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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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#7851

Lothar Fischer

#32564

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Lothar Fischer was a German sculptor. He was born in Germersheim, Palatinate. Between 1952 and 1958 he studied under Professor Heinrich Kirchner at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. In 1958, he received a three-month scholarship to the Villa Massimo in Rome from the Arnold’sche Stiftung . After this he joined the painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer in founding the group SPUR, which in 1959 entered the Situationist International. That year he participated in the Junge Kunst exhibition in Ulm.

#7852

Alexander Provan Robertson

#151626

Overall Influence

1925 - 1995 (70 years)

Alexander Provan Robertson FRSE FIMA was a 20th century Scottish mathematician who emigrated to Australia. Life He was born on 16 June 1925 in Glasgow the only child of an assistant railway station master. He was educated at Shawlands Academy and won a bursary to Glasgow University in 1942, graduating MA in 1946. After 18 months assisting in lectures in Mathematics he won the Ferguson Scholarship and went to Cambridge University to begin the Mathematics Tripos, gaining a BA in 1951 and doctorate.

#7853

Jean-Michel Salanskis

#108783

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (74 years)

Jean-Michel Emmanuel Salanskis is a French philosopher and mathematician, professor of science and philosophy at the University of Paris X Nanterre. Life Originally gaining a Diplôme d'études approfondies in pure mathematics he went on to study philosophy with Luis Puig and Jean-Francois Lyotard from 1974 to 1983. In1986 he completed a doctoral dissertation on Le continu et le discret .

#7854

Michael J. Freedman

#174704

Overall Influence

#7855

Linda J. Young

#131252

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (73 years)

Linda Jean Young is the Chief Mathematical Statistician and Director of Research and Development at the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Her research interests include integrating diverse data especially that involving spatial data, agricultural data, and statistical ecology.

#7856

Natalie Dean

#127483

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (38 years)

Natalie E. Dean is an American biostatistician specializing in infectious disease epidemiology. Dean is currently an assistant professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida. Her research involves epidemiological modeling of outbreaks, including Ebola, Zika and COVID-19.

#7857

Richard Loree Anderson

#120154

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Richard Loree Anderson was an American econometrician. He was a Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University from 1941 to 1966. In 1967, he took up chairmanship of the newly established Department of Statistics at the University of Kentucky, a position he held until 1979. In 1951 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. While a professor at the University of Kentucky, he consulted with a number of drug companies on clinical trials. Even before, he had been consulting several computer programming companies including IMSL, BMDP, and SAS.

#7858

Yuri Ofman

#167976

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (86 years)

Yuri Petrovich Ofman is a Russian mathematician who works in computational complexity theory. He obtained his Doctorate from Moscow State University, where he was advised by Andrey Kolmogorov. He did important early work on parallel algorithms for prefix sums and their application in the design of Boolean circuits for addition.

#7859

Fjalar Finnäs

#89752

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Fjalar Finnäs is a Finnish professor of demographics at the Åbo Akademi University. He is currently focusing on the demographics of the Swedish-speaking Finns. His recent research was in Ethno-Linguistic Exogamy and Divorce.

#7860

Detlef Peter Van Vuuren

#174805

Overall Influence

#7861

András Gyárfás

#174832

Overall Influence

#7862

Sündüz Keleş

#141883

Overall Influence

Sündüz Keleş is a Turkish statistician specializing in statistical methods in genomics. She is a professor of statistics and of biostatistics and medical informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research has included the development of the FreeHi-C system for generating synthetic Hi-C data.

#7863

Detlef Müller

#174885

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Detlef Horst Müller is a German mathematician, specializing in analysis. Müller received 1981 his doctorate from the University of Bielefeld with thesis 1927–2017 His research deals with harmonic analysis with applications to partial differential equations.

#7864

Bill Reid

#10838

Overall Influence

1920 - 1998 (78 years)

William Ronald Reid Jr. was a Haida artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid is regarded as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century.

#7865

Christof Geiß

#174914

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Christof Geiß, also called Geiss Hahn or Geiß Hahn, is a German mathematician. Geiß studied mathematics at the University of Bayreuth, where he received in 1990 his Diplom with Diplomarbeit Darstellungsendliche Algebren und multiplikative Basen and in 1993 his doctorate. His doctoral thesis Tame distributive algebras and related topics was written under the supervision of Wolfgang Erich Müller and José Antonio de la Peña. Geiß does research and teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México , where he studied already in 1991/92 and became in 1993 an Investigador Associado. He is there ...

