Early life and education David Joseph Patterson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 19 April 1950 to Doris Mary and Samuel Patterson, with one elder brother and a sister . Father of Alice Mia Vørs Patterson, Daniel Kieran Patterson, and William Zhao Patterson. He was educated at Belmont Primary, Strandtown and Grosvenor High schools in Belfast. He obtained his Bachelor of Science with first-class honours at Queen's University Belfast in 1971.
Go to Profile#7481
Stål Aanderaa
#149939
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Stål Aanderaa is a Norwegian mathematician. Biography Aanderaa was born in Beitstad. He completed the mag.scient. degree in 1959 and his doctorate at Harvard University in 1966. He was a professor at the University of Oslo from 1978 to his retirement in 2001.
Go to Profile#7482
Jean-Pierre Ezin
#109581
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Jean-Pierre Onvêhoun Ezin is a Beninese Emeritus Professor of mathematics at University of Abomey-Calavi . He was a former commissioner of Economic Community of West African States for Education, Science and Culture. He was a Commissioner of African Union for Human Resource, Science and Technology. He was the Founding Director of Institute of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Benin and a former Rector National University, Benin . He is an elected fellow of the World Academy of Sciences and African Academy of Sciences
Go to Profile#7483
Jonathan A. Sherratt
#164988
Overall Influence
#7484
Eric Grunsky
#108024
Overall Influence
Eric Christopher Grunsky is a Canadian mathematical geoscientist specialized in statistical petrology. Grunsky received the Felix Chayes Prize in 2005 from the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences and served as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Computers & Geosciences from 2006-2011. He was awarded the Krumbein Medal in 2012 by the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences. He is currently serving International Association for Mathematical Geosciences as its appointed Secretary General.
Go to Profile#7485
Paul J. W. Stoelinga
#165022
Overall Influence
#7486
Alicia Prieto Langarica
#142255
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Alicia Prieto Langaricar is an American applied mathematician and professor of mathematics at Youngstown State University. Education and career Prieto Langaricar is the granddaughter of Mexican footballer Max Prieto. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, and received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from University of Texas at Arlington in 2012. Her dissertation, From Discrete to Continuous Models of Cell Movement: An Application to Medical Implants was completed under the guidance of Hristo Venelinov Kojouharov.
Go to Profile#7487
Daniel B. Szyld
#159495
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Daniel B. Szyld is an Argentinian and American mathematician who is a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has made contributions to numerical and applied linear algebra as well as matrix theory.
Go to Profile#7488
Ying Guo
#113527
Overall Influence
Ying Guo is a Chinese biostatistician specializing in biomedical imaging, neuroimaging, and high-dimensional data analysis. She is a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Emory University, where she directs the Emory Center for Biomedical Imaging Statistics.
Go to Profile#7489
René L. Schilling
#165117
Overall Influence
#7490
Vicki Barnett
#165134
Overall Influence
#7491
Anatoli N. Andrianov
#135204
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Anatoli Nikolaievich Andrianov is а Russian mathematician. Andrianov received in 1962 his Ph.D. under Yuri Linnik at the Leningrad State University with thesis Investigation of quadratic forms by methods of the theory of correspondences and in 1969 his Russian doctorate of sciences . He is a professor at the Steklov Institute in Saint Petersburg.
Go to Profile#7492
Olivier Lantz
#165238
Overall Influence
#7493
Matthias Abend
#165288
Overall Influence
#7494
Emmanuel Stratakis
#150116
Overall Influence
Emmanuel Stratakis is a Greek physicist. Stratakis earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Crete. He works for the Institute of Electronic structure and laser, a division of the Foundation for Research and Technology—Hellas. Stratakis was elected as a member of the 2022 class of fellows for Optica. He is currently an Ambassador for the European Innovation Council for the years 2021-2027.
Go to Profile#7495
Neil J. Salkind
#165315
Overall Influence
#7496
David Oakes
#165367
Overall Influence
#7497
Guy Jumarie
#165386
Overall Influence
#7498
Marc Stevens
#80126
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Dr. ir. Marc Stevens is a cryptology researcher most known for his work on cryptographic hash collisions and for the creation of the chosen-prefix hash collision tool HashClash as part of his master's degree thesis. He first gained international attention for his work with Alexander Sotirov, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger in creating a rogue SSL certificate which was presented in 2008 during the 25th annual Chaos Communication Congress warning of the dangers of using the MD5 hash function in issuing SSL certificates. Several years later in 2012...
Go to Profile#7499
Wim Schoutens
#165472
Overall Influence
#7500
Max Kuhn
#165496
Overall Influence
