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,
#751
Robert C. James
#19366
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Robert Clarke James was an American mathematician who worked in functional analysis. Biography James attended UCLA as an undergraduate, where his father was a professor. As a devout Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II.
Go to Profile#752
Roshdi Rashed
#7538
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Roshdi Rashed , born in Cairo in 1936, is a mathematician, philosopher and historian of science, whose work focuses largely on mathematics and physics of the medieval Arab world. His work explores and illuminates the unrecognized Arab scientific tradition, being one of the first historians to study in detail the ancient and medieval texts, their journey through the Eastern schools and courses, their immense contributions to Western science, particularly in regarding the development of algebra and the first formalization of physics.
Go to Profile#753
Shigeru Iitaka
#16654
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Shigeru Iitaka is a Japanese mathematician at Gakushuin University working in algebraic geometry who introduced the Kodaira dimension and Iitaka dimension. He was a worldly leader in the field of Algebraic geometry.
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Louis Kauffman
#10298
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Louis Hirsch Kauffman is an American mathematician, mathematical physicist, and professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He does research in topology, knot theory, topological quantum field theory, quantum information theory, and diagrammatic and categorical mathematics. He is best known for the introduction and development of the bracket polynomial and the Kauffman polynomial.
Go to Profile#755
Nathan Mantel
#13977
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Nathan Mantel was an American biostatistician best known for his work with William Haenszel that led to the Mantel–Haenszel test and its associated estimate, the Mantel–Haenszel odds ratio. The Mantel–Haenszel procedure and its extensions allow data from several sources or groups to be combined while avoiding confounding.
Go to Profile#756
Underwood Dudley
#14999
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Underwood Dudley is an American mathematician and writer. His popular works include several books describing crank mathematics by pseudomathematicians who incorrectly believe they have squared the circle or done other impossible things.
Go to Profile#757
James A. Stockman...
#20052
Overall Influence
#758
Pranab K. Sen
#8598
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Pranab Kumar Sen is a statistician, a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Academic biography Sen was the second of seven siblings; his father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician. He began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college. He received a B.S. from the University of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc.
Go to Profile#759
Dusa McDuff
#11462
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.
Go to Profile#760
Philip Hartman
#16857
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Philip Hartman was an American mathematician at Johns Hopkins University working on differential equations who introduced the Hartman–Grobman theorem. He served as Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Johns Hopkins for several years. He has an Erdös number of 2.
Go to Profile#761
Shaun Wylie
#14227
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker. Early life Wylie was born in Oxford, England. The fourth son of Sir Francis Wylie and his wife Kathleen , he was educated at the Dragon School and then Winchester College. He won a scholarship to New College, Oxford where he studied mathematics and classics. In 1934, he went to study topology at Princeton University, obtaining a PhD in 1937 with Solomon Lefschetz as his supervisor. At Princeton he met fellow English mathematician Alan Turing. He became a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938/1939.
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Jerome H. Friedman
#3179
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Jerome Harold Friedman is an American statistician, consultant and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, known for his contributions in the field of statistics and data mining. Biography Friedman studied at Chico State College for two years before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley in 1959, where he received his AB in Physics in 1962, and his PhD in High Energy Particle Physics in 1967.
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John Nelder
#9056
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
John Ashworth Nelder was a British statistician known for his contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory. Contributions Nelder's work was influential in statistics. While leading research at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Nelder developed and supervised the updating of the statistical software packages GLIM and GenStat: Both packages are flexible high-level programming languages that allow statisticians to formulate linear models concisely. GLIM influenced later environments for statistical computing such as S-PLUS and R. Bo...
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Michel Kervaire
#14851
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Michel André Kervaire was a French mathematician who made significant contributions to topology and algebra. He introduced the Kervaire semi-characteristic. He was the first to show the existence of topological n-manifolds with no differentiable structure , and computed the number of exotic spheres in dimensions greater than four. He is also well known for fundamental contributions to high-dimensional knot theory. The solution of the Kervaire invariant problem was announced by Michael Hopkins in Edinburgh on 21 April 2009.
