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,
#8451
Metin Yurdanur
#30959
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Metin Yurdanur is a sculptor based in Turkey, who was awarded the title State Artist of Turkey. Early years Yurdanur was born in 1951 in Sivrihisar town of Eskişehir Province in Turkey. He spent his childhood until high school in his hometown. He was impressed by antique works of art, especially by the three-millennium old Phrygian reliefs, that inspired him for plastic arts.
Go to Profile#8452
Olli Mäenpää
#110168
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Olli Ilmari Mäenpää has been Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Helsinki since 1992 and previously held the same position at the University of Turku . He was a judge at the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland in 1994 and 2006 and from 1999 to 2003 was chair of the Council for Mass Media in Finland. He graduated from Helsinki University with a Master of Laws degree in 1974.
Go to Profile#8453
Donald P. Bellisario
#42543
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Donald Paul Bellisario is an American television producer and screenwriter who created and wrote episodes for the TV series Magnum, P.I. , Tales of the Gold Monkey , Airwolf , Quantum Leap , JAG , and NCIS .
Go to Profile#8454
Julia Silge
#127167
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Julia Silge is an American data scientist and software engineer. She has developed tools for statistical modelling in the R programming language, including the text mining package tidytext. Silge currently works for Posit, formerly known as RStudio.
Go to Profile#8455
Alan Lee
#4749
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Alan Lee is an English book illustrator and film conceptual designer. He is best known for his artwork inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels, and for his work on the conceptual design of Peter Jackson's film adaptations of Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series.
Go to Profile#8456
Anna Goldsworthy
#113852
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons. She has held several academic positions, and is director of the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide. She is a founder member of the Seraphim Trio, which has toured Australia and the world since 1995.
Go to Profile#8457
David Edwards
#187551
Overall Influence
#8458
Charles William Clenshaw
#50158
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Charles William Clenshaw was an English mathematician, specializing in numerical analysis. He is known for the Clenshaw algorithm and Clenshaw–Curtis quadrature . In a 1984 paper Beyond Floating Point, Clenshaw and Frank W. J. Olver introduced symmetric level-index arithmetic.
Go to Profile#8459
Nelson Repenning
#129009
Overall Influence
Nelson Repenning is an American business scholar, currently the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Systems Dynamics and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management.
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Bob Stewart
#130620
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Bob Stewart was an American television game show producer. He was active in the TV industry from 1956 until his retirement in 1991. Stewart is known for creating some of the most popular game shows for Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions. These shows include To Tell the Truth, Password, and The Price Is Right. His biggest success as an independent producer was the Pyramid series, starting with The $10,000 Pyramid in 1973.
Go to Profile#8461
Gerrit van der Mey
#105243
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Gerrit van der Mey was a deafblind Dutch mathematician. He helped create software for PTERA and ZEBRA, some of the first computers designed in the Netherlands, as well as creating compilers for later computers. In 1982 he was made a member of the Order of Orange-Nassau at the grade of knight.
Go to Profile#8462
George William Morgenthaler
#167598
Overall Influence
George William Morgenthaler is an American mathematician at the University of Colorado at Boulder working on analysis. External links George W. Morgenthaler
Go to Profile#8463
Ellen Cohn
#79649
Overall Influence
Ellen R. Cohn is an associate dean and associate professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, with a secondary faculty appointment at University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. She is a faculty member of the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine.
Go to Profile#8464
Ulrich Rückriem
#40636
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Ulrich Rückriem is a German sculptor notable for his monumental stone sculptures. He lives and works in Cologne and London. His abstract works of art are often assigned to the style of minimalism and process art.
Go to Profile#8465
Nikolai Ardelyan
#179770
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Nikolai Vasilievich Ardelyan is a Russian mathematician, Professor, Dr.Sc., Honored Scientist of the Moscow State University, Leading Researcher of the MSU Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics.
Go to Profile#8466
Joseph A. Ball
#176214
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Joseph Anthony Ball is an American mathematician who is currently a professor emeritus at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, often referred to as Virginia Tech. He is a 2019 fellow of the American Mathematical Society for contributions to operator theory, analytic functions, and service to the profession.
Go to Profile#8467
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
#125298
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Pierre Cassou-Noguès is a French philosopher and writer. Biography He was admitted at the École Normale Supérieure in 1991. He obtained the agrégation in mathematics in 1995 and wrote his PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Jean-Michel Salanskis in 1999. From 2001 to 2011, he was research fellow at the CNRS. Since 2011, he has been Full Professor at Université Paris-VIII. He is also co-editor of the journal SubStance.
Go to Profile#8468
James R. Thompson
#122797
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
James Robert Thompson was an American mathematician, statistician, and university professor whose most influential work combined applied mathematics and nonparametric statistics with computing technologies to advance the fields of financial engineering and computational finance, model disease progression, assess problems in public health, and optimize quality control in industrial manufacturing.
