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,

#8251

Oleg Izhboldin

#182049
Overall Influence
1963 - 2000 (37 years)
Oleg Tomovich Izhboldin was a Russian mathematician who was first to provide a non-trivial example of an odd u-invariant field solving a classical Kaplansky's conjecture. Oleg Izhboldin graduated from the 45th Physics-Mathematics School in Saint Petersburg, then from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University. He received his Ph.D. from the same university in 1988 and Doktor nauk degree in 2000. According to Alexander Merkurjev: Oleg found his niche in algebra, namely, the algebraic theory of quadratic forms. ... This needed knowledge in different areas of mathemat...
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#8252

João Lucas Marques Barbosa

#182010
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
João Lucas Marques Barbosa is a Brazilian physicist, researcher, and university professor. Commander and Grand Officer of the National Order of Scientific Merit and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences , João Lucas is professor emeritus of the Department of Mathematics of the Federal University of Ceará , and author of several books on mathematics. He is a member of the Science and Technology Council of the Ceará state government.
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#8253

Jean-Dominique Lebreton

#145142
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jean-Dominique Lebreton is a biomathematician and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Course Jean-Dominique Lebreton obtained a university degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1969, then a Certificate of Master of Mathematics and Fundamental Applications and a Master of Computer Science in 1971.
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#8254

David Milch

David Milch
#41465
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
David Sanford Milch is an American writer and producer of television series. He has created several television shows, including ABC's NYPD Blue , co-created with Steven Bochco, and HBO's Deadwood . Early life and education Milch graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University, where he won the Tinker Prize in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter, along with future US President George W. Bush. Milch earned a Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
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#8255

Olivier Guéant

#178958
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (41 years)
Olivier Guéant is a French mathematician, focusing on mean field game theory and financial mathematics. He is currently a Full Professor of applied mathematics at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.
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#8256

Tian Zheng

#171825
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Tian Zheng is a Chinese-American applied statistician whose work concerns Bayesian modeling and sparse learning of complex data from applications including social networks, bioinformatics, and geoscience. She is a professor of statistics at Columbia University, and chair of the Columbia Department of Statistics.
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#8257

Árpád Varecza

#170639
Overall Influence
1941 - 2005 (64 years)
Árpád Varecza , was a Hungarian mathematician, former lecturer at the College of Nyíregyháza, head of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, and deputy director general of the institution for three years.
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#8258

Susan Cain

Susan Cain
#6902
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Susan Horowitz Cain is an American writer and lecturer. She is the author of the 2012 non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people. In 2015, she co-founded Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company with initiatives in the areas of children , lifestyle, and the workplace. Her 2016 follow-on book, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, focused on introverted children and teens, the book also being directed to their educators a...
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#8259

Nell Sedransk

#170272
Overall Influence
Nell Sedransk is an American statistician who directed the National Institute of Statistical Sciences . She continues to work at NISS, and is a research professor of statistics at North Carolina State University. Her research interests include Bayesian inference and experimental design for complex experiments, and includes participation in a study of reading comprehension.
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#8260

Torstein Eckhoff

#60710
Overall Influence
1916 - 1993 (77 years)
Torstein Einang Eckhoff was a Norwegian civil servant and professor of law at the University of Oslo. Personal life He was born in Vestre Slidre as the son of shipmaster Trygve Eckhoff and his wife Sigrid Einang . He was a brother of designer Mathias Gerrard Eckhoff, a second cousin of jurist Ernst Fredrik Eckhoff and actor Johannes Eckhoff, and a grandnephew of architect Niels Stockfleth Darre Eckhoff. In 1941 he married psychologist Eva Bergliot Råness . They resided at Eiksmarka.
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#8261

Vladimir Bening

Vladimir Bening
#136171
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Vladimir Bening is a Russian mathematician, Professor, Dr.Sc., a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Moscow State University. He defended the thesis «Asymptotic analysis of distributions of some asymptotically efficient statistics in problems of hypothesis testing» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .
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#8262

Zdzisław Józef Porosiński

#180267
Overall Influence
1955 - 2016 (61 years)
Zdzisław Józef Porosiński was a Polish mathematician and statistician. Biography In 1979, he graduated in mathematics from Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology, Wrocław University of Technology with a master's degree. After graduation, he started working at his alma mater at the Institute of Mathematics . On 17 March 1987, he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Selected problems of optimal stopping . The research supervisor and thesis supervisor was professor Stanisław Trybuła. On 20 November 2003, the habilitation colloquium was held. On 31 May 2004, he obtained a postdoctoral degree in mathematical sciences.
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#8263

