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,
#8501
Elfriede Abbe
#69418
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Elfriede Martha Abbe was an American sculptor, wood engraver and botanical illustrator, often displaying nature and simple country living inspired by her Upstate New York home. A self-publisher, Abbe created numerous hand-printed books, which she printed on a printing press in her studio.
Go to Profile#8502
Greg Wyatt
#51279
Overall Influence
Greg Wyatt is an American representational sculptor who works primarily in cast bronze, and is the sculptor-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. Wyatt was born in Nyack, New York and raised in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York. His father was William Stanley Wyatt, a painter and professor of fine arts at Columbia University, Rockland Community College and the City College of New York. Greg Wyatt graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History. He also attended the National Academy of Design for ...
Go to Profile#8503
Ted Hurley
#141046
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Ted Hurley is an Irish mathematician specialising in algebra, specifically in group theory, group rings, cryptography, coding theory, and computer algebra. Most of his academic career was spent at University College Galway . He was Head of Discipline of Mathematics there from 1996 to 2010.
Go to Profile#8504
Rudolf Zwirner
#71442
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Rudolf Zwirner is a German art dealer and gallerist. Early life He was born in 1933, the son of the phonetician . His brother, , was a doctor. Career Together with his wife Ursula Reppin, he opened his first gallery in Essen in 1959. They opened a second gallery in Cologne in 1963.
Go to Profile#8505
Andor Földes
#144556
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
Andor Földes was an internationally renowned Hungarian pianist born in Budapest, who later took American citizenship. Career Földes first studied the piano with his mother, Valerie Ipolye, and with Tibor Szatmari in his home town of Óbuda. He made his public debut performing a Mozart concerto with the Budapest Philharmonic when he was 8 years old . He entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in 1922. Földes studied with Ernő Dohnányi until 1932 and with Béla Bartók from 1929. He made his American debut in a radio recital in 1940, and his recital debut at New York Town Hall in 1941. On 3 Novem...
Go to Profile#8506
He Xuhua
#139792
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Xuhua He is a Chinese mathematician. Education and career In 2001, He graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University. In 2005 he received his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with thesis Some subvarieties of the De Concini-Procesi compactification and advisor George Lusztig. As a postdoc research fellow, He was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 2005–2006 and Simons Instructor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 2006 to 2008. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology he was an assistant professor from 2008 to 2012 and an associate professor from 2012 to 2014.
Go to Profile#8507
Stephen R. Doty
#188434
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Stephen Richard Doty is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic representation theory . He earned a doctorate in mathematics from University of Notre Dame in 1982 under the supervision of Warren J. Wong with dissertation The Submodule Structure of Weyl Modules for Groups of Type An. After post-doctoral positions at University of Washington and University of Notre Dame, he joined the faculty at Loyola University Chicago in 1987.
Go to Profile#8508
Halsey
#188449
Overall Influence
#8509
Li Hengde
#164846
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Li Hengde was a Chinese nuclear physicist and materials scientist who established China's first nuclear materials program at Tsinghua University. He was a founding academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering , and a Fellow of the Materials Research Society. He served as President of the Chinese Materials Research Society from 1991 to 1999 and as President of the International Union of Materials Research Societies from 1999 to 2000.
Go to Profile#8510
Hossein Saffar Harandi
#19298
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi is an Iranian politician who was minister of culture and Islamic guidance of Iran from 21 August 2005 until 23 July 2009 when he resigned after opposing the appointment of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei as vice president. He is currently member of the Expediency Discernment Council.
Go to Profile#8511
Boris Berezovsky
#82774
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky , also known as Platon Elenin, was a Russian business oligarch, government official, engineer and mathematician and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He had the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Go to Profile#8512
Samuel J. Lomonaco Jr.
#121761
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Samuel John Lomonaco, Jr. is an American academic and mathematician who is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Background Lomonaco earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Saint Louis University and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University. Lomonaco specializes in quantum computation, topology, quantum information science, knot theory, and quantum algorithms.
Go to Profile#8513
Marti Noxon
#62419
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Martha Mills Noxon is an American television and film writer, director, and producer. She is best known for her work as a screenwriter and executive producer on the supernatural drama series Buffy the Vampire Slayer . She was also executive producer, writer, and creator of the Bravo comedy-drama series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce and the Lifetime drama series UnREAL , and an executive producer of the CBS medical drama series Code Black .
