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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#801
M. S. Narasimhan
#11846
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Mudumbai Seshachalu Narasimhan was an Indian mathematician. His focus areas included number theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and partial differential equations. He was a pioneer in the study of moduli spaces of holomorphic vector bundles on projective varieties. His work is considered the foundation for Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence that links differential geometry and algebraic geometry of vector bundles over complex manifolds. He was also known for his collaboration with mathematician C. S. Seshadri, for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem which proved the n...
Go to Profile#802
Fabien Morel
#18069
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Fabien Morel is a French algebraic geometer and key developer of A¹ homotopy theory with Vladimir Voevodsky. Among his accomplishments is the proof of the Friedlander conjecture, and the proof of the complex case of the Milnor conjecture stated in Milnor's 1983 paper 'On the homology of Lie groups made discrete'. This result was presented at the Second Abel Conference, held in January–February 2012.
Go to Profile#803
Joachim Cuntz
#12009
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Joachim Cuntz is a German mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Münster. Work Joachim Cuntz has made fundamental contributions to the area of C*-algebras and to the field of noncommutative geometry in the sense of Alain Connes. He initiated the analysis of the structure of simple C*-algebras and introduced new methods and examples, including the Cuntz algebras and the Cuntz semigroup. He was one of the first to apply K-theory to noncommutative operator algebras and contributed to the development of that theory. In collaboration with Daniel Quillen, he developed a new approach to cyclic cohomology and proved the excision property of periodic cyclic theory.
Go to Profile#804
Suren Arakelov
#18115
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Suren Yurievich Arakelov is a Soviet mathematician of Armenian descent known for developing Arakelov theory. Biography From 1965 onwards Arakelov attended the Mathematics department of Moscow State University, where he graduated in 1971.
Go to Profile#805
Clément Mouhot
#10657
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Clément Mouhot is a French mathematician and academic. He is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research is primarily in partial differential equations and mathematical physics .
Go to Profile#806
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
#9038
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory. In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism", a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics as well as computer science bear his name . Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather.
Go to Profile#807
Ulrich Kohlenbach
#7297
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Ulrich Wilhelm Kohlenbach is a German mathematician and professor of algebra and logic at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research interests lie in the field of proof mining. Kohlenbach was president of the German Association for Mathematical Logic and for Basic Research in the Exact Sciences from 2008 to 2012 and president of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 2016 to 2018.
Go to Profile#808
Hélène Esnault
#13403
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Hélène Esnault is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Biography Born in Paris, Esnault earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Paris VII. She wrote her dissertation on Singularites rationnelles et groupes algebriques under the direction of Lê Dũng Tráng.
Go to Profile#809
Jean Pedersen
#18362
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Jean J. Pedersen was an American mathematician and author particularly known for her works on the mathematics of paper folding. Education and career Pedersen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of an ophthalmologist and a teacher. She studied home economics changing to a double major in mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, before becoming a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Utah under the supervision of E. Allen Davis.
Go to Profile#810
Wolfgang Haack
#16141
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Wolfgang Siegfried Haack was a German mathematician and aerodynamicist. He in 1941 and William Sears in 1947 independently discovered the Sears–Haack body. Life Wolfgang Haack studied mechanical engineering at the Leibniz University Hannover and mathematics in Jena. He earned his doctorate in 1926 at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. After a short study and research period in Hamburg and a job as an assistant at the Technical University of Stuttgart he habilitated in 1929 at the TH Danzig . In 1935 he moved to the TH Berlin and in 1937, he followed the call to the TH Karlsruhe. During the Second World War he worked on projectile design.
Go to Profile#811
Churchill Eisenhart
#12488
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Churchill Eisenhart was a United States mathematician. He was Chief of the Statistical Engineering Laboratory , Applied Mathematics Division of the National Bureau of Standards . Biography Eisenhart was the son of Luther Eisenhart, a prominent mathematician in his own right.
Go to Profile#812
Harry Kesten
#14246
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Harry Kesten was a Jewish American mathematician best known for his work in probability, most notably on random walks on groupss and graphs, random matrices, branching processes, and percolation theory.