Júlia Volaufová

#171009
Overall Influence
Júlia Volaufová is a Slovak biostatistician whose research has applied statistics to questions involving food intake, dietary supplements, calorie restriction, body weight, and diabetes. Her more theoretical interests include mixed linear models, regression analysis, and statistical hypothesis testing. She is a professor emerita of biostatistics at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans.
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#8264

Andrzej Pliś

#182866
Overall Influence
1929 - 1991 (62 years)
Andrzej Pliśz was a Polish mathematician, specializing in differential equations and optimal control theory. Education and career Pliś received his undergraduate degree from the Jagiellonian University, where he studied from 1947 to 1951. He received his PhD from the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where his thesis advisor was Tadeusz Ważewski. Pliś did research and taught at both the Jagiellonian University and the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was promoted in 1961 to associate professor and in 1966 to full professor. In 1961 he was elected a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
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#8265

John Gilbert

#61949
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
John Gilbert is a film editor who works primarily in New Zealand. Gilbert has edited 17 feature films as well as television shows and short films. He won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing, among several honors, for Mel Gibson's war drama Hacksaw Ridge . Gilbert had earlier received various accolades for his work on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring , including the Satellite Award for Best Editing and nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award and an ACE Eddie Award.
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#8266

Terry Gannon

#183390
Overall Influence
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#8267

Duncan C. Thomas

#183412
Overall Influence
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#8268

Shen Weixiao

#181290
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Shen Weixiao is a Chinese mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems . Shen graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1995. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2001 with thesis On the metric property of multimodal interval maps and density of axiom A under the supervision of Mitsuhiro Shishikura. Shen was previously a professor at the National University of Singapore. He is currently a professor at Fudan University.
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#8269

Ritam Chowdhury

#82675
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Ritam Chowdhury is an Indian writer, physician, epidemiologist and biostatistician scientist of Bengali descent. His work in the fields of applied epidemiology, health economics, and outcomes research has contributed towards evidence-based medicine guidelines for oncology, heart disease, diabetes and trauma care. He is the Research Director of Medical Associates for Research and Communication . He also holds appointments as Visiting Instructor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Global Health Department of Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta and Statistical Consultant for the Instruc...
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#8270

Tim Hesterberg

#177282
Overall Influence
Tim Hesterberg is an American statistician. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and currently works as a staff data scientist at Instacart. Education and career Tim Hesterberg graduated with a B.A in mathematics from St. Olaf College and received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University. He is a member of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and was previously on the NISS Board of Trustees. He is currently on the board of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute. Hesterberg previously worked as a senior statistician at Google as well as at Franklin and Marshall College, Pacific Gas & Electric Co, and Insightful/MathSoft.
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#8271

David Rasbash

#169785
Overall Influence
David Rasbash was a pioneer in the field of Fire Safety Engineering. Rasbash was a chemical engineer who graduated from Imperial College, London, during World War II. He began publishing and teaching about the evaluation of fire safety in the 1970s. In his early career, he conducted research on techniques for fire extinction to assist firefighters. He also was interested in the production of smoke and its effect on visibility. He was an early proponent of the standardization of automatic fire detection and later became involved in the evaluation of fire safety and the quantification of risk. H...
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#8272

Christopher Amos

#60881
Overall Influence
Christopher Ian Amos is an American genetic epidemiologist and the director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the associate director for quantitative science at the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is known for his research on the genetic basis of certain types of human cancer.
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#8273

Neil Garrod

#155886
Overall Influence
Neil W. Garrod is a British academic. He has published in the fields of mathematical programming, accounting, financial analysis and higher education policy . He graduated from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology with a B.Sc. in Management Sciences and a Ph.D. In Operations Research. He has held lecturing posts in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; Union College, Schenectady, New York; University of Wales, Bangor; University of Glasgow, Scotland.
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#8274

Jian-Jian Ren

#171192
Overall Influence
Joan Jian-Jian Ren is an American statistician whose research concerns survival analysis and longitudinal data analysis for biomedical applications. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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#8275

Valérie Chavez-Demoulin

#169142
Overall Influence
Valérie Chavez-Demoulin is a Swiss statistician whose research includes statistical models of extreme events and their application to risk management. She is a professor of statistics at HEC Lausanne.
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#8276

Katherine Halvorsen

#89453
Overall Influence
Katherine Taylor Halvorsen is an American statistician and statistics educator whose research topics have included statistical significance for contingency tables, and the conditional logistic regression method for analysis of multiple risk factors in case–control studies. She was co-author of four editions of Mathematics Education in the United States, a quadrennial review publication of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and serves on the Mathematical Sciences Academic Advisory Committee of the College Board.
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#8277