Go to Profile#8514
Robert McLachlan
#80043
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Robert Iain McLachlan is a New Zealand mathematician and Distinguished Professor in the School of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, New Zealand. His research in geometric integration encompasses both pure and applied mathematics, modelling the structure of systems such as liquids, climate cycles, and quantum mechanics. He is also writes for the public on the subject of climate change policy.
Go to Profile#8515
David Rose
#134996
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
David Edward Rose was a British television producer and commissioning editor. At the BBC Following war service flying on 34 missions in Lancaster bombers, he trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Drama, but following graduation pursued a career in stage management. He became an Assistant Floor Manager for BBC television in London in 1954, working on the television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his first week, but by the end of the 1950s he was a director of dramatised documentaries for the BBC, including Black Furrow about open cast mining in South Wales.
Go to Profile#8516
David R. Jones
#188591
Overall Influence
#8517
Jian Yang
#112538
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Jian Yang is a Chinese statistical geneticist and Professor of Statistical Genomics at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, as well as an affiliated professor at the Queensland Brain Institute. He received the 2015 Ruth Stephens Gani Medal for his research on the "missing heritability" of complex traits. In 2017, he received the Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year from the Prime Minister of Australia for his work on the basis of genetic variation in complex human traits, such as obesity and schizophrenia. He has researched the contribution of numerou...
Go to Profile#8518
Marvin Stein
#104604
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Marvin Stein was a mathematician and computer scientist, and the "father of computer science" at the University of Minnesota. Early life Marvin Stein was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family later moved to Los Angeles, California to treat Stein's mother's tuberculosis. He graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1941, and immediately entered University of California, Los Angeles. His studies were interrupted and in 1942 he served in the US Army Signal Corps as a tabulating machine operator, and had a short stint working at IBM. He returned to school...
Go to Profile#8519
Lee Ufan
#28090
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Lee Ufan is a Korean minimalist painter, sculptor, and academic, known for innovative bodies of work emphasizing process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site, and critiques of European phenomenology.
Go to Profile#8520
Hans-Peter Luzius
#180787
Overall Influence
1912 - Present (113 years)
Hans-Peter Luzius was a German actuarial mathematician and economist. Luzius was most notable for his work oduring World War II on researching a method to cryptanalyse the M-209 mechanical cipher machine that led to the first recovery of key based on a crib, while he was conscripted to the Inspectorate 7/VI, the signals intelligence agency of the Wehrmacht, while based at Matthäikirchplatz in Berlin, close to Bendlerblock.
Go to Profile#8521
Asghar Hameed
#110868
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Asghar Hameed was the fourth Emir of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement. External links Biographie Asghar Hameed
Go to Profile#8522
Lee Bontecou
#19964
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
Go to Profile#8523
Simon Stringer
#163431
Overall Influence
Simon Stringer is a departmental lecturer, Director of the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, and Editor-in-Chief of Network: Computation in Neural Systems published by Taylor & Francis.
Go to Profile#8524
Michel Sintzoff
#103430
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Michel Sintzoff was a Belgian mathematician and computer scientist. He was one of the editors of the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 68. He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
Go to Profile#8525
Tom Clark
#24781
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer. Education and personal life Clark was born on the Near West Side of Chicago, and attended Fenwick High School in Oak Park. After high school, he attended the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake graduate study at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in England , before spending further time pursuing doctoral research at the newly-established University of Essex. It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through Somerset in the company of Alle...
Go to Profile#8526
John Frederick Clarke
#129020
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
John Frederick Clarke FRS was a professor, an aeronautical engineer, and a pilot. Biography After his schooling, he got training from Fleet Air Arm as a Navy Pilot and then from Royal Air force at Lossiemouth. He left Navy and worked few months at Armstrong Siddeley Motors, but his interest were in academics. Subsequently he quit the job and joined Queen Mary College in Aeronautical engineering course in 1949. He married Jean Gentle in 1953. His thesis advisor Norman A.V. Piercy died in 1953, then he temporarily advised by Leslie G. Whitehead and then finally by Alec David Young. He received his PhD at Queen Mary College in 1957.
