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,
#7901
Cynthia Bathurst
#75609
Overall Influence
Cynthia Bathurst is an animal welfare advocate, winner of a national veterinary award, and founder and director of Safe Humane Chicago, a nonprofit which includes the first of its kind Court Case Dog Program.
Go to Profile#7902
Dirk Eddelbuettel
#85172
Overall Influence
Dirk Eddelbuettel is a Canadian statistician, data scientist and researcher. He is the author of the open-source software package Rcpp, written in the R programming language, and has also written the textbook Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp on the topic. He is co-founder of the R In Finance Conference. In addition, he has contributed to many packages in R as well as the Debian project. He is also a co-creator of the Rocker Project bringing Docker to R.
Go to Profile#7903
Albert Joseph McConnell
#97591
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Albert Joseph McConnell was an Irish mathematician and mathematical physicist whose career was entirely spent at Trinity College Dublin , where he also served as Provost. He was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, and studied Mathematics and Philosophy at TCD, graduating BA in 1926. He carried out his postgraduate studies in the Sapienza University of Rome under the direction of Tullio Levi-Civita and was awarded his doctorate there in 1928. That same year, he was the official Irish delegate to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna, where he gave an invited address on "The Tor...
Go to Profile#7904
Rosemary Roberts
#102542
Overall Influence
Rosemary A. Roberts is a statistics educator who led the creation of the AP Statistics course and exam for US secondary school students, and who later chaired the Statistical Education Section of the American Statistical Association. Educated in England and Canada, she spent many years working in the US before her 2013 retirement.
Go to Profile#7905
Raquel Prado
#131060
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Raquel Prado is a Venezuelan Bayesian statistician. She is a professor of statistics in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has been elected president of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the 2019 term.
Go to Profile#7906
Teodor Atanacković
#168011
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Teodor Atanackovic is full professor of Mechanics since 1988 at the Faculty of Technical Sciences at the University of Novi Sad. He graduated from the Mechanical Engineering faculty in Novi Sad in 1969. In 1974 he obtained a PhD degree at Department of Mechanics, University of Kentucky, Lexington Ky. USA. He held Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Since 2009 he is full member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and in 2014 he was elected Professor emeritus of the University of Novi Sad. At present he is Secretary of the Branch in Novi Sad of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Go to Profile#7907
Ho Weang Kee
#145433
Overall Influence
Ho Weang Kee is a Malaysian statistician whose research focuses on the application of statistical methods to genetic data analysis. She is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 2018, Ho received the L'Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talent Award in recognition of her work toward developing a predictive model estimating the risk of breast cancer for Southeast Asian women.
Go to Profile#7908
Ricardo Cortez
#171338
Overall Influence
Ricardo Cortez is an American mathematician and currently the Pendergraft William Larkin Duren Professor at Tulane University. Professional career Ricardo Cortez earned a BS in mechanical engineering in 1986 and a BA in applied mathematics in 1988 from Arizona State University. In 1995, he earned his applied mathematics PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He was an instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, which is New York University's mathematics research school, from 1995-1998. Since 1998 he has been: Assistant Professor, Mathematics Department, Tulane University , Associate Professor, Mathematics Department, Tulane University 2001-2007.
Go to Profile#7909
Michael Ende
#12578
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German writer of fantasy and children's fiction. He is known for his epic fantasy The Neverending Story ; other well-known works include Momo and Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver. His works have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 35 million copies.
Go to Profile#7910
Acheson J. Duncan
#82211
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Acheson Johnston Duncan was a 20th-century statistician and an acknowledged authority in the field of quality control. A native of Leonia, New Jersey, he attended Princeton University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1925, a master's degree in 1927 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1936. He also attended the University of Chicago and Columbia University. He married Helen Foster in 1960, who died at age 91 in 1995 after his death at age 90. He had two step children, Catharine Foster Black and Joseph Foster, seven grandchildren and 5 great grand children in 1995.
Go to Profile#7911
Lori Thombs
#136408
Overall Influence
Lori A. Thombs is an American statistician whose interests include social statistics, time series, and resampling. She is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Missouri, where she directs the Social Science Statistics Center, and president of the Southern Regional Council On Statistics.