Ryan Seacrest

Ryan Seacrest
#17298
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Ryan John Seacrest is an American media personality, game show host, and producer. Seacrest co-hosted and served as executive producer of Live with Kelly and Ryan, and has hosted other media shows including American Idol, American Top 40, and On Air with Ryan Seacrest. He became co-host and executive producer of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve in 2006, and stayed on as host and executive producer following Clark's death in 2012.
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#8278

Michael Hochman

#183720
Overall Influence
Michael Hochman is an Israeli mathematician, currently a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his contributions to dynamical systems and ergodic theory. Hochman earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under supervision of Benjamin Weiss in 2007. He published his scientific work in such journals as Annals of Mathematics, Inventiones Mathematicae and Journal of the European Mathematical Society.
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#8279

Yasemin Arda

#131050
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Yasemin Arda is a Turkish-Belgian management scientist and operations researcher specializing in supply chain management. She is a professor in the management school of the University of Liège, vice-dean for education in the school, and the president for the 2021–2022 term of the Belgian Society for Operations Research.
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#8280

Howard Garland

#173844
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Howard Garland is an American mathematician, who works on algebraic groups, Lie algebras , and infinite-dimensional algebras. Garland received in 1958 his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago, in 1959 his master's degree from Wayne State University, and in 1964 his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley under S. S. Chern with thesis On the cohomology of lattices in Lie groups
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#8281

George Herbert Swift Jr

George Herbert Swift Jr
#141493
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
George Herbert Swift, Jr was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Swift attended the University of Oregon, earning a master's degree in mathematics in 1951, before attending the University of Washington, where he earned a PhD in mathematics in 1954 under Edwin Hewitt on irregular Borel measure. He began at Duke University in 1954 as an instructor before being IBM hired him in 1956; he would spend 32 years with the company, where he contributed to the development of the IBM 5100. He retired in 1988 from IBM to teach full-time in mathematics as well as computer science.
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#8282

Jean-Luc Bertrand-Krajewski

#183478
Overall Influence
Jean-Luc Bertrand-Krajewski is a professor at INSA Lyon and Head of the DEEP Laboratory. Career Bertrand-Krajewski got his PhD in 1992. His research has focussed on Urban Drainage processes, modelling and monitoring. In his capacity as researcher, Bertrand-Krajewski is also a member of the Société hydrotechnique de France and was president of GRAIE, the organisation behind the Novatech conferences. On an international level, Bertrand-Krajewksi has been an elected member, chair and associate member of the Joint Committee Urban Drainage, a Fellow for the IWA, member of the Board of Directors of...
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#8283

Aric Hagberg

Aric Hagberg
#183763
Overall Influence
Aric Hagberg is an American applied mathematician and academic, working in nonlinear dynamics, pattern formation and complex systems. He is the division leader of the computer, computational, and statistical sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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#8284

Kevin McConway

#183768
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Kevin McConway is emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, where he spent most of his career. He was the first Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society, from 2012-2016. He was academic adviser to the BBC Radio Four programme More or Less and has written about that experience. He is currently a trustee and advisory board member of the Science Media Centre and has written about experience communicating statistics with the media, and this is developed as general guidance, and to statisticians specifically - "remember to sound human".
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#8285

Erica Plambeck

#172066
Overall Influence
Erica L. Plambeck is an American operations researcher specializing in supply chain management and environmental sustainability. She is Charles A. Holloway Professor of Operations, Information & Technology in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, professor in the Stanford University Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the 2022–2023 Dhirubhai Ambani Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Stanford University.
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#8286

Alain R. Thierry

#182483
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Alain Thierry is a French geneticist and cancer researcher. He specializes in the clinical applications of circulating DNA analysis, notably in cancer care management. He is currently Director of Research at the INSERM’s Cancer Research Institute in Montpellier, France.
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#8287

Len Wein

Len Wein
#23297
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Leonard Norman Wein was an American comic book writer and editor best known for co-creating DC Comics' Swamp Thing and Marvel Comics' Wolverine, and for helping revive the Marvel superhero team the X-Men . Additionally, he was the editor for writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' influential DC miniseries Watchmen.
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#8288

George Robin Henderson

#171318
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
George Robin Henderson was a Scots mathematician with a flair for music. Noted as an inspirational character in his field he taught at Boroughmuir High School, lectured at Napier College, consulted in statistics and published a book.
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#8289