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Luis Santaló
#16170
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Luís Antoni Santaló Sors was a Spanish mathematician. He graduated from the University of Madrid and he studied at the University of Hamburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1936. His advisor was Wilhelm Blaschke. Because of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to Argentina as a professor in the National University of the Littoral, National University of La Plata and University of Buenos Aires.
Go to Profile#766
Marina Ratner
#13266
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Marina Evseevna Ratner was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who worked in ergodic theory. Around 1990, she proved a group of major theorems concerning unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, known as Ratner's theorems. Ratner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, awarded the Ostrowski Prize in 1993 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences the same year. In 1994, she was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Ronald Rivlin
#11322
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Ronald Samuel Rivlin was a British-American physicist, mathematician, rheologist and a noted expert on rubber. Life Rivlin was born in London in 1915. He studied physics and mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, being awarded a BA in 1937 and a ScD in 1952. He worked for the General Electric Company, then the UK Ministry of Aircraft Production, then the British Rubber Producers Research Association, to which he was recruited to at the suggestion of L. R. G. Treloar by John Wilson, over a “lavish meal” and game of pool. This included one sabbatical year at the National Bureau of Standards, USA.
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Minhyong Kim
#16881
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Minhyong Kim is a South Korean mathematician who specialises in arithmetic geometry and anabelian geometry. Biography Kim received his PhD at Yale University in 1990 under the supervision of Serge Lang and Barry Mazur, going on to work in a number of universities, including M.I.T., Columbia, Arizona, Purdue, the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, UCL and the University of Oxford. He is currently the Christopher Zeeman Professor of Algebra, Geometry, and Public Understanding of Mathematics at University of Warwick.
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Alex Wilkie
#9721
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alex James Wilkie FRS is a British mathematician known for his contributions to model theory and logic. Previously Reader in Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford, he was appointed to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester in 2007.
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John Pardon
#15752
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
John Vincent Pardon is an American mathematician who works on geometry and topology. He is primarily known for having solved Gromov's problem on distortion of knots, for which he was awarded the 2012 Morgan Prize. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
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Evelyn Boyd Granville
#10143
Overall Influence
1924 - 2023 (99 years)
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university; she earned it in 1949 from Yale University. She graduated from Smith College in 1945. She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.
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Michael Aschbacher
#16686
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael George Aschbacher is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. Aschbacher is currently the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#773
Melvin Hochster
#14588
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Melvin Hochster is an American mathematician working in commutative algebra. He is currently the Jack E. McLaughlin Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Michigan.
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Olav Kallenberg
#10313
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Olav Kallenberg is a probability theorist known for his work on exchangeable stochastic processes and for his graduate-level textbooks and monographs. Kallenberg is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University in Alabama in the USA.
Go to Profile#775
Spencer Bloch
#18287
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Spencer Janney Bloch is an American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic geometry and algebraic K-theory. Bloch is a R. M. Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Chicago. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he gave an invited lecture in 1978 and a plenary lecture in 1990. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1981–82. He received a Humboldt Prize in 1996.
Go to Profile#776
Jinyoung Park
#17705
Overall Influence
Jinyoung Park is a South Korean mathematician at Stanford University working in combinatorics and graph theory. In 2022, she released a preprint containing a 6-page proposed proof of the Kahn–Kalai conjecture with Huy Tuan Pham.
Go to Profile#777
Jan Mycielski
#14300
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Jan Mycielski is a Polish-American mathematician, logician and philosopher, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is known for contributions to graph theory, combinatorics, set theory, topology and philosophy of mathematics.
Go to Profile#778
Reid W. Barton
#10153
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Reid William Barton is a mathematician and also one of the most successful performers in the International Science Olympiads. Biography Barton is the son of two environmental engineers. Barton took part-time classes at Tufts University in chemistry , physics , and subsequently Swedish, Finnish, French, and Chinese. Since eighth grade he worked part-time with MIT computer scientist Charles E. Leiserson on CilkChess, a computer chess program. Subsequently, he worked at Akamai Technologies with computer scientist Ramesh Sitaraman to build one of the earliest video performance measurement systems that have since become a standard in industry.