Go to Profile#813
Radia Perlman
#2851
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol , which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for exampl...
Go to Profile#814
Germund Dahlquist
#9758
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Germund Dahlquist was a Swedish mathematician known primarily for his early contributions to the theory of numerical analysis as applied to differential equations. Dahlquist began to study mathematics at Stockholm University in 1942 at the age of 17, where he cites the Danish mathematician Harald Bohr as a profound influence.
Go to Profile#815
Irving S. Reed
#3899
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Irving Stoy Reed was an American mathematician and engineer. He is best known for co-inventing a class of algebraic error-correcting and error-detecting codes known as Reed–Solomon codes in collaboration with Gustave Solomon. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller code.
Go to Profile#816
Ivars Peterson
#8933
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ivars Peterson is an American mathematics writer. Early life Peterson received a B.Sc. in Physics and Chemistry and a B.Ed. in Education from the University of Toronto. Peterson received an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Go to Profile#817
James E. Humphreys
#17494
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
James Edward Humphreys was an American mathematician who worked in algebraic groups, Lie groups, and Lie algebras and applications of these mathematical structures. He is known as the author of several mathematical texts, such as Introduction to Lie Algebras and Representation Theory and Reflection Groups and Coxeter Groups.
Go to Profile#818
Wei Dongyi
#18048
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (33 years)
Wei Dongyi is a Chinese mathematician, born in Jinan, Shandong province. Currently, he is an assistant professor and assistant researcher at School of Mathematical Science, Peking University. Wei Dongyi graduated from Attached Senior School of Shandong Normal University, studied at Peking University since 2010, earned his bachelor's degree in 2014 and Phd in 2018 under Tian Gang as his doctoral advisor. His research field includes partial differential equations and differential geometry. In December 2019, he became assistant professor. His simple living style attracted huge attention from Chinese internet.
Go to Profile#819
Miklós Laczkovich
#17255
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Miklós Laczkovich is a Hungarian mathematician mainly noted for his work on real analysis and geometric measure theory. His most famous result is the solution of Tarski's circle-squaring problem in 1989.
Go to Profile#820
Richard Canary
#18429
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Richard Douglas Canary is an American mathematician working mainly on low-dimensional topology. He is a professor at the University of Michigan. Canary obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of William Paul Thurston, with the thesis Hyperbolic Structures on 3-Manifolds with Compressible Boundaries.
Go to Profile#821
Jane M. Hawkins
#18676
Overall Influence
Jane Margaret Hawkins is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research concerns dynamical systems and complex dynamics, including cellular automata and Julia sets. More recent research has included work on cellular automata models for the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and Ebola.
Go to Profile#822
Debabrata Basu
#14270
Overall Influence
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
Debabrata Basu was an Indian statistician who made fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics. Basu invented simple examples that displayed some difficulties of likelihood-based statistics and frequentist statistics; Basu's paradoxes were especially important in the development of survey sampling. In statistical theory, Basu's theorem established the independence of a complete sufficient statistic and an ancillary statistic.
Go to Profile#823
Arthur P. Dempster
#8341
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Arthur Pentland Dempster is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957. Biography Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics and M.A. in mathematics , both from the University of Toronto. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.
Go to Profile#824
Robert Henry Risch
#21166
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Henry Risch is an American mathematician who worked on computer algebra and is known for his work on symbolic integration, specifically the Risch algorithm. This result was quoted as a milestone in the development of mathematics:
Go to Profile#825
Denis Serre
#16873
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Denis Serre is a French mathematician who works as a professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he has chaired the mathematics department since 2012. His research concerns partial differential equations, hydrodynamics, and conservation laws.
Go to Profile#826
Michael Maschler
#13566
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Michael Bahir Maschler was an Israeli mathematician well known for his contributions to the field of game theory. He was a professor in the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. In 2012, the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society founded the Maschler Prize, an annual prize awarded to an outstanding research student in game theory and related topics in Israel.