#7866

Andrej Pazman

#169740

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (87 years)

Andrej Pázman is a Slovak mathematician working in the area of optimum experimental design and in the theory of nonlinear statistical models. He is an elected fellow of the International Statistical Institute , of the Learned Society of SAS and also a member of the Royal Statistical Society . He wrote also several books, three of them are monographs published in English. Today there are all presented by Springer. He obtained the Price of the Slovak Literary Fund for the Nonlinear statistical models . In 2004, he obtained the WU Best Paper Award der Stadt Wien , in 2008, the Golden Medal o...

#7867

Robert B. Kamm

#43551

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Robert B. Kamm served as the 13th president of Oklahoma State University–Stillwater from July 1, 1966 to January 31, 1977. He was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for the United States Senate in 1978, losing to Democratic nominee and then-Governor David Boren.

#7868

Aram Arutyunov

#128197

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (72 years)

Aram Arutyunov is a Russian mathematician, Professor, Dr.Sc., a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University and the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. He defended the thesis «Perturbation of optimal control problems and necessary conditions for the extremum of the first and second order» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences . and was awarded the title of Professor . He has authored seven books and 318 scientific articles.

#7869

Renzo Fenci

#51642

Overall Influence

1914 - 1999 (85 years)

Renzo G. Fenci was an Italian-American artist and arts educator, best known for his bronze sculpture. He worked in 1942 as a New Deal artist with the United States Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture.

#7870

Mohammad Reza Darafsheh

#83273

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (75 years)

Mohammad Reza Darafsheh is an Iranian Mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Tehran, and a member of the executive committee of the Iranian Mathematical Society. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Tehran with first rank in 1974 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Birmingham in 1975 and 1978 respectively under the supervision of Donald Livingston. His dissertation was titled "On some Subgroups of C_1." He has been a faculty member at the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz from 1978 to 1989, and from 1989 to present at the University of Tehran, where he chaired the mathematics department from 1995 to 1999 he has advised 33 Ph.D.

#7871

Dominique Haughton

#115681

Overall Influence

Dominique Marie-Annick Haughton is a French statistician whose research interests include business analytics, standards of living, and applications of statistics to music. She is a professor of mathematical sciences at Bentley University. She is also an associated researcher with the research center on Statistique, Analyse et Modélisation Multidisciplinaire at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

#7872

Kevin Houston

#168527

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (57 years)

Kevin Houston is a Professor of Mathematics Education and Public Engagement in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds and was previously a lecturer there, a post he held since 2005. Prior to that, he was a lecturer at Middlesex University and a research associate at the University of Liverpool. His research is on singularity theory. He is education secretary of the London Mathematical Society.

#7873

Ruth Rice Puffer

#83557

Overall Influence

1907 - 2002 (95 years)

Ruth Rice Puffer was an American biostatistician who headed the Department of Health Statistics of the Pan American Health Organization, where she led the Inter-American Investigation of Childhood Mortality.

#7874

Bruce M. Boghosian

#84152

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (70 years)

Prof. Bruce Michael Boghosian is an American mathematician. He has been a Professor of Mathematics at Tufts University since 2000, and served as chair of Mathematics there from 2006 to 2010. He also holds adjunct positions in the Tufts University Departments of Physics and Computer Science.

#7875

C S Yogananda

#170457

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (65 years)

C S Yogananda is a mathematician, currently serving as Professor of Mathematics at J.S.S Science and Technology University, Mysore. He is also an author and an entrepreneur. His writings of Mathematics have been published by many distinguished publications.

#7876

Kimberly Sellers

#102718

Overall Influence

Kimberly Flagg Sellers is an American statistician. She has been the head of the statistics department at North Carolina State University since 2023, where she is the first Black woman in the university's history to lead a science department. Previously, Dr. Sellers was a full professor of statistics at Georgetown University and a principal researcher in the Center for Statistical Research and Methodology of the United States Census Bureau, the former chair of the Committee on Women in Statistics of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

#7877

Alyson Wilson

#169278

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (58 years)

Alyson Gabbard Wilson is an American statistician known for her work on Bayesian methods for reliability estimation and on military applications of statistics. She is a professor of statistics at North Carolina State University, where she is also Associate Vice Chancellor for National Security and Special Research Initiatives.

#7878

Alexander Pechen

#159377

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (46 years)

Alexander Nikolayevich Pechen is a Russian physicist and mathematician. In 2009 he became a laureate of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists , in 2016 was elected to Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences among about 500 top Russian researchers aged under fifty.