Go to Profile#8527
Willem Wilmink
#108685
Overall Influence
1936 - 2003 (67 years)
Willem Wilmink was a Dutch poet and writer. He was best known for the large number of songs he wrote for popular children programs and his accessible, straightforward poetry. Life and career Wilmink was born in Enschede and studied Dutch and history at the University of Amsterdam. From 1960 to 1978, he taught modern literature at the same university. He wrote many songs for musicals and wrote a number of novels for young adults. At first he mainly wrote for adults, but later mainly for children.
Go to Profile#8528
Janez Rakovec
#188452
Overall Influence
1949 - 2008 (59 years)
Janez Rakovec was a Slovenian mathematician. His principal field of work was topology, mainly 3-manifolds. He worked at the Mathematics Department of the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Ljubljana; in 1992 he was retired early. His bibliography comprises 73 units.
Go to Profile#8529
Cornelius B. Murphy Jr.
#98519
Overall Influence
Cornelius B. Murphy Jr. is Professor of Environmental and Sustainable Systems at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry . From 2000 to 2013, he was the third President of SUNY-ESF. Previously, he was president and chief executive officer of O'Brien & Gere, a large environmental engineering consulting firm based in Syracuse, New York. He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Syracuse University, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Saint Michael's College.
Go to Profile#8530
John Strain
#184960
Overall Influence
John Andrew Strain is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of interest are Applied Mathematics, Algorithms, Numerical Analysis, and Materials Science. John Strain received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 working with his advisor Alexandre Joel Chorin. His dissertation paper was on the numerical study of dendritic solidification. Notable publications include Piecewise-polynomial discretization and Krylov-accelerated multigrid for elliptic interface problems, Locally corrected semi-Lagrangian methods for Stokes...
Go to Profile#8531
Tobias Rehberger
#56232
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Tobias Rehberger is a German sculptor, born in Esslingen am Neckar. He studied under Thomas Bayrle and Martin Kippenberger at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where he now teaches. Work Rehberger works in the wider sphere of design and architecture, and his art is difficult to categorize. He has created an idyllic Japanese garden in the middle of Manhattan; Pop-inspired wallpaper consisting of photographs of his organs; a series of Modernist-looking treehouses in a park in northern Germany; and an enormous tanker based on a crude boat that the father of a friend built to escape from Vi...
Go to Profile#8532
Gottfried Curio
#188880
Overall Influence
#8533
Jon Davison
#116635
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Jon Davison was Dean and the first Professor of Teacher Education in the Institute of Education, University of London. He holds degrees from the universities of Exeter and London. He taught in London schools for seventeen years, before becoming a teacher educator in 1992.
Go to Profile#8534
Pythagoras
#27239
Overall Influence
Pythagoras was a freedman of the Roman emperor Nero, whom he married in a public ceremony in which the emperor took the role of bride. Life Little is known about Pythagoras' background except that he was a freedman who accompanied Nero.
Go to Profile#8535
Oleg Kosterin
#173054
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Oleg Kosterin is a Russian genetic and entomologist, specializing at Odonata. He discovered and described a number of species and several have been named after him by other scientists. Species named after him Drepanosticta kosterini Dow, 2017 Asiagomphus kosterini Kompier, 2018 Dolychopus kosterini Grichanov, 2017 Alucita kosterini Ustjuzhanin, 1999Stenoptilia kosterini Ustjuchanin, 2001Cernyia kosterini Dubatolov et Buczek, 2013Lyclene kosterini Dubatolov et Buczek, 2013Coenosia kosterini Vikhrev, 2009 .Thricops kosterini Vikhrev, 2013 .Cordilura kosterini Ozerov et Krivosheina .
Go to Profile#8536
Tom Daly
#133988
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Thomas Cullen Daly was a Canadian film producer, film editor and film director, who was the head of Studio B at the National Film Board of Canada . During his 44-year career, Daly produced, edited and/or directed 315 films. His remarkable awards roster includes eight BAFTA awards, eight Venice Film Festival awards, seven Cannes Film Festival awards and ten Oscar nominations. On April 27, 2000, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Go to Profile#8537
Nnedi Okorafor
#77938
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.
