The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#8201
Jakov Brdar
#35445
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Jakov Brdar is a Slovene sculptor of Bosnian descent. He is the author of many public statues and sculptures in Ljubljana. In 1998, he received the Prešeren Fund Award for the sculpture group Pridiga ptičem .
Go to Profile#8202
John B. Little
#181874
Overall Influence
#8203
Jodi Lapidus
#116406
Overall Influence
Jodi Ann Lapidus is a professor of biostatistics and director of biostatics education at Oregon Health & Science University . Education Lapidus comes from a family of teachers. She did her undergraduate studies at the State University of New York, graduating in 1986, and then earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1988. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico in 1998 with a dissertation on Multivariate Statistical Methods Using Continuous and Discrete Data.
Go to Profile#8204
Ye Xiangdong
#167057
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Ye Xiangdong is a Chinese mathematician specializing in topological dynamic system and ergodic theory. Early life and education Ye was born in Ningguo, Anhui in 1963, to an intellectual family. His mother was a Chinese teacher. His father was a math teacher. After the resumption of college entrance examination, he was accepted to the University of Science and Technology of China, where he received a bachelor's degree and master's degree. In 1986 he pursued advanced studies in Russia, earning a Ph.D from Moscow State University in 1991. He was a postdoc at the International Centre for Theoreti...
Go to Profile#8205
Donald Kreider
#141615
Overall Influence
1931 - 2006 (75 years)
Donald Lester Kreider was an American mathematician and educator who served as president of the Mathematical Association of America . Early life Kreider was born on December 5, 1931, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He attended high school in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and college at Lebanon Valley College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1953. In 1959, he received a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a thesis in recursive function theory supervised by Hartley Rogers.
Go to Profile#8206
Christophe Lambert
#182077
Overall Influence
#8207
Linda M. Haines
#109726
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Linda Margaret Haines is an English and South African statistician. Originally a chemist, she is known for her research in the design of experiments and in the application of those designs in clinical trials. She is a professor emeritus of statistical sciences at the University of Cape Town, the past president of the South African Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#8208
Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser
#92757
Overall Influence
Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser is a Swiss statistician who develops methods for statistical inference with applications to research fields ranging from social, economics to experimental sciences . She is a professor in the Geneva School of Economics and Management, part of the University of Geneva, and was the founding dean of the school.
Go to Profile#8209
Marian Scott
#112384
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Ethel Marian Scott, is a Scottish statistician, author and academic, specialising in environmental statistics and statistical modelling. She is Professor of Environmental Statistics at the University of Glasgow. She is additionally vice-president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council.
Go to Profile#8210
Doron Levy
#181398
Overall Influence
Doron Levy is a mathematician, scientist, magician, and academic. He is a Professor and chair at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the Director of the Brin Mathematics Research Center.
Go to Profile#8211
Ji-Hyun Lee
#170214
Overall Influence
Ji-Hyun Lee is an American statistician whose research involves clinical trials, especially for the treatment of cancer. Lee did her graduate studies in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a master's degree in 2000 and completed her doctorate in 2003. She joined the faculty at the University of South Florida in 2003, and in 2014 moved to the University of New Mexico as a professor of internal medicine and director of biostatistics in the UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center. Since 2018 she has been a professor of biostatistics at the University of Flor...
Go to Profile#8212
Monica Riley
#83150
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Monica Riley was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery of messenger RNA in her Ph.D work with Arthur Pardee, and was later a pioneer in the exploration and computer representation of the Escherichia coli genome.
Go to Profile#8213
Jonathan Rougier
#182221
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Jonathan C. Rougier is professor of statistical science at the University of Bristol. Rougier is a specialist in the assessment of the risk from natural hazards. He was an undergraduate at University College, Durham. He completed a doctorate at Durham University in 1996, the thesis being titled Price change and volume in a speculative market.
Go to Profile#8214
Patrick Joseph Brennan
#182236
Overall Influence
#8215
Michael Vaughan-Lee
#147849
Overall Influence
Michael Rogers Vaughan-Lee is a mathematician and retired academic. He was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2010 and a tutor at Christ Church, Oxford, between 1971 and 2010.
Go to Profile#8216
Kellie Archer
#168570
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Kellie Jo Archer is a biostatistician specializing in microarray analysis techniques. She is a professor of biostatistics and chair of the biostatistics department at the Ohio State University. Education and career Archer graduated summa cum laude from Franklin College in 1991. After earning a master's degree at the Ohio State University in 1993, she worked for several years as a medical data analyst before completing her Ph.D. at the Ohio State University College of Public Health in 2001. Her dissertation, Goodness-of-Fit for Logistic Regression Models Developed Using Data Collected from a ...
