Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#7651

Olivier Strebelle

Olivier Strebelle

#50019

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Olivier Strebelle was a Belgian sculptor. Strebelle was born in Brussels, Belgium on 20 January 1927. His monumental sculptures adorn many public places in Brussels as well as in Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States.

#7652

Alexei Venkov

#167929

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Alexei Borisovich Venkov is a Russian mathematician, specializing in the spectral theory of automorphic forms. Venkov graduated from Leningrad State University in 1969 and received there in 1973 his Russian candidate degree under Ludvig Faddeev. He then became an academic at the Steklov Institute in Saint Petersburg, where he received in 1980 his Russian doctorate with dissertation Spectral theory of automorphic functions . He was a visiting scholar at IHES, at the University of Göttingen, in Paris , at the MSRI, at Stanford University, several times at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, at the University of Lille, and at the Aarhus University.

#7653

Rüdiger Valk

#95169

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Rüdiger Valk is a German mathematician. From 1976 to 2010 he was Professor for Theoretical Computer Science at the Institut für Informatik of the University of Hamburg, Germany. Valk studied mathematics at the University of Bonn . Supervised by Wilfried Brauer, he continued studying for a postgraduate degree at Bonn and received his PhD in Mathematics in 1974. In 1976 he became Professor for Theoretical Computer Science . From 1985 until 2010 he was head of the research group on theoretical foundations of computer science at the University of Hamburg.

#7654

Klaus Schmitt

#169541

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Klaus Schmitt is an American mathematician doing research in nonlinear differential equations, and nonlinear analysis. Schmitt completed the Abitur at Rimbach's Martin-Luther-Schule in 1960. He received a BA in mathematics and physics from St. Olaf College in 1962, an MA and PhD in mathematics from the University of Nebraska in 1967. He began his 43-year career at the University of Utah in 1967, first as assistant, then associate, then as full professor of mathematics. He also served as chairman of the department of mathematics from 1989 to 1992.

#7655

Arthur Hobbs

#168669

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (85 years)

Arthur Hobbs is an American mathematician specializing in graph theory. He spent his teaching career at Texas A&M University. Early and personal life Arthur Hobbs was born on June 19, 1940, in Washington, D.C. He is the eldest child of his family, having two younger brothers. His father was an engineer and later became an attorney. The family moved in 1941 to Pennsylvania, and again after World War II to South Bend, Indiana, where Arthur Hobbs grew up. He married his wife Barbara in 1964; they have two daughters and five grandchildren.

#7656

Florence Newman Trefethen

#130133

Overall Influence

1921 - 2012 (91 years)

Florence Marion Newman Trefethen was an American codebreaker, historian of operations research, poet, and English professor. Early life and education Florence Marion Newman was born in 1921, in Philadelphia. She graduated magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1943.

#7657

Sally McClean

#114623

Overall Influence

Sally Ida McClean is a Northern Irish statistician, computer scientist, and operations researcher. She is a professor of mathematics in the school of computing at Ulster University, and a former president of the Irish Statistical Association. Topics in her research include workforce modeling, health administration, interactive architecture, and survey methodology.

#7658

Jasjeet S. Sekhon

#118013

Overall Influence

Jasjeet "Jas" Singh Sekhon is a data scientist, political scientist, and statistician at Yale University. Sekhon is the Eugene Meyer Professor at Yale University, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a fellow of the Society for Political Methodology. Sekhon's primary research interests lie in causal inference, machine learning, and their intersection. He has also published research on their application in various fields including voting behavior, online experimentation, epidemiology, and medicine.

#7659

Martin Goldstern

#169836

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Martin Goldstern is an Austrian mathematician and university professor for set theory at the TU Wien and head of the research unit 1 of the Institute of Discrete Mathematics and Geometry. His main research lies in set theory of the real line and forcing theory, and applications of set theory in universal algebra.

#7660

Gerald Gardner

#60235

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Gerald Henry Frazier Gardner was an Irish-American mathematician, geophysicist and social activist whose statistical analysis led to the banning of classified advertising segregated by gender in a 1973 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations. On a professional basis, he did early work on the use of monitoring seismological vibrations to identify deposits of natural gas that became industry standards.

