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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#8851
Moon Shin
#108780
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Moon Shin was a South Korean painter and sculptor whose childhood name was Moon Ahn-shin. His date of birth was reported late and is erroneously stated as 1923 in most publications. When an international exhibition was held in France in 1989 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, Moon was one of 24 artists who were invited. One of his pieces can be found in SOMA sculptor park celebrating the 1988 Summer Olympics Seoul.
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Raymond Keiller Butchart
1888 - 1930 (42 years)
Raymond Keiller Butchart FRSE was a short-lived Scottish mathematician. He served for two years as Professor of Mathematics at the illustrious Raffles College in Singapore. He lost a leg in the First World War.
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Fritz Wotruba
1907 - 1975 (68 years)
Fritz Wotruba was an Austrian sculptor of Czecho-Hungarian descent. He was considered one of the most notable sculptors of the 20th century in Austria. In his work, he increasingly dissolves figurative components in favor of geometrical abstraction with the shape of the cube as the basic form.
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Robert Diez
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
Robert Diez was a German sculptor. Life He was the son of Pößneck's Mayor. His artistic inclinations began to emerge at his grandparents home in Sonneberg, the center of the German toy-making industry. During his years at the Gymnasium in Meiningen, he lived with his uncle Samuel Friedrich Diez, the Court Painter, who strongly encouraged Robert to pursue a career in art. He began his artistic training in 1863 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. From 1867 to 1870, he was a pupil of Johannes Schilling. After his father died and he lost his means of support, he went to work in Schilling's studio.
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Walter Richard Talbot
1909 - 1977 (68 years)
Walter Richard Talbot was the fourth African American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh and Lincoln University's youngest Doctor of Philosophy. He was a member of Sigma Xi and Pi Tau Phi. In 1969 Talbot co-founded the National Association of Mathematics at Morgan State University, the organization which, nine years later honored him at a memorial luncheon and created a scholarship in his name. In 1990 the Cox-Talbot lecture was inaugurated recognizing his accomplishments together with Elbert Frank Cox – the first African-American to get a doctoral degree in ma...
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Hernando de Talavera
1428 - 1507 (79 years)
Hernando de Talavera, O.S.H. was a Spanish clergyman and councilor to Queen Isabel of Castile. He began his career as a monk of the Order of Saint Jerome, was appointed the queen's confessor and with her support and patronage, became the Archbishop of Granada.
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Jacques-François Le Poivre
1652 - 1710 (58 years)
Jacques-François Le Poivre was a Belgian mathematician and geometer who was a pioneer of projective geometry. He is largely known from a single book in French on conic sections, Traité des sections du cylindrie et du cône considérées dans le solide et dans le plan, avec des démonstrations simples & nouvelles .
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Ibn Mu'adh al-Jayyani
989 - 1050 (61 years)
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muʿādh al-Jayyānī was an Arab, mathematician, Islamic scholar, and Qadi from Al-Andalus . Al-Jayyānī wrote important commentaries on Euclid's Elements and he wrote the first known treatise on spherical trigonometry.
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David Martin
1737 - 1797 (60 years)
David Martin was a Scottish painter and engraver. Born in Fife, he studied in Italy and England, before gaining a reputation as a portrait painter. Early life Born in Anstruther Easter, he was the first of the five children of John Martin , Anstruther Easter's parish schoolmaster, and his second wife, Mary Boyack .
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Wenceslaus Hollar
1607 - 1677 (70 years)
Wenceslaus Hollar was a prolific and accomplished Bohemian graphic artist of the 17th century, who spent much of his life in England. He is known to German speakers as ; and to Czech speakers as . He is particularly noted for his engravings and etchings. He was born in Prague, died in London, and was buried at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.
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Charles Herschel Sisam
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Charles Herschel Sisam was an American mathematician. He received his B.A. in 1902 from the University of Michigan and then his M.A. in 1903 and Ph.D. in 1906, under the supervision of Virgil Snyder, from Cornell University. While working on his Ph.D., Sisam was a mathematics instructor at the United States Naval Academy from 1904 to 1906. He was an instructor in 1906–1907, a research associate in 1907–1909, and an assistant professor in 1909–1918 at the University of Illinois. From 1918 to 1948, he was a full professor at Colorado College. He did research on algebraic surfaces and was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1928 in Bologna.
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Samuel Palmer
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Samuel Palmer Hon.RE was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings.
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Cristoforo Alasia de Quesada
1869 - 1918 (49 years)
Cristoforo Alasia de Quesada was an Italian mathematician. Life and work Alasia studied at the universities of Turin and Rome . In 1893 began his academic career as mathematics professor in different high schools at Sassari, Tempio Pausania, Oristano, Ozieri, Brindisi and, finally, at Albenga.
