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,
#851
Peter Cameron
#13132
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Jephson Cameron FRSE is an Australian mathematician who works in group theory, combinatorics, coding theory, and model theory. He is currently half-time Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#852
H. Blaine Lawson
#18314
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1969 for work carried out under the supervision of Robert Osserman.
Go to Profile#853
Abraham Charnes
#9043
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Abraham Charnes was an American mathematician who worked in the area of operations research. Charnes published more than 200 research articles and seven books, including An Introduction to Linear Programming. His works influenced the development of Data envelopment analysis method.
Go to Profile#854
David Harbater
#19361
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Harbater is an American mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, well known for his work in Galois theory, algebraic geometry and arithmetic geometry. Early life and education Harbater was born in New York City and attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was on the math team. After graduating in 1970, he entered Harvard University.
Go to Profile#855
William Desmond Evans
#22205
Overall Influence
#856
Horst Knörrer
#17401
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Horst Knörrer is a German mathematician, who studies algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. Knörrer studied from 1971 at University of Regensburg and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and received a doctorate in 1978 from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Egbert Brieskorn . After that, he was a research assistant until 1985 in Bonn, interrupted by two years 1980 to 1982 at the Leiden University. In 1985 he completed his habilitation in Bonn and was a Heisenberg fellow the following two years. During 1986/87, he was a department representative at the University of Düsseldorf.
Go to Profile#857
Gyula O. H. Katona
#19403
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gyula O. H. Katona is a Hungarian mathematician known for his work in combinatorial set theory, and especially for the Kruskal–Katona theorem and his beautiful and elegant proof of the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem in which he discovered a new method, now called Katona's cycle method. Since then, this method has become a powerful tool in proving many interesting results in extremal set theory. He is affiliated with the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#858
Cathleen Synge Morawetz
#13663
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Cathleen Synge Morawetz was a Canadian mathematician who spent much of her career in the United States. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She was professor emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she had also served as director from 1984 to 1988. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998.
Go to Profile#859
Aise Johan de Jong
#19990
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Aise Johan de Jong is a Dutch mathematician born in Belgium. He currently is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University. His research interests include arithmetic geometry and algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#860
William Arveson
#19511
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
William B. Arveson was a mathematician specializing in operator algebras who worked as a professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography Arveson obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1964 with thesis advisor Henry Dye and thesis Prediction theory and group representations.
Go to Profile#861
Jean-Pierre Kahane
#15994
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Jean-Pierre Kahane was a French mathematician with contributions to harmonic analysis. Career Kahane attended the École normale supérieure and obtained the agrégation of mathematics in 1949. He then worked for the CNRS from 1949 to 1954, first as an intern and then as a research assistant. He defended his PhD in 1954; his advisor was Szolem Mandelbrojt.
Go to Profile#862
Jürgen Herzog
#18016
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Jürgen Reinhard Gerhard Herzog is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at University of Duisburg-Essen, in Essen, Germany. From 1969 to 1975, he was Lecturer at University of Regensburg and from 1975 to 2009 a professor of Mathematics at University of Duisburg-Essen.
Go to Profile#863
Jean-Pierre Wintenberger
#17309
Overall Influence
1954 - 2019 (65 years)
Jean-Pierre Wintenberger was a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Strasbourg. He was corecipient of the 2011 Cole Prize in number theory, along with Chandrashekhar Khare, for his proof of Serre's modularity conjecture.
Go to Profile#864
Gerald L. Thompson
#9554
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Gerald L. Thompson was the IBM Professor of Systems and Operations Research in the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University. From 1943 to 1946, Thompson served in the Navy as an ensign on the , which was stationed in the Pacific. By correspondence he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from Iowa State University in 1944. After the war he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with Master of Science in 1948. He then took up further graduate study at University of Michigan, obtaining the Ph.D. in 1953 under the supervision of Robert M. Thrall.
Go to Profile#865
Nan Laird
#7980
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nan McKenzie Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#866
Alexander Esenin-Volpin
#7240
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin was a Russian-American poet and mathematician. A dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of six years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in psikhushkas and exile. In mathematics, he is known for his foundational role in ultrafinitism.
Go to Profile#867
Daniel Bump
#20403
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Daniel Willis Bump is a mathematician who is a professor at Stanford University. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2015, for "contributions to number theory, representation theory, combinatorics, and random matrix theory, as well as mathematical exposition".
Go to Profile#868
Dan-Virgil Voiculescu
#14366
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dan-Virgil Voiculescu is a Romanian professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked in single operator theory, operator K-theory and von Neumann algebras. More recently, he developed free probability theory.