#7661

Paul Gray

#48739

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Paul Gray was an American information systems pioneer, and Professor Emeritus at Claremont Graduate University where he was the founding chair of The School of Information Systems and Technology. The School of Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University is the home of the Paul Gray PC Museum.

#7662

John Westcott

#37644

Overall Influence

1920 - 2014 (94 years)

John Hugh Westcott FRS, FREng, Hon FIEE was a British scientist specialising in control systems and Professor of Computing and Automation at Imperial College London. Career Westcott was educated at Wandsworth Grammar School, the City and Guilds College, both in London, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His career began in radar research during World War II. After a year in Germany with the Allied Commission, he obtained a scholarship to the MIT where many scientists returning from the services were addressing the early possibilities of computer applications.

#7663

Subhashis Nag

#169941

Overall Influence

1955 - 1998 (43 years)

Subhashis Nag was an Indian mathematician who specialised in complex analytic geometry, particularly Teichmüller theory, and its relations to string theory. He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 1998, the highest science award in India, in the mathematical sciences category. However, he died on 22 December 1998, before the actual award ceremony was held.

#7664

Kenneth P. Bogart

#168250

Overall Influence

1943 - 2005 (62 years)

Kenneth Paul Bogart was an American mathematician known for his work on preference structures and for his textbook on combinatorics. He was a professor at Dartmouth College. Education and career Bogart was originally from Cincinnati, and was a 1965 graduate of Marietta College. He earned his Ph.D. in 1968 at the California Institute of Technology. His dissertation, Structure Theorems for Local Noether Lattices, was supervised by Robert P. Dilworth.

#7665

William P. Byers

#136155

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

William Paul Byers is a Canadian mathematician and philosopher; professor emeritus in mathematics and statistics at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He completed a BSc , and an MSc from McGill University, and obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, Anosov Flows, was supervised by Stephen Smale.

#7666

Naum Il'ich Feldman

#167998

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

Naum Il'ich Feldman was a Soviet mathematician who specialized in number theory. Life Feldman was born on 26 November 1918 in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast of southeastern Ukraine. He entered in 1936 the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at the University of Leningrad where he specialized in number theory under the supervision of Rodion O. Kuzmin. After his graduation in 1941, Feldman was called up by the army and served from October 1941 until the end of the World war II. For his service, he was awarded the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War , and the medals "For the Cap...

#7667

Huixia Judy Wang

#141157

Overall Influence

Huixia Judy Wang is a statistician who works as a professor of statistics at George Washington University. Topics in her research include quantile regression and the application of biostatistics to cancer.

#7668

Vik Muniz

#8175

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional materials such as tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, dirt, etc., Muniz creates works of art, referencing old master's paintings and celebrity portraits, among other things, and then photographs them. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently represented by...

#7669

Peter Bouwknegt

#153804

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (64 years)

Pier Gerard "Peter" Bouwknegt is professor of theoretical physics and mathematics at the Australian National University , and deputy director of their Mathematical Sciences Institute. He is an adjunct professor at University of Adelaide.

#7670

Michael Akritas

#165461

Overall Influence

Michael G. Akritas is a Greek American statistician and professor emeritus of Statistics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research has focused on nonparametric statistics, factorial designs, censored data, high-dimensional data modeling, astrostatistics, and social statistics.

#7671

Victor Valderrabano

#95634

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (53 years)

Victor Valderrabano is a Swiss orthopedic surgeon and traumatologist specializing in sports traumatology, osteoarthritis surgery and reconstructive surgery of the lower extremity. Career Victor Valderrabano studied human medicine at the University of Zurich / Switzerland, where he received his doctorate in medicine. At the University of Calgary, he then completed a second PhD in biomechanics and osteoarthritis research. He did his residency/fellowship program at the Spital of Davos/Switzerland, Orthopaedic Department of the University Hospital of Basel/Switzerland and Orthopaedic Department o...

#7672

Debbie Dupuis

#71227

Overall Influence

Debbie Janice Dupuis is a Canadian statistician who works in decision science and robust statistics with applications to statistical finance and environmental statistics. She is a professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal.

#7673

Nikolay Morozkin

#125083

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Nikolai Danilovich Morozkin is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , Professor , Rector of Bashkir State University , Honorary Figure of Higher Education of the Russian Federation .

