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,
#7551
Dawn Tilbury
#82608
Overall Influence
Dawn Marie Tilbury is an American control theorist whose research topics include logic control, networked control systems, robotics, human–machine systems, and autonomous vehicles. She is a professor of mechanical engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, and the head of the directorate for engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#7552
Claude Lemaréchal
#167190
Overall Influence
#7553
Wolfgang Kühnel
#167194
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
#7554
Beate Neumann
#167201
Overall Influence
#7555
Michael William Palmer
#167207
Overall Influence
#7556
C. H. Joseph Chang
#167235
Overall Influence
#7557
Vasilii Vasil'evich Zhikov
#167240
Overall Influence
#7558
Cheon, Jung Hee
#134981
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Cheon, Jung Hee is a South Korean cryptographer and mathematician whose research interest includes computational number theory, cryptography, and information security. He is one of the inventors of braid cryptography, one of group-based cryptography, and approximate homomorphic encryption HEAAN. As one of co-inventors of approximate homomorphic encryption HEaaN, he is actively working on homomorphic encryptions and their applications including machine learning, homomorphic control systems, and DNA computation on encrypted data. He is particularly known for his work on an efficient algorithm on strong DH problem.
Go to Profile#7559
Koh Ono
#167301
Overall Influence
#7560
David F. Andrews
#167316
Overall Influence
#7561
Detlef Peter Van Vuuren
#167416
Overall Influence
#7562
Carl Van Walraven
#167433
Overall Influence
#7563
Eldad Haber
#167467
Overall Influence
#7564
Andrzej Skowroński
#167533
Overall Influence
#7565
Joseph Herbert Abramson
#167577
Overall Influence
#7566
Lude Franke
#167585
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (45 years)
#7567
Paul Edward Norman
#167591
Overall Influence
#7568
Hisashi Okamoto
#152427
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Hisashi Okamoto is a Japanese applied mathematician, specializing in mathematical fluid mechanics and computational fluid dynamics. Okamoto graduated from the University of Tokyo in March 1979. In April 1981 he became a research associate to Hiroshi Fujita at the University of Tokyo. There in 1985 he received his Doctorate of Science with Fujita as advisor. For the academic year 1986–1987 Okamoto was a visiting fellow at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications. In August 1987 Okamoto became an associate professor in the University of Tokyo's Department of Applied Science.
Go to Profile#7569
Donald C. Reynolds
#167606
Overall Influence
#7570
Thomas Kirchartz
#167607
Overall Influence
#7571
Marko Iosifovich Vishik
#167631
Overall Influence
#7572
Richard William Hornung
#167634
Overall Influence
#7573
Niel Hens
#167654
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#7574
Thomas Arthur Zang
#167662
Overall Influence
#7575
Elias Masry
#167672
Overall Influence
#7576
John A. Klobuchar
#167686
Overall Influence
#7577
Peter Skalicky
#39628
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Peter Skalicky is the former rector of TU Wien, Austria. After taking his A-levels in Vienna, he studied physics at TU Wien. He wrote his PhD thesis on Röntgen topography. In 1973 he became an associate professor. Since 1979 he has been a full professor of applied physics. From 1991 until 2011 he was rector of TU Wien. He was followed in this function by Sabine Seidler.
Go to Profile#7578
Jie Chen
#103259
Overall Influence
Jie Chen is a statistician who works as a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Medical College of Georgia. As well as biostatistics, her research interests include change detection. Chen earned a bachelor's degree in statistics from Chongqing University in China in 1985, and became a lecturer at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics from 1985 to 1988. She returned to graduate school for a master's degree from the University of Akron in 1990, and a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in 1995, under the supervision of Arjun Kumar Gupta. She joined the Department o...