Wolfgang Männel

#41650
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Wolfgang Männel was an influential German professor of Business Administration. Academic contributions Männel was born as the son of the German entrepreneur Max Rudolf Männel and his wife Liska. He graduated at the University of Mannheim. In 1972 Männel became professor of Business Administration at the University of Frankfurt, in 1973 at the University of Dortmund and in 1982 at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
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#8290

Susan Ahmed

#174063
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Susan Mae Wolofski Ahmed is an American statistician. After early work in biostatistics, she became chief mathematical statistician in the National Center for Education Statistics and president of the Washington Statistical Society.
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#8291

Rachel Fewster

#177590
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Rachel M. Fewster is a British and New Zealand environmental statistician and statistical ecologist known for her work on wildlife population size, population genetics, and Benford's law, and for the development of the CatchIT citizen science project for monitoring invasive species. She is a professor of statistics in New Zealand at the University of Auckland.
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#8292

Florian Neukart

Florian Neukart
#109233
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Florian Neukart is an Austrian business executive, computer scientist, physicist, and scientific author known for his work in quantum computing and artificial intelligence. He has primarily been working on utilizing quantum computers, artificial intelligence, and related technologies for solving industry problems. In his work on artificial intelligence, he describes methods for interpreting signals in the human brain in combination with paradigms from artificial intelligence to create artificial conscious entities.
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#8293

Mark Berliner

#183927
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Lloyd Mark Berliner is an American statistician interested in Bayesian analysis in complex settings and geophysical problems, and formerly Bayesian statistics, decision theory and Bayesian analysis. He is a professor emeritus in residence at Ohio State University and an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, and Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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#8294

Carol A. Gotway Crawford

#137631
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Carol Anne Gotway Crawford is an American mathematical statistician and from 2018 to 2020 served as Chief Statistician of the U.S. Government Accountability Office . She joined the GAO in May 2017. From August 2014 to April 2017, she was with the Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. She was formerly at the National Center for Environmental Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She also holds an adjunct faculty position at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, and is an expert in biostatistics, spatial analysis, environmental statistics, and the statistics of public health.
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#8295

Leonard Sarason

Leonard Sarason
#176749
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Leonard Sarason was a music composer, a pianist, and a mathematician. He earned a master's degree music composition from Yale University, supervised by Paul Hindemith. After a doctorate in Mathematics at New York University supervised by Kurt Otto Friedrichs he taught mathematics at Stanford University and the University of Washington. His mathematical research concerned partial differential equations.
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#8296

Judith T. Lessler

#170777
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Judith T. Lessler is an American statistician and expert on survey methodology, particularly on surveys relating to health and epidemiology. Lessler was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and grew up on a farm in Iredell County, North Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in 1974 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, A Double Sampling Scheme Model for Eliminating Measurement Process Bias and Estimating Measurement Errors in Surveys, was jointly supervised by Daniel G. Horvitz and Gary Grove Koch.
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#8297

Graham Hilford Pollard

#130578
Overall Influence
Graham Hilford Pollard is an Australian mathematician, professor, statistician, author, lecturer, and Doctor in Mathematics, recognised for being the recipient of the David Hilbert Award in 1991. Career In 1976, he received his PhD from the Australian National University with the thesis entitled A Stochastic Analysis of Scoring Systems.
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#8298

Stefanie Barz

#136771
Overall Influence
Stefanie Barz is a German physicist and Professor of Quantum Information and Technology at the University of Stuttgart. She studies quantum physics and quantum information in photonics. Early life and education Barz studied mathematics, physics and computer sciences at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. During her undergraduate studies she was an Erasmus Programme student at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in Vienna before moving to the University of Oxford, where she worked in quantum photonics. She was awarded the University of Vienna LaudiMaxima Prize for her dissertation.
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#8299

Robert Rosen

#138143
Overall Influence
1934 - 1998 (64 years)
Robert Rosen was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University. Career Rosen was born on June 27, 1934, in Brownsville , in New York City. He studied biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and history; particularly, the history of science. In 1959 he obtained a PhD in relational biology, a specialization within the broader field of Mathematical Biology, under the guidance of Professor Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago. He remained at the University of Chicago until 1964, later moving to the University of Buffalo — now part of the State ...
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#8300

Fang Liu

#169587
Overall Influence
Fang Liu is a Chinese-American statistician and data scientist whose research topics include differential privacy, statistical learning theory, Bayesian statistics, regularization, missing data, and applications in biostatistics. She is a professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Notre Dame.
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