#7674

Julie Legler

#131831

Overall Influence

Julie M. Legler is an American biostatistician and statistics educator. She is a professor of statistics at St. Olaf College. Legler did her undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota, and continued there for a master's degree. As a doctoral student in biostatistics at Harvard University, she became one of the early recipients of the Gertrude Cox Scholarship of the American Statistical Association's Committee on Women in Statistics. Her 1993 dissertation, supervised by Louise M. Ryan, was Statistical Analysis for Multiple Binary Outcomes: The Analysis of Birth Defects Data.

#7675

Judi Hewitt

#132665

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Judith Elaine Hewitt is a Finnish-New Zealand bio-statistician and soft-sediment benthic ecologist. She currently works at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and have with an association with the University of Auckland.

#7676

Haïm Brezis

#170164

Overall Influence

#7677

Marjorie Clarke

#74278

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Marjorie J. "Maggie" Clarke is an American environmental scientist who specializes in recycling participation, waste prevention methods, waste-to-energy/incinerator emissions controls, environmental impacts of the World Trade Center fires and collapse, and community botanical gardening. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks she has focused on increasing participation in New York City's waste prevention and recycling programs.

#7678

Antonio Giorgilli

#167818

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (76 years)

Antonio Giorgilli is an Italian mathematical physicist, known for his work on the perturbative theory of Hamiltonian systems with applications to studies of orbital stability for major and minor planets.

#7679

Rui Song

#127464

Overall Influence

Rui Song is a Chinese-American statistician. Her research interests include machine learning, causal inference, and independence screening for variable selection, with applications to precision medicine and economics. She works for Amazon as a senior principal scientist.

#7680

Karl Apfelbacher

#126212

Overall Influence

Karl Apfelbacher was a German mathematician who served as minister for higher public education in Upper Bavaria-East. He was a student of Arnold Sommerfeld and Heinrich Tietze at the University of Munich, where he received his doctorate in 1939. He went into teaching mathematics and science, as well as administration, in secondary schools. In 1964, he was cited as being Oberstudiendirektor at the Oberrealschule in Burghausen, Altötting. On October 16, 1964, the school was taken over by the Bayerischen Staatsministeriums für Unterricht und Kultus.

#7681

Dick de Jongh

#40047

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Dick Herman Jacobus de Jongh is a Dutch logician and mathematician and a retired professor at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD degree in 1968 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison under supervision of Stephen Kleene with a dissertation titled Investigations on the Intuitionistic Propositional Calculus. De Jongh is mostly known for his work on proof theory, provability logic and intuitionistic logic. De Jongh is a member of the group collectively publishing under the pseudonym L. T. F. Gamut. In 2004, on the occasion of his retirement, the Institute for Logic, Language and C...

#7682

Gad Landau

#77523

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Gad Menahem Landau is an Israeli computer scientist noted for his contributions to combinatorial pattern matching and string algorithms and is the founding department chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Haifa.

#7683

Catherine McGeoch

#42505

Overall Influence

Catherine Cole McGeoch is an American computer scientist specializing in empirical algorithmics and heuristics for NP-hard problems. She is currently Beitzel Professor in Technology and Society at Amherst College. She has been the Editor in Chief of ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics and was a member of the ACM Publications Board.

#7684

Jonathan Wahl

#81778

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (80 years)

Jonathan Wahl is a mathematician based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wahl received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of David Mumford. He earned a B.S. from Yale University in 1965 and M.A. from Yale in 1965.

#7685

Judy R. Dubno

#170203

Overall Influence

Judy R. Dubno is an American scientist and researcher in the field of audiology. She is a distinguished university professor and director of research in the department of otolaryngology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She is recognized for her scientific contributions to the understanding of presbycusis, a condition of hearing loss that occurs gradually for many aging adults. She has been involved in the development and implementation of several new methods for assessing hearing loss, including the Hearing in Noise Test and Speech Intelligibility Index . She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Jerger Career Award for Research in Audiology in 2011.

#7686

Hans-Joachim Bungartz

#114822

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (62 years)

Hans-Joachim Bungartz is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor at the Technical University of Munich and holds the chair for scientific computing there. He was Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science and has been Dean of the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology since October 2022.