#7879

István Vincze

#155608

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

István Vincze was a Hungarian mathematician, known for his contributions to number theory, non-parametric statistics, empirical distribution, Cramér–Rao inequality, and information theory. Considered by many, as an expert in theoretical and applied statistics, he was the founder of the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy, and was the Head of the Statistics Department. He also held the post of professor at Faculty of Science of the Eötvös Loránd University. He wrote over 100 academic papers, authored 10 books, and was a speaker at several conferences, including the Berkeley Symposiums in 1960, 1965, and 1970.

#7880

Doug Lind

#141496

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Doug Lind is an American mathematician specializing in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Lind was named as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. He is a board member of Spectra, an association for LGBT mathematicians.

#7881

Michael Edward Ash

Michael Edward Ash

#53742

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Michael Edward Ash was a British mathematician and brewer. Ash led a team that invented a nitrogenated dispense system for Guinness stout first released in 1959, which evolved to become the beer now sold globally as Draught Guinness. As the manager in charge of the Easy Serve project, Ash is credited as the inventor of nitrogenated beer . He was Managing Director of Crookes Laboratories where he was responsible for securing the license for an early anti-depressant in the UK, Prothiaden.

#7882

James Thomas Beale

#147676

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

James Thomas Beale is an American mathematician, specializing in fluid dynamics, partial differential equations, and numerical analysis. J. Thomas Beale grew up in Savannah, Georgia. In 1967 he graduated from California Institute of Technology with a B.S. in mathematics. In 1973 he received his PhD in mathematics from Stanford University. His PhD thesis Purely imaginary scattering frequencies for exterior domains. was written under the supervision of Ralph S. Phillips. Soon after receiving his PhD Beale became a faculty member at Tulane University. In 1983 he resigned from Tulane University...

#7883

Michael Hayden

#91362

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (82 years)

Michael Hayden is a Canadian artist who is noted for his artworks incorporating neon lighting. Career Hayden was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the son of a designer who moved to Toronto with his family. Hayden attended the Ontario College of Art and while there created a ten-room presentation of sights, sounds, and smells, called "Mind Excursion". His best-known commission is Sky's the Limit at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago's United Airlines terminal . Other prominent commissions include Arc en Ciel , which was formerly installed at Yorkdale subway station in Toronto, York E...

#7884

Joerg Hasford

#137520

Overall Influence

1950 - 2021 (71 years)

Joerg Hasford is a German physician, biometrician, and epidemiologist. He is emeritus professor in the Institute for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, chair of the Ethics Committee of the Physicians’ Chamber of the Free State of Bavaria, president of the Association of the Research Ethics Committees in Germany and a member of the Expert Group on Clinical Trials of the European Commission. He has been influential in the study of safety of drugs and pharmacoepidemiology. He was one of the first biostatisticians to look at reliably compiled drug dosing history data in light of pharmacometric consequences.

#7885

Douglas Jones

#99200

Overall Influence

1922 - 2013 (91 years)

Douglas Jones MBE, FRS, FRSE was a mathematician known for his work in the field of electromagnetism. He was described by The Scotsman as "one of the most outstanding British mathematicians of his generation".

#7886

Penny Whetton

#42047

Overall Influence

1958 - 2019 (61 years)

Penelope Whetton was a climatologist and an expert in regional climate change projections due to global warming and in the impacts of those changes. Her primary scientific focus was Australia. Early life Whetton was born in Melbourne, Victoria, on 5 January 1958. She held a Bachelor of Science , majoring in physics, and an honours year in meteorology, from the University of Melbourne. She received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same university in 1986.

#7887

James Renwick

#52107

Overall Influence

James Arthur Renwick CRSNZ is a New Zealand weather and climate researcher. He is professor of physical geography at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in large-scale climate variations. He was awarded the 2018 New Zealand Prime Minister's Science Prize for Communication by Jacinda Ardern.

#7888

David Kent Harrison

#124254

Overall Influence

1931 - 1999 (68 years)

David Kent Harrison was an American mathematician, specializing in algebra, particularly homological algebra and valuation theory. He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1957; his dissertation, titled On torsion free abelian groups, was written under the supervision of Emil Artin.

#7889

Alison Motsinger-Reif

#158151

Overall Influence

Alison Anne Motsinger-Reif is an American biostatistician and human geneticist specialized in association analyses, big data, and genomic analyses. In December 2018, she became the chief of the biostatistics and computational biology branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Montsinger-Reif was previously a professor of statistics at the North Carolina State University.