Go to Profile#827
Peter J. Huber
#16988
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Peter Jost Huber is a Swiss statistician. He is known for his contributions to the development of heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors. A native of Wohlen, Aargau, Huber earned his Ph.D. at the ETH Zürich in 1962, under supervision of Beno Eckmann. He later changed his research area from topology to statistics. In 2012, he became one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#828
Bill Schelter
#14169
Overall Influence
1947 - 2001 (54 years)
William Frederick Schelter was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called Maxima. Schelter authored Austin Kyoto Common Lisp under contract with IBM. AKCL formed the foundation for Axiom, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the GNU C compiler to the Intel 386 architecture, used in the original ...
Go to Profile#829
Björn Engquist
#13241
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Björn Engquist has been a leading contributor in the areas of multiscale modeling and scientific computing, and a productive educator of applied mathematicians. Life He received his PhD in numerical analysis from University of Uppsala in 1975, and taught there during the following years while also holding a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2001, he moved to Princeton University as the Michael Henry Stater University Professor of Mathematics and served as the director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He has also been professor at the Royal...
Go to Profile#830
Peter J. Olver
#19151
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter John Olver is a British-American mathematician working in differential geometry. Education and career After moving to the USA in 1961, Olver obtained a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics at Brown University in 1973 and a PhD in Mathematics at Harvard University in 1976. His PhD thesis was entitled "Symmetry Groups of Partial Differential Equations" and has been written under the supervision of Garrett Birkhoff.
Go to Profile#831
Roger Evans Howe
#15702
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Roger Evans Howe is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Yale University, and Curtis D. Robert Endowed Chair in Mathematics Education at Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to representation theory, in particular for the notion of a reductive dual pair and the Howe correspondence, and his contributions to mathematics education.
Go to Profile#832
Carl Hewitt
#534
Overall Influence
2000 - 2022 (22 years)
Carl Eddie Hewitt was an American computer scientist who designed the Planner programming language for automated planning and the actor model of concurrent computation, which have been influential in the development of logic, functional and object-oriented programming. Planner was the first programming language based on procedural plans invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. The actor model influenced the development of the Scheme programming language, the π-calculus, and served as an inspiration for several other programming languages.
Go to Profile#833
Gustave Solomon
#6373
Overall Influence
1930 - 1996 (66 years)
Gustave Solomon was an American mathematician and electrical engineer who was one of the founders of the algebraic theory of error detection and correction. Career Solomon completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 under direction of Kenkichi Iwasawa.
Go to Profile#834
Theodor Estermann
#19104
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Theodor Estermann was a German-born American mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory. The Estermann measure, a measure of the central symmetry of a convex set in the Euclidean plane, is named after him.
Go to Profile#835
Emanuel Parzen
#17178
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Emanuel Parzen was an American statistician. He worked and published on signal detection theory and time series analysis, where he pioneered the use of kernel density estimation . Parzen was the recipient of the 1994 Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal of the American Statistical Association.
Go to Profile#836
Ieke Moerdijk
#11252
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Izak Moerdijk is a Dutch mathematician, currently working at Utrecht University, who in 2012 won the Spinoza prize. Education and career Moerdijk studied mathematics, philosophy and general linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD cum laude in 1985 at the same institution. His thesis was entitled Topics in intuitionism and topos theory and was written under the supervision of Anne Sjerp Troelstra.
Go to Profile#837
Andrew Majda
#13078
Overall Influence
1949 - 2021 (72 years)
Andrew Joseph Majda was an American mathematician and the Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He was known for his theoretical contributions to partial differential equations as well as his applied contributions to diverse areas including shock waves, combustion, incompressible flow, vortex dynamics, and atmospheric sciences. Majda was listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in mathematics.
Go to Profile#838
Benson Farb
#19144
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Benson Stanley Farb is an American mathematician at the University of Chicago. His research fields include geometric group theory and low-dimensional topology. Early life A native of Norristown, Pennsylvania, Farb earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell University. In 1994, he obtained his doctorate from Princeton University, under supervision of William Thurston.
Go to Profile#839
Adrien Douady
#11083
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Adrien Douady was a French mathematician born in La Tronche, Isère. He was the son of Daniel Douady and Guilhen Douady. Douady was a student of Henri Cartan at the École normale supérieure, and initially worked in homological algebra. His thesis concerned deformations of complex analytic spaces. Subsequently, he became more interested in the work of Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia and made significant contributions to the fields of analytic geometry and dynamical systems. Together with his former student John H. Hubbard, he launched a new subject, and a new school, studying properties of iterated quadratic complex mappings.