#7687

Elizabeth DeLong

#80542

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Ray DeLong is an American biostatistician. She is a professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Duke University, where she chairs the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and is affiliated with the Duke Clinical Research Institute and Duke Cancer Institute.

#7688

Richard Nonas

#59366

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Richard Nonas was an American anthropologist and post-minimalist sculptor. He lived and worked in New York City. Education Nonas was educated in literature and anthropology at University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina. He followed this with field-work studies on Native American sites in Northern Ontario, Canada, and in Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona before becoming a sculptor.

#7689

Yvonne Bishop

#117688

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Yvonne Millicent Mahala Bishop was an English-born statistician who spent her working life in America. She wrote a "classic" book on multivariate statistics, and made important studies of the health effects of anesthetics and air pollution. Later in her career, she became the Director of the Office of Statistical Standards in the Energy Information Administration.

#7690

Kai Salomaa

#92636

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

Kai T. Salomaa is a Finnish Canadian theoretical computer scientist, known for his numerous contributions to the state complexity of finite automata. His highly cited 1994 joint paper with Yu and Zhuang laid the foundations of the area. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals on various subjects in formal language theory. Salomaa is a full professor at Queen's University .

#7691

Robert Dixon

#142663

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Robert Dixon is a British mathematician and graphic artist, known primarily for his book Mathographics and for his plagiarism dispute with Damien Hirst. Dixon was a research associate at the Royal College of Art.

#7692

Merlise A. Clyde

#132566

Overall Influence

Merlise Aycock Clyde is an American statistician known for her work in model averaging for Bayesian statistics. She is a Professor of Statistical Science and immediate past chair of the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University. She was president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis in 2013, and chair of the Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association for 2018.

#7693

George Owen Mackie

#145289

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (96 years)

George Owen Mackie was a British–Canadian zoologist who was a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Victoria. Prior to this, he worked at the University of Alberta Department of Zoology, which he left in 1968. Much of his research focused on invertebrate behavioural physiology. He was born in Lincolnshire, England, on October 20, 1929, the youngest son of Frederick Percival Mackie. After obtaining a B.A. from the University of Oxford in 1953, he obtained an M.A. and a D. Phil from Oxford in 1957. In 1982, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1991, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

#7694

Alain-Jacques Valleron

#70944

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Alain-Jacques Valleron He is a graduate of the École polytechnique and holds a PhD in Science. He was a researcher at Inserm from 1966 to 1981. Professor of Biomathematics at the University of Paris 7 from 1981 to 1991, Professor of Biostatistics / Medical Informatics at the Pierre et marie Curie Faculty of Medicine from 1991 to 2013 and hospital practitioner at Saint-Antoine Hospital .

#7695

Lily Wang

#142902

Overall Influence

Li Lily Wang is a Chinese statistician whose research interests include nonparametric statistics, semiparametric statistics, large data sets and high-dimensional data, and official statistics. She is an associate professor of statistics at George Mason University .

#7696

Melody Goodman

#101349

Overall Influence

Melody S. Goodman is an American biostatistician whose interests include social determinants of health, health literacy, and stakeholder engagement in health research. Goodman has spoken publicly about racial disparities in access to healthcare, and is an advocate for public outreach and engagement on health issues. She is an associate professor of biostatistics and associate dean for research in the New York University School of Global Public Health.

#7697

Thomas David Spearman

#114722

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (88 years)

Thomas David Spearman is an Irish mathematical physicist who is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin , where he spent his career and at various times served as head of the department of pure and applied mathematics, bursar, vice provost and pro-chancellor. He was Professor of Natural Philosophy at TCD from 1966 to 1997. He is the author of 400 years of Mathematics at TCD .

#7698

Alan Selman

#94649

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

Alan Louis Selman was a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his research on structural complexity theory, the study of computational complexity in terms of the relation between complexity classes rather than individual algorithmic problems.

#7699

Kevin Karplus

#30384

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Kevin Karplus is a professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz, currently in the Biomolecular Engineering Department. He is probably best known for work he did as a computer science graduate student at Stanford University on the Karplus–Strong string synthesis algorithm.

#7700

De Witt Sumners

#117731

Overall Influence

De Witt Lee Sumners is an American mathematician, having been the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. He is known for his research in knot theory, topological fluid dynamics, and their application to DNA.

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