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Leone Levi
1821 - 1888 (67 years)
Leone Levi was an English jurist and statistician. Born to a Jewish family in Ancona, Italy, he worked in commerce there before emigrating to Liverpool in 1844. There he obtained British citizenship and joined the Presbyterian church.
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Marius Lacombe
1862 - 1938 (76 years)
Marius Lacombe was a Swiss mathematician. Life and work Lacombe studied mathematics at Engineers Department of the ETH Zurich. From 1890 to 1894 he was teaching descriptive geometry in the university of Lausanne. In 1894 he was appointed professor at ETH Zurich to fill a newly created chair of descriptive geometry in French language. After fourteen years in Zurich, in 1908 he returned to university of Lausane, where he retired in 1927.
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Pierre-Dominique Bazaine
1786 - 1838 (52 years)
Pierre-Dominique Bazaine was a French scientist and engineer. Early life He was born 13 January 1786, in the town of Scy-sur-Moselle, son of Pierre Bazaine and Francoise Gilbert. Educated in Paris, graduate of the Paris engineering schools, Paris' Polytechnic University and Paris' University of Bridges . Initially he practised as an Engineer in Italy and Southern France.
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George Gibson
1858 - 1930 (72 years)
George Alexander Gibson FRSE LLD was a Scottish mathematician and academic writer. Life He was born on 19 April 1858 in Greenlaw in Berwickshire the third son of Robert Gibson JP . He attended the free church school in the parish, and showing great promise, went to the University of Glasgow where he graduated with an MA in 1882 and immediately joined the University staff.
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Andor Kertész
1929 - 1974 (45 years)
Andor Kertész was a Hungarian mathematician and professor of mathematics at the Lajos Kossuth University , Debrecen. He is the father of linguist András Kertész. Biography and career Kertész was born on 19 February 1929 in Gyula, Békés County, Hungary.
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Antonio del Pollaiuolo
1429 - 1498 (69 years)
Antonio del Pollaiuolo , also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo , was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
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Wolcott Gibbs
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Wolcott Gibbs was an American editor, humorist, theatre critic, playwright and writer of short stories, who worked for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is notable for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure. Gibbs wrote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"; he concluded the piece, "Where it all will end, knows God!" He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun, which ran on Broadway for 10 months in 1950–51 and was based on a series of stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
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Lawrence Crawford
1867 - 1951 (84 years)
Lawrence Crawford FRSE LLD was a Scottish-born mathematician. He was a co-founder of the re-established Royal Society of South Africa in 1908 and served as its President from 1936 to 1941. He was an expert on the Lame function, Mathieu function and proved Klein's theorem.
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Ernests Fogels
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Ernests Fogels was a Latvian mathematician who specialized in number theory. Fogels discovered new proofs of the Gauss-Dirichlet formula on the number of classes of positively definite quadratic forms and of the de la Vallée-Poussin formula for the asymptotic location of prime numbers in an arithmetic progression.
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Thomas Mitchell
1792 - 1855 (63 years)
Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell , often called Major Mitchell, was a surveyor and explorer of Southeastern Australia. He was born in Scotland and served in the British Army during the Peninsular War. In 1827 he took up an appointment as Assistant Surveyor General of New South Wales. The following year he became Surveyor General and remained in this position until his death. Mitchell was knighted in 1839 for his contribution to the surveying of Australia.
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Muzio Oddi
1569 - 1639 (70 years)
Muzio or Mutio Oddi was an Italian mathematician and Gnomonist. Biography He was born to Lisabetta Genga and Lattanzio Oddi. His initial training was in eloquence and philosophy, but he later trained under the painter Federico Barocci. He moved to Pesaro to work under Guidobaldo del Monte, one of the main disciples of Federico Commandino. He was hired to work in Spain and France as a military engineer, which required him also to help train in the use of artillery. He returned to the Duchy of Urbino to work as an engineer under the Duke Francesco Maria II della Rovere.
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Ivan Mitford-Barberton
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Ivan Mitford-Barberton was a sculptor, writer and authority on heraldry. Early life and education Mitford-Barberton was born in Somerset East, in Cape Colony, in 1896. He was a descendant of several 1820 Settler families. His grandmother was the naturalist, Mary Elizabeth Barber. He did his schooling at St. Andrew's College, Grahamstown. In 1912 his family moved to Kenya, where he encountered African and Arab subjects that later formed an important theme in his work. From 1915 to 1918 he served as a soldier in East Africa. From 1919 to 1922 he studied at the Grahamstown School of Art, and from 1923 at the Royal College of Art in London, under Henry Moore and Derwent Wood.