Go to Profile#8469
Thomas Kappeler
#187686
Overall Influence
1953 - 2022 (69 years)
Thomas Kappeler was a Swiss mathematician and professor at the University of Zurich. Kappeler's main research was in global analysis, partial differential equations and dynamical systems in infinite dimensions.
Go to Profile#8470
Linda Williams Pickle
#175024
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Linda Williams Pickle is an American statistician and expert in spatial analysis and data visualization, especially as applied to disease patterns. She worked as a researcher for the National Cancer Institute, for Georgetown University, and for the National Center for Health Statistics before becoming a statistics consultant and adjunct professor of geography and public health services at Pennsylvania State University.
Go to Profile#8471
Yuri A. Kuznetsov
#85466
Overall Influence
Yuri A. Kuznetsov is a Russian-American mathematician currently the M. D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mathematics at University of Houston and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Numerical Mathematics.
Go to Profile#8472
Piergiorgio Odifreddi
#187746
Overall Influence
#8473
David Wright
#181181
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
David Lee Wright is a mathematics professor, barbershop arranger, and Associate Director of the Ambassadors of Harmony . He is a noted a cappella historian and arranger, especially in the barbershop style where in 12 of 18 years from 1999 to 2016, his arrangements resulted in chorus gold medals at the Barbershop Harmony Society International Contest. Wright travels the world as a barbershop historian, coach, and mathematics lecturer.
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Marc van Leeuwen
#181191
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Marc A. A. Van Leeuwen is a Dutch mathematician at the University of Poitiers. He is a project member of the atlas of Lie groups and representations. Van Leeuwen attended the Utrecht University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1989, under supervision of T. A. Springer.
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David L. Ferguson
#177395
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
David Ferguson was a Distinguished Service Professor and Provost's Scholar at Stony Brook University. He joined Stony Brook University in 1981, becoming first African-American assistant professor there.
Go to Profile#8476
Jennifer Taback
#187259
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Jennifer Taback is an American mathematician whose research focuses on geometric group theory and combinatorial group theory. She is the Isaac Henry Wing Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Go to Profile#8477
Donald Lipski
#63113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Donald Lipski is an American sculptor best known for his installation work and large-scale public works. Early life and education Donald Lipski was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1947. He was raised in the northern suburb of Highland Park, the son and grandson of bicycle dealers. Although his first welded sculptures as a teen won him The Scholastic Art Award in high school, he was a history major and anti-war activist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a B.A. in American History in 1970. In Madison, Lipski discovered ceramics while working with well-known ceramics artist Don Reitz.
Go to Profile#8478
Valerie Plame
#26556
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Valerie Elise Plame is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post. She described this period and the media firestorm that ensued as "mortifying, and I think I was in shock for a couple years".
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Geoff Vigar
#94478
Overall Influence
Geoff Vigar is Professor at School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University. Currently he is the Director of Global Urban Research Unit at the university. Research interests His research focuses on strategy development and implementation in land-use and transport planning, and the role and incorporation of social and environmental issues into governance practices in particular. His research centres on how governance institutions influence different policy pathways both in relation to planning and transport policy but also in wider City strategy-making.
Go to Profile#8480
Wolfgang Händler
#77088
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Wolfgang Händler was a German mathematician, pioneering computer scientist and professor at Leibniz University Hannover and University of Erlangen–Nuremberg known for his work on automata theory, parallel computing, artificial intelligence, man-machine interfaces and computer graphics. Händler diagram
Go to Profile#8481
Jane Zuengler
#108230
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Jane Ellen Zuengler is an American academic who works in the field of linguistics. Career She is currently a professor in the English department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Additionally, she is the executive editor of the academic journal Applied Linguistics. Zuengler has published widely in the field of linguistics. Her research centers on language acquisition, classroom discourse, and global English. Zuengler received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and completed her M.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She then received her M.Ed. and Ed.D. from Co...
Go to Profile#8482
Charles A. S. Hall
#187922
Overall Influence
#8483
Mark Burnett
#33519
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
James Mark Burnett is a television producer and author who is the former Chairman of MGM Worldwide Television Group. He created and produced the reality shows Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice, and Shark Tank .
Go to Profile#8484
Mark Reed
#187957
Overall Influence
#8485
Michael Wolf
#175795
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Michael Wolf holds the Chair of Econometrics and Applied Statistics in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He was previously Professor at UCLA, Charles III University of Madrid, and Pompeu Fabra University.
Go to Profile#8486
John Buckley
#40897
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
John Buckley is an English sculptor whose best known work is the sculpture "Untitled 1986", better known as "the Shark House" or "The Headington Shark" in Headington, a suburb of Oxford. Buckley went to sculpture classes in the evenings when studying for his O-levels in a technical college. He went on to Winchester School of Art and Leicester College of Art.