Go to Profile#779
Robert G. Bartle
#16381
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Robert Gardner Bartle was an American mathematician specializing in real analysis. He is known for writing the popular textbooks The Elements of Real Analysis , The Elements of Integration , and Introduction to Real Analysis with Donald R. Sherbert, published by John Wiley & Sons.
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Arthur Harold Stone
#16486
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Arthur Harold Stone was a British mathematician born in London, who worked at the universities of Manchester and Rochester, mostly in topology. His wife was American mathematician Dorothy Maharam. Stone studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first paper dealt with squaring the square, he proved the Erdős–Stone theorem with Paul Erdős and is credited with the discovery of the first two flexagons, a trihexaflexagon and a hexahexaflexagon while he was a student at Princeton University in 1939. His Ph.D. thesis, Connectedness and Coherence, was written in 1941 under the direction of Solomon Lefschetz.
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Revaz Gamkrelidze
#11741
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Revaz Valerianovic Gamkrelidze is a Georgian and Soviet mathematician known for his work in optimal control theory and related fields. Gamkrelidze is a member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the founding editor of Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences.
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Fred Van Oystaeyen
#17841
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Fred Van Oystaeyen , also Freddy van Oystaeyen, is a mathematician and emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He has pioneered work on noncommutative geometry, in particular noncommutative algebraic geometry.
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William A. Stein
#14466
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
William Arthur Stein is a software developer and previously a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. He is the lead developer of SageMath and founder of CoCalc. Stein does computational and theoretical research into the problem of computing with modular forms and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He is considered "a leading expert in the field of computational arithmetic".
Go to Profile#784
Jeremy Gray
#13608
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jeremy John Gray is an English mathematician primarily interested in the history of mathematics. Biography Gray studied mathematics at the University of Oxford from 1966 to 1969, and then at Warwick University, obtaining his PhD in 1980 under the supervision of Ian Stewart and David Fowler. He has worked at the Open University since 1974, and became a lecturer there in 1978. He also lectured at the University of Warwick from 2002 to 2017, teaching a course on the history of mathematics.
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José Adem
#16942
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
José Adem was a Mexican mathematician who worked in algebraic topology, and proved the Adem relations between Steenrod squares. Life and education Born José Adem Chahín in Tuxpan, Veracruz, , Adem showed an interest in mathematics from an early age, and moved to Mexico City in 1941 to pursue a degree in engineering and mathematics. He obtained his B.S. in mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1949. During this time met Solomon Lefschetz, a famous algebraic topologist who was spending prolonged periods of time in Mexico. Lefschetz recognized Adem's mathematical talent, and sent him as a doctoral student to Princeton University where he graduated in 1952.
Go to Profile#786
Claudio Procesi
#12337
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Claudio Procesi is an Italian mathematician, known for works in algebra and representation theory. Career Procesi studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he received his degree in 1963. In 1966 he graduated from the University of Chicago advised by Israel Herstein, with a thesis titled "On rings with polynomial identities". From 1966 he was assistant professor at the University of Rome, 1970 associate professor at the University of Lecce, and 1971 at the University of Pisa. From 1973 he was full professor in Pisa and in 1975 ordinary Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He...
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Bernhard Neumann
#11260
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Bernhard Hermann Neumann was a German-born British-Australian mathematician, who was a leader in the study of group theory. Early life and education After gaining a D.Phil. from Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin in 1932 he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1935 and a Doctor of Science at the University of Manchester in 1954. His doctoral students included Gilbert Baumslag, László Kovács, Michael Newman, and James Wiegold. After war service with the British Army, he became a lecturer at University College, Hull, before moving in 1948 to the University of Manchester, where he spent the next 14 years.
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Donald J. Newman
#17695
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Donald Joseph Newman was an American mathematician. He gave simple proofs of the prime number theorem and the Hardy-Ramanujan partition formula. He excelled on multiple occasions at the annual Putnam competition while studying at City College of New York and New York University, and later received his PhD from Harvard University in 1953.