Go to Profile#7912
Mohamed Omar
#105700
Overall Influence
Mohamed Omar is a mathematician interested in combinatorics, and algebra. Omar is currently an Associate Professor of Mathematics and the Joseph B. Platt Chair in Effective Teaching at Harvey Mudd College.
Go to Profile#7913
Kahlil Gibran
#52234
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Kahlil G. Gibran , sometimes known as "Kahlil George Gibran" , was a Lebanese American painter and sculptor from Boston, Massachusetts. A student of the painter Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibran first received acclaim as a magic realist painter in the late 1940s when he exhibited with other emerging artists later known as the "Boston Expressionists". Called a "master of materials", as both artist and restorer, Gibran turned to sculpture in the mid-fifties. In 1972, in an effort to separate his identity from his famous relative and namesake, the author of The ...
Go to Profile#7914
Francis Y. L. Chin
#176203
Overall Influence
#7915
Adam Jaffe
#176239
Overall Influence
#7916
Mark de Cataldo
#176268
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Mark Andrea de Cataldo is an Italian mathematician. De Cataldo earned a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 1995, and began teaching at Stony Brook University in 1998–1999, after completing postdoctoral research at the Washington University in St. Louis, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, and Harvard University. He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and has been awarded the Simons Foundation fellowship. In 2019, de Cataldo was elected a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#7917
Bhubaneswar Mishra
#23703
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Bhubaneswar Mishra is an Indian American computer scientist and professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He is known for his applied contributions to bioinformatics, cybersecurity, and computational finance. Mishra is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in Computer Science.
Go to Profile#7918
Robert Penner
#128597
Overall Influence
Robert Clark Penner is an American mathematician whose work in geometry and combinatorics has found applications in high-energy physics and more recently in theoretical biology. He is the son of Sol Penner, an aerospace engineer.
Go to Profile#7919
Friedhelm Eicker
#116046
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
Friedhelm Eicker was a German statistician and former professor at the University of Dortmund. He is known for his contributions in the development of heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors. A native of Radevormwald, Eicker earned his PhD from the University of Mainz in 1956.
Go to Profile#7920
Vladimir Miklyukov
#170199
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Vladimir Michaelovich Miklyukov was a Russian educator in mathematics, and head of the Superslow Process workgroup based at Volgograd State University. Biography In 1970, as a student of Georgy D. Suvorov at Donetsk National University, he defended his Ph.D. thesis Theory of Quasiconformal Mappings in Space. In 1981 Miklyukov and his family moved to Volgograd. He was transferred to the newly built Volgograd State University where he became chairman of the Department of Mathematical Analysis and Theory of Functions.
Go to Profile#7921
Sergey Brin
#176370
Overall Influence
#7922
Deborah Donnell
#117651
Overall Influence
Deborah J. Donnell is a New Zealand and American biostatistician known for her research on the prevention of HIV infection. She is a professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division and Public Health Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an affiliate professor of global health and health services at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#7923
Takeharu Yamanaka
#95167
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Takeharu Yamanaka is a Japanese politician and current mayor of Yokohama, the capital of Kanagawa Prefecture. He defeated incumbent mayor Fumiko Hayashi in the 2021 Yokohama mayoral election. His independent campaign was supported by the Constitutional Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party, and the Communist Party of Japan. Yamanaka's campaign focused on the opposition for a planned integrated resort development and casino for the city which was to be built on Yamashita Pier, criticism against the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and additional sister city relationship with ...
Go to Profile#7924
Roy Thomas
#9917
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Roy William Thomas Jr. is an American comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is possibly best known for introducing the pulp magazine hero Conan the Barbarian to American comics, with a series that added to the storyline of Robert E. Howard's character and helped launch a sword and sorcery trend in comics. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes – particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America – and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and The Avengers, and DC Comic...
Go to Profile#7925
Mary Hardy
#167781
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Mary Rosalyn Hardy is a professor of actuarial science at the University of Waterloo . She pioneered, together with Julia Wirch, the development and application of the conditional tail expectation . Biography Hardy studied mathematics at the University of London and holds a PhD from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She has served as editor of the North American Actuarial Journal and she was previously editor of Annals of Actuarial Science.