Go to Profile#840
Daniel Shanks
#16215
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Daniel Charles Shanks was an American mathematician who worked primarily in numerical analysis and number theory. He was the first person to compute π to 100,000 decimal places. Life and education Shanks was born on January 17, 1917, in Chicago, Illinois. He is not related to the English mathematician William Shanks, who was also known for his computation of π. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1937, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1954. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Shanks worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, first as a physicist and then as a mathematician.
Go to Profile#841
Gabriele Vezzosi
#18699
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Gabriele Vezzosi is an Italian mathematician, born in Florence . His main interest is algebraic geometry. Vezzosi earned an MS degree in Physics at the University of Florence, under the supervision of Alexandre M. Vinogradov, and a PhD in Mathematics at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, under the supervision of Angelo Vistoli. His first papers dealt with differential calculus over commutative rings, intersection theory, algebraic K-theory, motivic homotopy theory, and existence of vector bundles on singular algebraic surfaces.
Go to Profile#842
Alexander Samarskii
#13282
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Alexander Andreevich Samarskii was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and academician , specializing in mathematical physics, applied mathematics, numerical analysis, mathematical modeling, finite difference methods.
Go to Profile#843
Joseph L. Fleiss
#9541
Overall Influence
1937 - 2003 (66 years)
Joseph L. Fleiss was an American professor of biostatistics at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he also served as head of the Division of Biostatistics from 1975 to 1992. He is known for his work in mental health statistics, particularly assessing the reliability of diagnostic classifications, and the measures, models, and control of errors in categorization.
Go to Profile#844
James Durbin
#9443
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
James Durbin FBA was a British statistician and econometrician, known particularly for his work on time series analysis and serial correlation. Education The son of a greengrocer, Durbin was born in Widnes, where he attended the Wade Deacon Grammar School. He studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, where his contemporaries included David Cox and Denis Sargan. After wartime service in the Army Operational Research Group, he worked as a statistician for two years with the British Boot, Shoe and Allied Trades Research Association and took a postgraduate diploma in mathematical stat...
Go to Profile#845
Emma Castelnuovo
#17806
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
Emma Castelnuovo was an Italian mathematician and teacher of Jewish descent. In 2013, the year of her 100th birthday, the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction created an award named after Castelnuovo to recognize outstanding contributions to mathematics education.
Go to Profile#846
Edmund Hlawka
#11465
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Edmund Hlawka was an Austrian mathematician. He was a leading number theorist. Hlawka did most of his work at the Vienna University of Technology. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Sorbonne. Hlawka died on February 19, 2009, in Vienna.
Go to Profile#847
Mikhail Postnikov
#17104
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Postnikov was a Soviet mathematician, known for his work in algebraic and differential topology. Biography He was born in Shatura, near Moscow. He received his Ph.D. from Moscow State University under the direction of Lev Pontryagin, and then became a professor at this university. He died in Moscow.
Go to Profile#848
Dirk van Dalen
#8239
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dirk van Dalen is a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Van Dalen studied mathematics and physics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. Inspired by the work of Brouwer and Heyting, he received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Amsterdam for the thesis Extension problems in intuitionistic plane Projective geometry. From 1964 to 1966 Van Dalen taught logic and mathematics at MIT, and later Oxford. From 1967 he was professor at the University of Utrecht. In 2003 Dirk van Dalen was awarded the Academy Medal 2003 of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for bringing the work...
Go to Profile#849
Efim Zelmanov
#6798
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov is a Russian-American mathematician, known for his work on combinatorial problems in nonassociative algebra and group theory, including his solution of the restricted Burnside problem. He was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994.
Go to Profile#850
Yair Minsky
#18710
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Yair Nathan Minsky is an Israeli-American mathematician whose research concerns three-dimensional topology, differential geometry, group theory and holomorphic dynamics. He is a professor at Yale University. He is known for having proved Thurston's ending lamination conjecture and as a student of curve complex geometry.
Go to Profile