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George Frampton
1860 - 1928 (68 years)
Sir George James Frampton, was a British sculptor. He was a leading member of the New Sculpture movement in his early career when he created sculptures with elements of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, often combining various materials such as marble and bronze in a single piece. While his later works were more traditional in style, Frampton had a prolific career in which he created many notable public monuments, including several statues of Queen Victoria and later, after World War I, a number of war memorials. These included the Edith Cavell Memorial in London, which, along with the Peter Pan st...
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Chester Snow
1881 - 1970 (89 years)
Chester Snow was an American applied mathematician and physicist, known for his work on formulas for computing capacitance and inductance. Snow was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. After attending Ogden High School and Utah Agricultural College, Snow matriculated at Harvard University in 1903 and graduated there with an A.B. in 1906. At Brigham Young University he was a professor of physics from 1906 to 1911 and a professor of mathematics from 1911 to 1912. From 1912 to 1914 he was a fellow in physics at the University of Wisconsin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1914. At the University of Idaho mathematics department he was an associate professor from 1914.
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Edward Sang
1805 - 1890 (85 years)
Edward Sang FRSE FRSSA LLD was a Scottish mathematician and civil engineer, best known for having computed large tables of logarithms, with the help of two of his daughters. These tables went beyond the tables of Henry Briggs, Adriaan Vlacq, and Gaspard de Prony.
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Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo was born on 10 January 1887 in the country estate of Vista Bella, province of Aija, Peru, department of Áncash. He was an engineer, physicist and mathematician. Early years He studied at Colegio Nacional de la Libertad and later Colegio Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe , where he met Peruvian writer Abraham Valdelomar. In 1905 he was admitted into the Mathematical Sciences faculty of the San Marcos National University in Lima. At the end of the 1906 academic year , he received a distinction from President José Pardo, receiving a gold medal. After this, he traveled to France to get his degree in Electrical Engineering in the University of Grenoble.
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Alexander of Villedieu
1175 - 1240 (65 years)
Alexander of Villedieu was a French author, teacher and poet, who wrote text books on Latin grammar and arithmetic, everything in verse. He was born around 1175 in Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, studied in Paris, and later taught at Dol in Brittany. His greatest fame stems from his versified Latin grammar book, the Doctrinale Puerorum. He died in 1240, or perhaps in 1250. He was a Franciscan and a Master of the University of Paris.
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Augustus William Smith
1802 - 1866 (64 years)
Augustus William Smith was an American educator, astronomer and mathematician in the mid-19th century. Smith was born in Newport, Herkimer County, New York, May 12, 1802. He attended Hamilton College, and graduated in 1825. After college, he began teaching in the Methodist Oneida conference seminary, in Cazenovia, New York. He became head of Oneida in 1827, the same year in which he married his wife, Catherine R. Childs. While at Oneida, he earned a master's degree from Hamilton.
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Maikki Friberg
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Maria Elisabeth Friberg was a Finnish educator, journal editor, suffragist and peace activist. She is remembered for her involvement in the Finnish women's movement, especially as chair of the Finnish women's rights organisation Suomen Naisyhdistys and as the founder and editor of the women's journal Naisten Ääni . She travelled widely, promoting understanding of Finland abroad while participating in international conferences and contributing to the foreign press.
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Edward Jan Habich
1835 - 1909 (74 years)
Edward Jan Habich was a Polish engineer and mathematician. In 1876, he founded the National University of Engineering , a renowned engineering school in Lima, Peru. He was a member of the Peruvian Geographic Society and an Honorary Citizen of Peru. In his native Poland he took part in the January Uprising against the Russian Empire in 1863.
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Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
1485 - 1556 (71 years)
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. During eight years of traveling across what is now the US Southwest, he became a trader and faith healer to various Native American tribes before reconnecting with Spanish civilization in Mexico in 1536. After returning to Spain in 1537, he wrote an account, first published in 1542 as La relación y comentarios , which in later editions was retitled Naufragios y comentarios . Cabeza de Vaca is sometimes considered a proto-anthropologist for his detailed accounts of the ...
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Francis John Welsh Whipple
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Francis John Welsh Whipple ScD FInstP was an English mathematician, meteorologist and seismologist. From 1925 to 1939, he was superintendent of the Kew Observatory. Biography Whipple was the son of Kew Observatory employees George Mathews Whipple and Elizabeth Beckley, an astronomical photographer.
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Otto von Fürth
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Otto von Fürth was an Austrian physician, physiologist and biochemist. Fürth studied at the University of Prague, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin. He worked at the University of Vienna, the University of Prague and the University of Straßburg where received his habilitation in medical chemistry in 1899. From that point on he worked in Vienna focusing on biochemistry. In 1898 he announced the discovery of "suprerenin." He received the Lieben Prize in 1923.