Go to Profile#7926
Cathy Woan-Shu Chen
#134138
Overall Influence
Cathy Woan-Shu Chen is a Taiwanese statistician, who works as a distinguished professor of statistics at Feng Chia University and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economics and Management. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Her research interests include Bayesian methods and economic statistics. In 2020, she was elected as a Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.
Go to Profile#7927
Ellen Datlow
#9293
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award . Career Datlow began her career working for Holt, Rinehart and Winston for three years, as well as doing a stint at Crown Publishing Group. She went on to be fiction editor at Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies. She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008 . She was also editor of the webzine Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror...
Go to Profile#7928
Robert R. Jensen
#148887
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Robert Ronald Jensen is an American mathematician, specializing in nonlinear partial differential equations with applications to physics, engineering, game theory, and finance. Jensen graduated in 1971 with B.S. in mathematics from Illinois Institute of Technology. He received in 1975 his Ph.D. from Northwestern University with thesis Finite difference approximation to the free boundary of a parabolic variational inequality under the supervision of Avner Friedman. Jensen was from 1975 to 1977 an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and from 1977 to 1980 a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin's Mathematics Research Center.
Go to Profile#7929
Ratnasingham Shivaji
#157765
Overall Influence
Ratnasingham Shivaji is an American mathematician, focusing in applied math and mathematical biology, currently the H. Barton Excellence Professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and formerly a W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University.
Go to Profile#7930
Shelley Hurwitz
#92366
Overall Influence
Shelley Hurwitz is an American biostatistician. She is the Director of Biostatistics in the Center for Clinical Investigation at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#7931
Byeong Park
#176603
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Byeong Uk Park is a South Korean statistician working in structured nonparametric regression, semiparametric inference and non-Euclidean data analysis. He is Professor of Statistics at the Seoul National University.
Go to Profile#7932
Frank Farris
#126080
Overall Influence
Frank A. Farris is an American mathematician. He is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Santa Clara University. He is also an editor, author, and artist whose work concerns mathematical topics. Farris is known primarily for mathematical exposition, his creation of visual mathematics through computer science, and advocacy for mathematical art as a discipline.
Go to Profile#7933
James Allister Jenkins
#127148
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
James Allister Jenkins was a Canadian–American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis. Early life James A. Jenkins was born 23 September 1923 in Toronto, Ontario and grew up in what is now known as Davisville Village. His father, James Thomas Jenkins, was the head the mathematics department of Jarvis Collegiate Institute. His mother, Maude Zuern, taught high school classics prior to her wedding. The Jenkins family spent their summers at the family farmstead in Sugar Valley, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#7934
M. Vali Siadat
#170909
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
M. Vali Siadat is an Iranian-American mathematician, the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Richard J. Daley College. Professional career Siadat completed his Ph.D. thesis in harmonic analysis at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990 under the supervision of professor Yoram Sagher. He then worked on and completed a second doctorate, Doctor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1997, with a focus in mathematics education, once again with collaboration and under the supervision of professor Sagher. He is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Richard J. Daley College and an adjunct professor of mathematics at Loyola University Chicago.
Go to Profile#7935
Snezhana Abarzhi
#169050
Overall Influence
Snezhana I. Abarzhi is an applied mathematician and mathematical physicist from the former Soviet Union specializing in the dynamics of fluids and plasmas and their applications in nature and technology. Her research has indicated that supernovas explode more slowly and less turbulently than previously thought, changing the understanding of the mechanisms by which heavy atomic nuclei are formed in these explosions. She is Professor and Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Australia.
Go to Profile#7936
Sze-Tsen Hu
#176673
Overall Influence
1914 - 1999 (85 years)
Sze-Tsen Hu , also known as Steve Hu, was a Chinese-American mathematician, specializing in homotopy theory. Hu received his B.S. from the National Central University in Nanking, China in 1938 and his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, England in 1947 with thesis advisor Max Newman.
Go to Profile#7937
Katharine Elizabeth O'Brien
#171196
Overall Influence
1901 - 1998 (97 years)
Katharine Elizabeth O'Brien was an American mathematician, musician and poet. Early life Born in Amesbury, Massachusetts to parents who had emigrated from Ireland, O'Brien's family moved to Maine while at the age of three. She was class valedictorian when she graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine in 1917. She then attended nearby Bates College from which she graduated in 1922 with honors in both mathematics and science. Despite her science-focused majors, she also was drawn to and pursued both poetry and music.