Go to Profile#8217
Alice Larkin
#123655
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Alice Larkin is a Professor of Climate Science and Energy Policy in the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester. She works on carbon budgets, international transport and cumulative emissions.
Go to Profile#8218
Richard Corben
#54544
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Richard Corben was an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for his comics featured in Heavy Metal magazine, especially the Den series which was featured in the magazine's first film adaptation in 1981. He was the winner of the 2009 Spectrum Grand Master Award and the 2018 Grand Prix at Angoulême. In 2012 he was elected to the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#8219
John McCarthy
#167946
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
John Edward McCarthy is a mathematician. He is currently the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Arts and Sciences, and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. He works in operator theory and several complex variables.
Go to Profile#8220
Nancy L. Garcia
#102455
Overall Influence
Nancy Lopes Garcia is Professor of Statistics at University of Campinas in Brazil. Her research interests include modeling of and inference for spatial point processes, chains of infinite or variable memory, and inference for functional data.
Go to Profile#8221
Dominique Foata
#182319
Overall Influence
#8222
Roxana Moslehi
#78359
Overall Influence
Roxana Moslehi is an Iranian-born genetic epidemiologist. Her research is on cancer and cancer precursors, including work on radiation-induced cancer of the eyes, and ethnic differences in breast cancer incidence. Born in Iran and raised there and in Canada, she is an associate professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University at Albany in New York state.
Go to Profile#8223
Jens Carsten Jantzen
#182349
Overall Influence
#8224
Pandurang Shastri Athavale
#10303
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Rev. Pandurang Shastri Athavale , also known as Dada /Dadaji, which literally translates as "elder brother" in Marathi, was an Indian activist, philosopher, spiritual leader, social revolutionary, and religion reformist, who founded the Swadhyaya Parivar in 1954. Swadhyaya is a self-study process based on the Bhagavad Gita which has spread across nearly 100,000 villages in India, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Oceania and other Asian countries with five million adherents. Noted for his discourses on the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas and the Upanishads, Dadaji is also known for his selfless work an...
Go to Profile#8225
Cécile Ané
#180309
Overall Influence
Cécile Ané is an evolutionary biologist, botanist, and statistical geneticist whose research involves the inference of evolutionary trees and the evolution of inherited traits, especially for plant species, as well as the mathematical statistics underlying these methods. Educated in France, she works in the US as a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with joint appointments in the departments of botany and statistics.
Go to Profile#8226
Barbara Gertrude Yates
#176180
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
Barbara Gertrude Yates was an Irish mathematician who seems to have been the first woman born and brought up in Ireland to gain a PhD in pure mathematics. Life and career She was born in January 1919 in Dublin, to a family with a tradition of excelling in mathematics at Trinity College Dublin. Her Offaly-born father James Yates had been a Trinity Scholar in Mathematics prior to his graduation in 1891, and was a school inspector in various parts of Ireland until 1922, when the whole family moved to Belfast following the partition of Ireland. Her older brothers Henry George Yates and James Garrett Yates had also been Trinity Scholars in Mathematics, in 1927 and 1936 respectively.
Go to Profile#8227
Nedret Billor
#169882
Overall Influence
Nedret Billor is a Turkish statistician known for her work on robust statistics and outlier detection. She is a professor of statistics at Auburn University. Education and career Billor graduated from Ankara University in 1983, and earned a master's degree at Çukurova University in 1985. She completed a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Sheffield in 1992; her dissertation, Diagnostic Methods in Ridge Regression and Errors-in-variables Model, was supervised by Robert Loynes.
Go to Profile#8228
Renee M. Johnson
#95977
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Renee M. Johnson is an American scientist specializing in the mental health of adolescents and young adults. She researches substance abuse, substance use epidemiology, and violence in marginalized youth including persons of color, LGBTQ, and immigrants. Johnson is an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#8229
Gael M. Martin
#90691
Overall Influence
Gael Margaret Martin is an Australian Bayesian econometrician, known for her work in simulation-based inference and time series analysis of non-Gaussian data. She is a professor of econometrics and business statistics at Monash University, an associate investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Go to Profile#8230
Jennie Stephens
#180413
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Jennie C. Stephens is an academic researcher, professor, author, and social justice advocate. She is Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She is also affiliated with the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the department of Cultures, Societies & Global Studies.
Go to Profile#8231
Margaret P. Martin
#144507
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Margaret Pearl Martin was an American statistician, associated with the University of Minnesota. Most of her statistical research was performed as a consultant on public health studies, in connection with her work teaching statistics in medical schools.
Go to Profile#8232
Hiroshi Saito
#182557
Overall Influence
1947 - 2010 (63 years)
Hiroshi Saito was a Japanese mathematician at the Division of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University who worked on automorphic forms. He introduced the base change lifting and the Saito–Kurokawa lift.