Go to Profile#869
Morton Brown
#20951
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Morton Brown is an American mathematician, who specializes in geometric topology. In 1958 Brown earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under R. H. Bing. From 1960 to 1962 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afterwards he became a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Go to Profile#870
András Frank
#16749
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
András Frank is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics, especially in graph theory, and combinatorial optimisation. He is director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Go to Profile#871
Raman Parimala
#12857
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Raman Parimala is an Indian mathematician known for her contributions to algebra. She is the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of mathematics at Emory University. For many years, she was a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Mumbai. She has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2019 and is on the Abel prize selection Committee 2021/2022.
Go to Profile#872
Neeraj Kayal
#4639
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Neeraj Kayal is an Indian computer scientist and mathematician noted for development of the AKS primality test, along with Manindra Agrawal and Nitin Saxena. Kayal was born and raised in Guwahati, India.
Go to Profile#873
Imre Bárány
#16471
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Imre Bárány is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics and discrete geometry. He works at the Rényi Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and has a part-time appointment at University College London.
Go to Profile#874
Étienne Ghys
#9581
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Étienne Ghys is a French mathematician. His research focuses mainly on geometry and dynamical systems, though his mathematical interests are broad. He also expresses much interest in the historical development of mathematical ideas, especially the contributions of Henri Poincaré.
Go to Profile#875
Sergey Yablonsky
#6745
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the founders of the Soviet school of mathematical cybernetics and discrete mathematics. He is the author of a number of classic results on synthesis, reliability, and classification of control systems , the term used in the USSR and Russia for a generalization of finite state automata, Boolean circuits and multi-valued logic circuits.
Go to Profile#876
Vyacheslav Shokurov
#18887
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Vyacheslav Vladimirovich Shokurov is a Russian mathematician best known for his research in algebraic geometry. The proof of the Noether–Enriques–Petri theorem, the cone theorem, the existence of a line on smooth Fano varieties and, finally, the existence of log flips—these are several of Shokurov's contributions to the subject.
Go to Profile#877
Joseph Goguen
#4583
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Joseph Amadee Goguen was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and University of Oxford, and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.
Go to Profile#878
Corrado de Concini
#18080
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Corrado de Concini is an Italian mathematician and professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He studies algebraic geometry, quantum groups, invariant theory, and mathematical physics. Life and work He was born in Rome in 1949, the son of Ennio de Concini, a noted screenwriter and film director.
Go to Profile#879
Detlef Gromoll
#18793
Overall Influence
1938 - 2008 (70 years)
Detlef Gromoll was a mathematician who worked in Differential geometry. Biography Gromoll was born in Berlin in 1938, and was a classically trained violinist. After living and attending school in Rosdorf and graduating from high school in Bonn, he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Bonn in 1964. Following sojourns at several universities, he joined the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1969.
Go to Profile#880
Imre Csiszár
#11593
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Imre Csiszár is a Hungarian mathematician with contributions to information theory and probability theory. In 1996 he won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest annual award given in the field of information theory.
Go to Profile#881
Leopoldo Nachbin
#17952
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Leopoldo Nachbin was a Jewish-Brazilian mathematician who dealt with topology, and harmonic analysis. Nachbin was born in Recife, and is best known for Nachbin's theorem. He died, aged 71, in Rio de Janeiro.
Go to Profile#882
Fabrice Bethuel
#17426
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Fabrice Bethuel is a French mathematician. He holds a chair at Paris VI University. Bethuel earned his doctorate at Paris-Sud 11 University in 1989, under supervision of Jean-Michel Coron. In 1998 Bethuel was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He won the 1999 Fermat Prize, jointly with Frédéric Hélein, for several important contributions to the theory of variational calculus. He also won the 2003 for his fundamental discoveries at the interface between analysis, topology, geometry, and physics.
Go to Profile#883
Imre Leader
#17035
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Imre Bennett Leader is a British mathematician, a professor in DPMMS at the University of Cambridge working in the field of combinatorics. He is also known as an Othello player. Life He is the son of the physicist Elliot Leader and his first wife Ninon Neményi, previously married to the poet Endre Kövesi; Darian Leader is his brother. Imre Lakatos was a family friend and his godfather.
Go to Profile#884
Stéphane Mallat
#12774
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stéphane Georges Mallat is a French applied mathematician, concurrently appointed as Professor at Collège de France and École normale supérieure. He made fundamental contributions to the development of wavelet theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He has additionally done work in applied mathematics, signal processing, music synthesis and image segmentation.
Go to Profile#885
D. H. Lehmer
#17096
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer , almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His peripatetic career as a number theorist, with him and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
Go to Profile#886
Gilbert Baumslag
#15849
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Gilbert Baumslag was a Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York, with joint appointments in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. He was director of the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software, which grew out of the MAGNUS computational group theory project he also headed. Baumslag was also the organizer of the New York Group Theory Seminar.