Go to Profile#7579
Andrey Muchnik
#134764
Overall Influence
1958 - 2007 (49 years)
Andrey Albertovich Muchnik was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his contributions to mathematical logic. He was awarded the A. N. Kolmogorov Prize in 2006. Biography Muchnik was born on February 24, 1958 to Albert Abramovich Muchnik and Nadezhda Mitrofanovna Ermolaeva. Both of his parents were mathematicians and students of P. S. Novikov. His father, Albert Muchnik, solved Post's problem about the existence of a non-trivial enumerable degree of Turing reducibility.
Go to Profile#7580
Dihua Jiang
#128306
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Dihua Jiang is a Chinese-born American mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of Minnesota working in number theory, automorphic forms, and the Langlands program. Early life and education In 1958, Jiang was born in the Lucheng District of Wenzhou, Zhejiang. He studied at Wenzhou No. 3 Middle School before studying at Zhejiang Normal University, where he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1982. He received a master's degree from East China Normal University in 1987 and a PhD in mathematics from Ohio State University in 1994 under the supervision of Step...
Go to Profile#7581
Jeanette Shakalli
#144302
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (40 years)
Jeanette Shakalli is a Panamanian mathematician best known for her outreach activities in the Republic of Panama. She is currently Executive Director of the Panamanian Foundation for the Promotion of Mathematics a private non-profit foundation established to promote the study of mathematics in Panama.
Go to Profile#7582
Stephen Childress
#167286
Overall Influence
William Stephen Childress is an American applied mathematician, author and professor emeritus at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He works on classical fluid mechanics, asymptotic methods and singular perturbations, geophysical fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics and dynamo theory, mathematical models in biology, and locomotion in fluids. He is also a co-founder of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences's Applied Mathematics Lab.
Go to Profile#7583
Anatoly Styopin
#162706
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Anatoly Mikhailovich Styopin was a Soviet-Russian mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems and ergodic theory. Education and career Stepin was born in Moscow on 20 July 1940. In 1965 he graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University. There he received in 1968 his Ph.D. under Felix Berezin with thesis "Применение метода аппроксимации динамических систем периодическими в спектральной теории" and in 1986 his Russian doctorate with thesis "Спектральные и метрические свойства динамических систем и групп преобразований" . In 1970 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Nice.
Go to Profile#7584
David G. Hartwell
#10367
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Go to Profile#7585
Tony Cragg
#9616
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. Early life and training Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool. His father was an aerospace engineer. He first worked as a lab technician for the British Rubber Producers Research Association after high school. He studied art at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Cheltenham, from 1968 to 1970, and painted at the Wimbledon School of Art, London, from 1970 to 1973. The same year he went on to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, completing an MA in 1977.
Go to Profile#7586
Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter
#125572
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter is an Austrian statistician and professor of applied statistics and econometrics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is known for her research in Bayesian analysis. In 2020 she was the President of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
Go to Profile#7587
Grace E. Kissling
#129264
Overall Influence
Grace Elizabeth Kissling is a biostatistician who works at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as chief statistician for the National Toxicology Program. Kissling graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics. She completed her Ph.D. in biostatistics in 1981 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, supervised by Lawrence L. Kupper, was A Generalized Model for Analysis of Nonindependent Observations.
Go to Profile#7588
Terri Windling
#8566
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
Go to Profile#7589
Yurii Egorov
#162008
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Yurii Vladimirovich Egorov was a Russian-Soviet mathematician who specialized in differential equations. Biography In 1960 he completed his undergraduate studies at the Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University . In 1963 from MSU he received his Ph.D. with the thesis "Некоторые задачи теории оптимального управления в бесконечномерных пространствах" . In 1970 from MSU he received his Russian doctorate of sciences with thesis: "О локальных свойствах псевдодифференциальных операторов главного типа" . He was employed at MSU from 1961 to 1992, and he was a full professor in ...
Go to Profile#7590
Jill Adler
#150043
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Jillian Beryl Adler née Smidt is a South African Professor of Mathematics education at the University of the Witwatersrand and the President of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction . Adler's work has focused on the teaching and learning of mathematics particularly in multilingual classrooms.