Go to Profile#8233
Berrien Moore III
#132110
Overall Influence
Berrien Moore III is the former director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire and the founding director of Climate Central. In June 2010, he accepted a set of linked positions at the University of Oklahoma: Vice President, Weather & Climate Programs, Director, National Weather Center, and Dean, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. He holds the Chesapeake Energy Corporation Chair in Climate Studies. Moore was a coordinating lead author of the final chapter of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , an organisation that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Go to Profile#8234
Guorong Wang
#175926
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Guorong Wang is a Chinese mathematician, working in the area of generalized inverses of matrices. He is a Professor and first Dean of Mathematics & Science College of Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Go to Profile#8235
Christophe Soulé
#182574
Overall Influence
#8236
John R. Rice
#114581
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
John Rischard Rice is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the W. Brooks Fortune Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and a professor of mathematics at Purdue University. He specializes in numerical computing, founded the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software and is the author of more than 20 books and approximately 300 research articles.
Go to Profile#8237
Tom Leonard
#182751
Overall Influence
#8238
Barry Moser
#6920
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Barry Moser is an American visual artist and educator, known as a printmaker specializing in wood engravings, and an illustrator of numerous works of literature. He is also the owner and operator of the Pennyroyal Press, an engraving and small book publisher founded in 1970.
Go to Profile#8239
Don Potter
#70907
Overall Influence
1902 - 2004 (102 years)
Donald Steele Potter was an English sculptor, wood carver, potter and teacher. Don Potter was born in Newington, near Sittingbourne, Kent, the son of a school teacher, and attended a private school. He joined the Wolf Cubs at the age of eight and became a keen participant in the scouting movement.
Go to Profile#8240
John P. A. Ioannidis
#182905
Overall Influence
#8241
Alexander Rinnooy Kan
#139678
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Alexander Hendrik George Rinnooy Kan is a Dutch politician, businessman and mathematician who served as Chairman of the Social and Economic Council from 2006 to 2012. A member of the Democrats 66 party, he was a member of the Senate from 2015 to 2019 and is a distinguished professor of Economics and Business Studies at the University of Amsterdam since 1 September 2012. He has also been president of the supervisory board of EYE Film Institute Netherlands since 2008 and of Museum Boerhaave since 2018.
Go to Profile#8242
János Pintz
#182938
Overall Influence
#8243
Max Karoubi
#182980
Overall Influence
#8244
Jim Osman
#167825
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Jim Osman is a contemporary American sculptor. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Brooklyn Arts Council Grant. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library and The Queens Museum.
Go to Profile#8245
Philip McShane
#73697
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Philip McShane was an Irish mathematician and philosopher-theologian. Originally trained in mathematics, mathematical physics, and chemistry in the 1950s, he went on to study philosophy from 1956 to 1959. In 1960, after teaching mathematical physics, engineering, and commerce to undergraduates, and special relativity and differential equations to graduate students, McShane began studying theology. He did his fourth year of theology in 1963 and in 1968 began reading economics.
Go to Profile#8246
Robert Loewy
#80098
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Robert Gustav Loewy is an aerospace engineer who has been influential in the development of rotary-wing vertical take-off and landing aircraft. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the class of 1947 with a Bachelor of Aeronautical Engineering degree. He earned an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1948 to 1962, Dr. Loewy worked in industry for the Glenn L. Martin Company; Piasecki Helicopter Corporation; Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory; and Vertol Aircraft, which later became a division of the Boeing Company.
Go to Profile#8247
Lorin Crawford
#116595
Overall Influence
Lorin Crawford is the RGSS Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Brown University. He is affiliated with the Center for Statistical Sciences, Center for Computational Molecular Biology, and the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science. His scientific research interests involve the development of novel and efficient computational methodologies to address complex problems in statistical genetics, cancer pharmacology, and radiomics .
Go to Profile#8248
Elizabeth Mannshardt
#169810
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Mannshardt is an American environmental statistician, professor, and government executive. She is the Associate Director of the Information Access and Analytic Services Division at the United States Environmental Protection Agency and an adjunct associate professor in the department of statistics at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on climate change and extremes in climate and weather.
Go to Profile#8249
George W. Brown
#147624
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
George William Brown was an American statistician, game theorist, and computer scientist known for his work and research in early computing machinery, game theory, mathematical logic, decision theory and administration. He was a major force in the design and construction of early computing machinery, including the IAS machine, and subsequently directed the construction of JOHNNIAC. His publication of EDUNET in 1967 presaged the details and rise of the early internet. The concept of fictitious play in game theory is due to him.
Go to Profile#8250
Laura O'Dwyer
#169009
Overall Influence
Laura Mary O'Dwyer is a professor of Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics at Boston College known for her work on examining the impact of technology in education, especially science education, and for quantifying outcomes for K-12 student success.
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