Go to Profile#8538
Angela Mihai
#137556
Overall Influence
Loredana Angela Mihai is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst. Originally from Romania, she works in the UK as professor of applied mathematics at Cardiff University, and director of research and innovation for the Cardiff University School of Mathematics. She specialises in mathematical modeling of the mechanical properties of soft materials, such as biological tissue.
Go to Profile#8539
Zerrin Bölükbaşı
#124183
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Zerrin Bölükbaşı was a Turkish sculptor, one of the first Turkish female sculptors, and the first woman sculptor to work on abstract sculptures. Life Early life Zerrin Bölükbaşı was born as Zerrin Ark to İhsan and Nevzat Hanım in Bakırköy, İstanbul, then in the Ottoman Empire in 1919. Her mother Nevzat was an educated woman, who graduated from the German school and her father İhsan Ark worked in real estate business. In 1926, she entered the Bakırköy Primary School, and after she finished the school, the family moved to Kadıköy in Istanbul. There, she continued her schooling in Kadıköy Ameri...
Go to Profile#8540
Sergei Aseev
#181415
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Sergei Mironovich Aseev is a Russian mathematician, Dr. Sc., Professor, and a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the faculty of MSU CMC in 1980. He defended the thesis «Extremal problems for differential inclusions with phase constraints» for the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences .
Go to Profile#8541
John Howard
#115653
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
John Howard is an English singer-songwriter, pianist and recording artist and published author. With his February 1975 debut album Kid in a Big World , Howard emerged as a late voice of the glam-pop wave of the early 1970s. Across a musical career that has included two main periods of recording activity – 1974-84 and 2004–present – Howard has released 20 studio albums and 12 studio EPs. In March 2018, he became a published author, his first autobiography, Incidents Crowded With Life, covering his childhood up to 1976, was published by Fisher King Publishing. In August 2020, the second volume ...
Go to Profile#8542
Russell T Davies
#89471
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Stephen Russell Davies , better known as Russell T Davies, is a Welsh screenwriter and television producer whose works include Queer as Folk, Bob & Rose, The Second Coming, Casanova, the 2005 revival of the BBC One science fiction franchise Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, Years and Years, It's a Sin and Nolly.
Go to Profile#8543
Lester R. Rice-Wray
#114969
Overall Influence
Lester R. Rice-Wray was a professor of mathematics at the University of Denver who later was elected to the City Council in Los Angeles, California, and was the first councilman there to face a recall election under the 1925 city charter.
Go to Profile#8544
Barry Dean Karl
#67054
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Barry Dean Karl was an American educator. Education He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Louisville in 1949, a master's from the University of Chicago in 1951, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961.
Go to Profile#8545
Terry Lyons
#189131
Overall Influence
#8546
Patricia Reynaud-Bouret
#181499
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
Patricia Reynaud-Bouret is a French statistician who has studied Hawkes processes, density estimation, and concentration inequalities, and applied them in neuroscience, neural connectivity reconstruction, and genomics. She is a director of research for the French National Centre for Scientific Research , affiliated with the J. A. Dieudonné Laboratory of Côte d'Azur University , founder and former director of the university's NeuroMod Institute for Modeling in Neuroscience and Cognition, and a chair holder in the university's Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#8547
Gladys H. Reynolds
#152259
Overall Influence
Gladys H. Reynolds is an American statistician who did pioneering research on modeling sexually transmitted diseases. She worked for many years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , was the first female chief of a CDC statistics branch, and the first statistician to serve in that role.
Go to Profile#8548
E. Thomas Lawson
#20097
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Ernest Thomas Lawson is an honorary professor at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture and co-founder of the North American Association for the Study of Religion . He is a founding member and has served as the first President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion .
Go to Profile#8549
André Fortin
#185473
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
André Fortin is a French Canadian mathematician, known for his research in applied and industrial mathematics. He holds a NSERC Research Chair in High Performance Scientific Computing at Université Laval.
Go to Profile#8550
Latika Katt
#99966
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Latika Katt is an Indian sculptor who specializes in stone carving, metal casting and bronze sculpting. She is notable for winning the Beijing Art Biennale Award for her bronze work titled "Makar Sankranti at Dashawmeth Ghat, Varanasi.
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