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Ralph S. Phillips
#16040
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Ralph Saul Phillips was an American mathematician and academic known for his contributions to functional analysis, scattering theory, and servomechanisms. He served as a Professor of mathematics at Stanford University. He made major contributions to acoustical scattering theory in collaboration with Peter Lax, proving remarkable results on local energy decay and the connections between poles of the scattering matrix and the analytic properties of the resolvent. With Lax, he coauthored the widely referred book on scattering theory titled Scattering Theory for Automorphic Functions. Phillips received the 1997 Leroy P.
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Robert McEliece
#5597
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Robert J. McEliece was the Allen E. Puckett Professor and a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology best known for his work in error-correcting coding and information theory. He was the 2004 recipient of the Claude E. Shannon Award and the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He was a life fellow of the IEEE and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.
Go to Profile#791
Sourav Chatterjee
#13990
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Sourav Chatterjee is an Indian mathematician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probability theory. Chatterjee is credited with work on the study of fluctuations in random structures, concentration and super-concentration inequalities, Poisson and other non-normal limits, first-passage percolation, Stein's method and spin glasses. He has received a Sloan Fellowship in mathematics, Tweedie Award, Rollo Davidson Prize, Doeblin Prize, Loève Prize, and Infosys Prize in mathematical sciences. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014.
Go to Profile#792
Teruhisa Matsusaka
#20528
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
was a Japanese-born American mathematician, who specialized in algebraic geometry. Matsusaka received his Ph.D. in 1954 at Kyoto University; he was a member of the Brandeis Mathematics Department from 1961 until his retirement in 1994, and was that department's chair from 1984–1986. He was invited to address the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Edinburgh in 1958 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
Go to Profile#793
Dominic Joyce
#14944
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Dominic David Joyce FRS is a British mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Lincoln College since 1995. His undergraduate and doctoral studies were at Merton College, Oxford. He undertook a DPhil in geometry under the supervision of Simon Donaldson, completed in 1992. After this he held short-term research posts at Christ Church, Oxford, as well as Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley in the United States.
Go to Profile#794
Jonathan Rosenberg
#17117
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jonathan Micah Rosenberg is an American mathematician, working in algebraic topology, operator algebras, K-theory and representation theory, with applications to string theory in physics. Rosenberg received his Ph.D. in 1976, under the supervision of Marc Rieffel, from the University of California, Berkeley . From 1977 to 1981 he was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981, he has been at the University of Maryland at College Park where he is the Ruth M. Davis Professor of Mathematics. He is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .
Go to Profile#795
Alfred Horn
#3775
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Alfred Horn was an American mathematician notable for his work in lattice theory and universal algebra. His 1951 paper "On sentences which are true of direct unions of algebras" described Horn clauses and Horn sentences, which later would form the foundation of logic programming.
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Deane Montgomery
#16144
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Deane Montgomery was an American mathematician specializing in topology who was one of the contributors to the final resolution of Hilbert's fifth problem in the 1950s. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1961 to 1962.
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Vladimir Levenshtein
#4695
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Vladimir Iosifovich Levenshtein was a Russian and Soviet scientist who did research in information theory, error-correcting codes, and combinatorial design. Among other contributions, he is known for the Levenshtein distance and a Levenshtein algorithm, which he developed in 1965.
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Ralph Faudree
#12987
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Ralph Jasper Faudree was a mathematician, a professor of mathematics and the former provost of the University of Memphis. Faudree was born in Durant, Oklahoma. He did his undergraduate studies at Oklahoma Baptist University, graduating in 1961, and received his Ph.D. in 1964 from Purdue University under the supervision of Eugene Schenkman . Faudree was an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley and an assistant professor at the University of Illinois before joining the Memphis State University faculty as an associate professor in 1971. Memphis State became renamed as the Universi...
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Robert J. Lang
#4886
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Robert James Lang is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has studied the mathematics of origami and used computers to study the theories behind origami. He has made great advances in making real-world applications of origami to engineering problems.
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Joachim Lambek
#5574
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Joachim "Jim" Lambek was a Canadian mathematician. He was Peter Redpath Emeritus Professor of Pure Mathematics at McGill University, where he earned his PhD degree in 1950 with Hans Zassenhaus as advisor.
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