Go to Profile#7938
Lee-Ann C. Hayek
#146695
Overall Influence
Lee-Ann Collins Hayek is the chief mathematical statistician at the National Museum of Natural History. Her work has included studying the proportions of metals in Renaissance bronze, and the response of Pandas to vaccines. With Martin Buzas, she is the author of Surveying Natural Populations: Quantitative Tools for Assessing Biodiversity .
Go to Profile#7939
Angela Dale
#105676
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Angela Dale is a British social scientist and statistician whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data, and the study of women in the workforce. Formerly Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit of City, University of London, and Professor of Quantitative Research and Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester, she is now a professor emerita at Manchester.
Go to Profile#7940
Vladimir Petviashvili
#95562
Overall Influence
1936 - 1993 (57 years)
Vladimir Iosifovich Petviashvili was a Soviet physicist from Georgia. Petviashvili graduated from Tbilisi State University in 1959, where he also completed his doctoral studies. In 1963–1965, he was research assistant at the Institute of Physics of the Andronikashvili Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR. Since 1965 he worked at the Kurchatov Institute and at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1992, Petviashvili received the I. Tamm Prize for a series of works on Turbulence and eddy current structures in plasma.
Go to Profile#7941
George H. Mealy
#23294
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
George H. Mealy was an American mathematician and computer scientist who invented the namesake Mealy machine, a type of finite state transducer. He was also a pioneer of modular programming, one of the lead designers of the IPL-V programming language, and an early advocate of macro processors in assembly language programming.
Go to Profile#7942
Ulrike Grömping
#156873
Overall Influence
Ulrike Grömping is a German statistician known for her work on regression analysis with variable importance, and for her R package relaimpo for performing linear regression with relative importance. She is Professor for Applied Statistics and Business Mathematics at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik.
Go to Profile#7943
Robin Medforth-Mills
#48986
Overall Influence
1942 - 2002 (60 years)
Leslie Robin Medforth-Mills was a British professor of Geography at the University of Durham and a United Nations official. Family Medforth-Mills was the son of Cyril Mills and Nora Medforth . He married Princess Elena of Romania at a civil ceremony on 20 July 1983 in Durham, England, which was followed by a religious ceremony on 24 September 1983 at the Greek Orthodox Church in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#7944
Allan L. McCutcheon
#136263
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Allan Lee McCutcheon was an American sociologist and statistician. He is best known for his work in survey research and methods, as well as for his contributions to categorical data analysis, especially to latent class analysis.
Go to Profile#7945
Rebecca Andridge
#145737
Overall Influence
Rebecca Roberts Andridge is an American statistician. Her statistical research concerns the imputation of missing data and the statistics of group-randomized trials; she has also performed highly-cited applied statistical work on omega-3 nutritional supplements and on the health benefits of using yoga to lower stress. Andridge is an associate professor of biostatistics at the Ohio State University.
Go to Profile#7946
Mei-Ling Ting Lee
#124690
Overall Influence
Mei-Ling Ting Lee is a Taiwanese-American biostatistician known for her research on microarrays. She is a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Lifetime Data Analysis. She was president of the International Chinese Statistical Association for 2016.
Go to Profile#7947
Mark Adler
#176811
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
#7948
Don Hahn
#14342
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Donald Paul Hahn is an American film producer who is credited with producing some of the most successful animated films in recent history, including Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
Go to Profile#7949
Kameshwar Prasad
#69167
Overall Influence
Kameshwar Prasad is an Indian neurologist, medical researcher, academic and the head of the Department of Neurology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi , known as a proponent of evidence-based medicine and evidence-based healthcare . The government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 1991.
Go to Profile#7950
Jennifer Brown
#149672
Overall Influence
Jennifer Ann Brown is a New Zealand statistician, currently a professor at the University of Canterbury and the former president of the New Zealand Statistical Association. Brown is interested in problems of environmental statistics such as monitoring endangered or invasive species, and in the statistical problems such as experimental design and change detection needed to accomplish those tasks. She is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Canterbury, head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Canterbury, and associate director of the Biomathematics Research Centre.
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