Go to Profile#7591
Margaret Wu
#120374
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Margaret Wu is an Australian statistician and psychometrician who specialises in educational measurement. She is an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne. Early life Wu studied statistics at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1972. She worked at Monash University as a research assistant from 1973 to 1975, where she taught herself to program. She worked with Watterson on the Watterson estimator, a means to determine the genetic diversity of a population.
Go to Profile#7592
Marcin Schroeder
#118472
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Marcin Schroeder is a Polish-Japanese mathematician and theoretical physicist, currently a professor and head of basic education and dean of academic affairs at Akita International University, Japan, and President Elect of the International Society for the Study of Information .
Go to Profile#7593
Paula Roberson
#91772
Overall Influence
Paula Karen Roberson is a biostatistician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where she chairs the department of biostatistics. Her research interests include the design of clinical trials, nonparametric statistics, and feature selection. She was president of the Caucus for Women in Statistics in 2015.
Go to Profile#7594
Fabienne Comte
#90285
Overall Influence
Fabienne Comte is a French statistician known for her research on topics including statistical finance, stochastic volatility, autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity, and deconvolution. She is a professor in the unit for mathematics and computer science at the University of Paris.
Go to Profile#7595
Francesca Chiaromonte
#111025
Overall Influence
Francesca Chiaromonte is an Italian statistician known for her work on statistical genetics and dimensionality reduction. She works at Pennsylvania State University as the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences, professor of statistics, and director of the Genome Sciences Institute, and in the Institute of Economics of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy as the scientific coordinator for Economics and Management in the era of Data Science.
Go to Profile#7596
Susan S. Ellenberg
#108166
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Susan S. Ellenberg is an American statistician specializing in the design of clinical trials and in the safety of medical products. She is a professor of biostatistics, medical ethics and health policy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 1993 president of the Society for Clinical Trials and the 1999 President of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society.
Go to Profile#7597
Leonard R. Stephens
#150065
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Leonard R Stephens FRS is a molecular biologist, senior group leader and associate director at the Babraham Institute. Len Stephens has contributed much to the understanding of inositol lipids functions in eukaryotic cells, and in particular in neutrophils. Early highlights were the mapping of new pathways of inositol phosphate synthesis. Together with his long-time collaborator Phillip Thomas Hawkins, he established that PtdInsP2 is the main substrate of receptor-controlled Type 1 phosphoinositide 3-kinases , thus identifying PtdInsP3 as the key output signal produced by this enzyme. They i...
Go to Profile#7598
Kari Astala
#115945
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Kari Astala is a Finnish mathematician, specializing in analysis. Astala graduated from the University of Helsinki with M.Sc. in 1977 and received his doctorate there in 1980 with thesis On Measures of compactness and ideal variations in Banach spaces. In the 1980s and 1990s he held academic appointments at the University of Helsinki and the Academy of Finland. He was a full professor at the University of Jyväskylä from 1995 to 2002, a full professor at the University of Helsinki from 2002 to 2017, and an Academy Professor from 2006 to 2011 at the Academy of Finland. Since 2017 he is an adjun...
Go to Profile#7599
Simon Tatham
#33925
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Simon Tatham is a British computer programmer. He created and maintains PuTTY, a free software implementation of Secure Shell and Telnet for Microsoft Windows and Unix, along with an xterm terminal emulator. He is also the original author of Netwide Assembler , and maintains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games. All of them run natively on Nintendo DS, Symbian S60, Unix , and Windows.
Go to Profile#7600
Noah Diffenbaugh
#90994
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Noah S. Diffenbaugh is an American climate scientist at Stanford University, where he is the Kara J Foundation Professor of Earth System Science and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and an affiliate at the Precourt Institute for Energy. From 2015-2018, he served as editor-in-chief of the peer-review journal Geophysical Research Letters . He is known for his research on the climate system, including the effects of global warming on extreme weather and climate events such as the 2011-2017 California drought.
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