Go to Profile#887
Donald A. Martin
#11483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Donald Anthony Martin , also known as Tony Martin, is an American set theorist and philosopher of mathematics at UCLA, where he is an emeritus professor of mathematics and philosophy. Education and career Martin received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1965–67. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#888
Alexander S. Kechris
#13323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Sotirios Kechris is a set theorist and logician at the California Institute of Technology. Contributions Kechris has made contributions to the theory of Borel equivalence relations and the theory of automorphism groups of uncountable structuress. His research interests cover foundations of mathematics, mathematical logic and set theory and their interactions with analysis and dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#889
Peter C. Fishburn
#13208
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Peter Clingerman Fishburn was an American mathematician, known as a pioneer in the field of decision theory. In collaboration with Steven Brams, Fishburn published a paper about approval voting in 1978.
Go to Profile#890
Jack Morava
#17950
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jack Johnson Morava is an American homotopy theorist at Johns Hopkins University. Education Of Czech and Appalachian descent, he was raised in Texas' lower Rio Grande valley. An early interest in topology was strongly encouraged by his parents. He enrolled at Rice University in 1962 as a physics major, but entered the graduate mathematics program in 1964. His advisor Eldon Dyer arranged, with the support of Michael Atiyah, a one-year fellowship at the University of Oxford, followed by a year in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#891
Michael Fisher
#6973
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Michael Ellis Fisher was an English physicist, as well as chemist and mathematician, known for his many seminal contributions to statistical physics, including but not restricted to the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena. He was the Horace White Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics at Cornell University. Later he moved to the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, where he was University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Go to Profile#892
Anil Nerode
#6090
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Anil Nerode is an American mathematician, known for his work in mathematical logic and for his many-decades tenure as a professor at Cornell University. He received his undergraduate education and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, the latter under the directions of Saunders Mac Lane. He enrolled in the Hutchins College at the University of Chicago in 1947 at the age of 15, and received his Ph.D. in 1956. His Ph.D. thesis was on an algebraic abstract formulation of substitution in many-sorted free algebrass and its relation to equational definitions of the partial recursi...
Go to Profile#893
Dennis DeTurck
#21002
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Dennis M. DeTurck is an American mathematician known for his work in partial differential equations and Riemannian geometry, in particular contributions to the theory of the Ricci flow and the prescribed Ricci curvature problem. He first used the DeTurck trick to give an alternative proof of the short time existence of the Ricci flow, which has found other uses since then.
Go to Profile#894
Victor Ginzburg
#16413
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Victor Ginzburg is a Russian American mathematician who works in representation theory and in noncommutative geometry. He is known for his contributions to geometric representation theory, especially, for his works on representations of quantum groups and Hecke algebrass, and on the geometric Langlands program . He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#895
Felix Otto
#10634
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Felix Otto is a German mathematician. Biography He studied mathematics at the University of Bonn, finishing his PhD thesis in 1993 under the supervision of Stephan Luckhaus. After postdoctoral studies at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and at Carnegie Mellon University, in 1997 he became a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1999 to 2010 he was professor for applied mathematics at the University of Bonn, and currently serves as one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig.
Go to Profile#896
Michael Barnsley
#14297
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael Fielding Barnsley is a British mathematician, researcher and an entrepreneur who has worked on fractal compression; he holds several patents on the technology. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 and BA in mathematics from Oxford in 1968. In 1987 he founded Iterated Systems Incorporated, and in 1988 he published a book entitled Fractals Everywhere and in 2006 SuperFractals.
Go to Profile#897
Nitin Saxena
#9698
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Nitin Saxena is an Indian scientist in mathematics and theoretical computer science. His research focuses on computational complexity. He attracted international attention for proposing the AKS Primality Test in 2002 in a joint work with Manindra Agrawal and Neeraj Kayal, for which the trio won the 2006 Fulkerson Prize, and the 2006 Gödel Prize. They provided the first unconditional deterministic algorithm to test an n-digit number for primality in a time that has been proven to be polynomial in n. This research work came out as a part of his undergraduate study.
Go to Profile#898
Mónica Clapp
#12196
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mónica Alicia Clapp Jiménez Labora is a mathematician at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México known for her work in nonlinear partial differential equations and algebraic topology. Life and work Clapp was born in Mexico City. She graduated from UNAM in 1974. Clapp then graduated with her Ph.D from Heidelberg University in 1979, and has been a faculty member at UNAM since that time.
Go to Profile#899
Ralph E. Gomory
#5448
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Ralph Edward Gomory is an American applied mathematician and executive. Gomory worked at IBM as a researcher and later as an executive. During that time, his research led to the creation of new areas of applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#900
Takahiro Kawai
#16331
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Takahiro Kawai is a Japanese mathematician working on algebraic analysis. He is a professor emeritus at RIMS. He was a student of Mikio Sato at the same time as Masaki Kashiwara with whom he later shared the Asahi Prize in 1987.
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