Go to Profile#8487
Brad Wright
#78791
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Brad Wright is a Canadian television producer and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of the television series Stargate SG-1 , Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe and as the creator of Travelers.
Go to Profile#8488
Andréa Sardinha Taschetto
#187104
Overall Influence
Andréa Sardinha Taschetto or A. S. Taschetto; Andréa Taschetto is a climate change scientist at the University of New South Wales, and winner of the Dorothy Hill award. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2016. Her research has contributed to improved understanding of the role of oceans, on climate variability at regional scales, and from seasonal to mulit-decade timescales. This research also has assisted with future climate projections.
Go to Profile#8489
Bert Waits
#175750
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Bert Kerr "Hank" Waits II was an American mathematician and professor at The Ohio State University where he taught in the Mathematics Department from 1961 to 1991. He was also a consultant to Texas Instruments, Education Technology Division, and a mathematics textbook author.
Go to Profile#8490
Peter Li
#188097
Overall Influence
#8491
Robert T. Powers
#170007
Overall Influence
Robert T. Powers is an American mathematician. Powers earned his doctorate from Princeton University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2012, he was elected an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#8492
Nadine Barrie Smith
#101391
Overall Influence
1962 - 2010 (48 years)
Nadine Barrie Smith was an American biomedical researcher in the field of therapeutic ultrasound and non-invasive drug delivery. She was also an educator and mentor, especially to women students. Personal life Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois to Jean and Barron Smith. The family has deep roots in Japan , associated with the Sekiguchi and Asaki clans. She has two sisters, Arnette Bosch and Jolene Smith. She graduated from Chicago’s Lane Tech High School in 1980. She was married to Andrew Webb in New Zealand. Outside of her scientific career, she was an accomplished sports photographer, equestrian, and mountaineer.
Go to Profile#8493
Noah Hawley
#43597
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Noah Hawley is an American director, producer, and writer for television and film who created and wrote the FX television series Fargo and Legion . Hawley earlier worked on the television series Bones , The Unusuals , and My Generation , and wrote the film The Alibi . He also wrote and directed Lucy in the Sky . He is set to create a new television series based on the Alien film franchise. In addition to his work in film and television, Hawley has written six novels.
Go to Profile#8494
Thomas Geisser
#185546
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Thomas Hermann Geisser is a German mathematician working at Rikkyo University . He works in the field of arithmetic geometry, motivic cohomology and algebraic K-theory. Education From 1985 Geisser studied at Bonn University under the supervision of Günther Harder and obtained a master's degree in 1990. He continued to obtain a Ph.D. under the supervision of Christopher Deninger at the University of Münster; the title of his thesis is A p-adic analog of Beilinson's conjecture for Hecke characters of imaginary quadratic fields.
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Amitava Bose
#24427
Overall Influence
1947 - 2017 (70 years)
Amitava Bose was a professor of economics at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He was also a former director of IIM-C. Education Bose received his B.A. degree in Economics from Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, in 1967, and MA degree in economics with First Rank from the Delhi School of Economics in 1969. Bose completed his Ph.D. programme from University of Rochester in 1974.
Go to Profile#8496
Jacek Malinowski
#112686
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Jacek Malinowski , is a Polish professor and mathematical logician, the editor-in-chief of Studia Logica, Head of the Department of Logic and Cognitive Science at the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland, and Head of the Section of Logical Semiotics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.
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Laure Wynants
#181595
Overall Influence
Laure Wynants is a Belgian epidemiologist who is a professor at Maastricht University. She studies prediction models in medicine and hospital acquired infections. Early life and education Wynants studied biostatistics at KU Leuven in Belgium. She remained there for her doctoral research, where she focused on prediction models. Her doctorate sought to predict whether ovarian tumours are benign or malignant, and how likely it is that the insertion of a catheter will cause bloodstream infection.
Go to Profile#8498
Samuel A. Ilori
#185526
Overall Influence
Samuel A. Ilori is a Nigerian professor of mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He was the former Head of the Department of Mathematics, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, former Provost of the College of Science and Technology, and ex- National President of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria. He is also a member of African Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#8499
Sandip Kumar Basu
#117872
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Sandip Kumar Basu is an Indian molecular biologist and the holder of the J. C. Bose Chair of the National Academy of Sciences, India, who is credited with innovations in the treatment protocols of leishmaniasis, tuberculosis, viral infections, multidrug resistant cancer and arterosclerosis. He was honored by the Government of India, in 2001, with the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri.
Go to Profile#8500
Chris Pollock
#129259
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Christopher John Pollock CBE DSc FSB FRAgS FLSW is a British research scientist. Chris Pollock was born in 1947 in Handsworth, Birmingham. He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Pollock graduated from Birmingham University with a PhD degree in microbiology in 1971, and with a DSc degree in 1993 for a thesis on ‘Temperature, growth and carbohydrate metabolism in plants’.
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