#7890

Brisa Sánchez

#156041

Overall Influence

Brisa N. Sánchez is a Mexican-American biostatistician and environmental epidemiologist, whose research has included work on the spatial analysis of fast food restaurants, on nutrition in schools, on the relation between the characteristics of neighborhoods and the health of their residents, on the water infrastructure in Mexico City, and on latent variable models in environmental statistics. She is the Dornsife Professor of Biostatistics at Drexel University.

#7891

June Morita

#150705

Overall Influence

June Gloria Morita is an American statistician and statistics educator. She is a principal lecturer emerita in statistics at the University of Washington, and is known for her innovative lessons in statistics based on examples from real life. For instance, one of her classes tested whether helium-filled footballs travel farther than air-filled footballs, with the assistance of her son, Washington Huskies football place-kicker Eric Guttorp. Another lesson, for local elementary school students, tested the mark and recapture method by catching fish at the school's fish pond.

#7892

Adrian Ioviță

#94603

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (71 years)

Adrian Ioviță is a Romanian-Canadian mathematician, specializing in arithmetic algebraic geometry and p-adic cohomology theories. Education Born in Timișoara, Romania, Iovita received in 1978 his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Bucharest. He worked as a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, obtaining a Ph.D. degree in 1991 from the University of Bucharest with thesis On local classfield theory written under the direction of Nicolae Popescu. He received in 1996 a doctorate in mathematics from Boston University. His doctoral thesis there was supervised by Glenn H.

#7893

Robert B. Davis

#148476

Overall Influence

1926 - 1997 (71 years)

Robert B. Davis was an American mathematician and mathematics educator. Davis was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. He graduated from MIT with a B.S, M.S, and Ph.D. in mathematics. He was a professor and researcher at the University of New Hampshire, Syracuse University, the University of Illinois and Rutgers University, where he was named New Jersey Professor of Mathematics Education in 1988. He was one of the founders of the Madison Project, a study of mathematics education which spanned 15 years. The project is named for Madison Junior High School in Syracuse, where it began. The project...

#7894

Paul McNicholas

#172921

Overall Influence

Paul D. McNicholas is an Irish-Canadian statistician. He is a professor and University Scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University. In 2015, McNicholas was awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics. McNicholas uses computational statistics techniques, and mixture models in particular, to gain insight into large and complex datasets. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Classification.

#7895

Carlos J. Moreno

#113530

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (79 years)

Carlos Julio Moreno is a Colombian mathematician and faculty member at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . His B.A. and his Ph.D. in mathematics were earned at New York University. Moreno has over sixty publications, including two books, on topics dealing with algebra and number theory.

#7896

Zhu Miaolong

#134533

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (83 years)

ZHU Miaolong is a Chinese mathematician, educator and expert in space technology. He is the former President and current Honorary President of the Qingdao University. Biography Zhu was born in Fenghua, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province. 1966, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang University. July 1978, he became a lecturer at Northwest Industrial University. 1979, he was promoted into associate professor. He was transferred into the University of Science and Technology of China, and became a professor there. Then he went to Qingdao University in Qingdao, Shandong Province, and became the Vice-president of the university.

#7897

David H. Bailey

#175741

Overall Influence

#7898

Margarete Seeler

Margarete Seeler

#80280

Overall Influence

1909 - 1996 (87 years)

Margarete Seeler was a German-born American artist, designer, educator, and author. She was known for work as a goldsmith, her enamelwork, graphic design, and her paintings. She was one of the best known enamelers in the United States, specifically for her cloisonné work. She published two books on enameling, The Art of Enameling and Enamel Medium for Fine Art . Seeler was elected as a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1993.

#7899

F. Reese Harvey

#175775

Overall Influence

Frank Reese Harvey is Professor Emeritus of mathematics at Rice University, known for contributions to the field of differential geometry. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1966, under the direction of Hikosaburo Komatsu. Over half of his work has been done in collaboration with Blaine Lawson. Their 1982 introduction of calibrated geometry, in particular, is among the most widely cited papers in differential geometry. It is instrumental in the formulation of the SYZ conjecture.

#7900

Hans Peter Schlickewei

Hans Peter Schlickewei

#175779

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (78 years)

Hans Peter Schlickewei is a German mathematician, specializing in number theory and, in particular, the theory of transcendental numbers. Schlickewei received his doctorate in 1975 at the University of Freiburg under the supervision of Theodor Schneider. Schlickewei is a professor at the University of Marburg.

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