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Fredrik Lange-Nielsen
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Fredrik Lange-Nielsen was a Norwegian mathematician and insurance company manager. He chaired the Norwegian Students' Society, edited Norsk matematisk Tidsskrift, and lectured at the University of Oslo. He was chief executive of the insurance company Norske Liv for nearly twenty years, was elected member of several governmental commissions, and a member of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature from its establishment in 1953.
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Franciscus van den Enden
1602 - 1674 (72 years)
Franciscus van den Enden, in later life also known as 'Affinius' was a Flemish former Jesuit, Neo-Latin poet, physician, art dealer, philosopher, and plotter against Louis XIV of France. Born in Antwerp, where he had a truncated career as a Jesuit and an art dealer, he moved later to the Dutch Republic where he became part of a group of radical thinkers sometimes referred to as the Amsterdam Circle who challenged prevailing views on politics and religion. He was a Utopian planning to set up an ideal society in the Dutch colonies in America and a proponent of democracy in the administration of states.
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Alexander Ritchie Scott
1874 - 1962 (88 years)
Dr Alexander Ritchie Scott FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician and statistician. Life He was born in Edinburgh and educated at George Heriot's School. He studied mathematics and science at the University of Edinburgh graduating with a BSc in 1894. He then spent some time in the Challenger Expedition Office in Edinburgh, doing statistical analysis. In 1896 he became a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and taught mathematics for 11 years. He then spent a year as Assistant Registrar at the University of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Returning to the UK in 1909 he became Principal of the Beaufoy Institute in London where he remained for 30 years.
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Judson B. Coit
1849 - 1921 (72 years)
Judson Boardman Coit was an American mathematician and astronomer who published in numerous journals, including The Astrophysical Journal and the of the British Astronomical Association. The largest part of his professional career was spent as a professor at Boston University, where he established the Department of Astronomy and developed a teaching and research observatory. The teaching observatory at Boston University is named in his memory.
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Vilhelm Bissen
1836 - 1913 (77 years)
Christian Gottlieb Vilhelm Bissen was a Danish sculptor. He was also a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with great influence on the next generation of Danish sculptors and for a while served as its director. Bissen was trained in the Neoclassical tradition from Bertel Thorvaldsen but after a stay in Paris around 1880, he was influenced by Naturalism. With the equestrian statue of Absalon he turned to Neo-romanticism.
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Milton W. Humphreys
1844 - 1928 (84 years)
Milton W. Humphreys was an American Confederate sergeant during the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and an early scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin in the United States. He was the first professor to introduce the Roman pronunciation of Latin in the United States while teaching at Washington and Lee University. Additionally, he was the first Professor of Latin and Greek at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Virginia. He also served as the President of the American Philological Association in 1882–1883.
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William Gilham
1818 - 1872 (54 years)
William Henry Gilham was an American soldier, teacher, chemist, and author. A member of the faculty at Virginia Military Institute, in 1860, he wrote a military manual which was still in modern use 145 years later. He served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and became president of Southern Fertilizing Company in Richmond after the War.
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Louis Awad
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Louis Awad was an Egyptian intellectual and a writer. Born in the upper Egypt, in Sharuna village, in Minya, Egypt, Awad studied at the literature department of Cairo University before setting off to England for further studies before the Second World War. He returned to Egypt in 1941, after which he lived in the Cairo district of Dokki for much of his adult life.
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Percy John Harding
1845 - 1943 (98 years)
Percy John Harding was an English mathematician, noteworthy as an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1912. The elder son of William Harding, a surgeon in London, Percy J. Harding received his B.A. in 1869 and his M.A. in 1874 from Cambridge University. He became a lecturer at University College, London and Bedford College, London. On 1 March 1906 at Bedford College, London, he gave a talk The History and Human Side of Mathematics with lantern illustrations. Using lantern slides, he gave a talk The history and evolution of arithmetic division at the ICM at 9 PM ...
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Rudolph Goclenius the Younger
1572 - 1621 (49 years)
Rudolph Goclenius the Younger was a German physician and professor at Philipps University of Marburg. Goclenius was born in Wittenberg, the oldest son of Rudolph Goclenius, who was also professor of physics, logic, mathematics and ethics at Marburg. He enrolled at the University of Marburg at the age of 15. As a student, Goclenius was a respondent to his father in a physical disputation and received his master's degree in 1591. After obtaining his medical degree in 1601, Goclenius became the first rector of the newly founded gymnasium in Büdingen and a personal physician to Wolfgang Ernst I, Count of Isenburg-Büdingen.
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Hannes Leitgeb
#8898
Peter Laird McKinlay
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
Dr Peter Laird McKinlay FRSE FSS was a Scottish medical statistician. His report on the effects of milk on schoolchildren brought about the introduction of Free School Milk in British Schools from the Education Act 1944.
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Henricus Brucaeus
1530 - 1593 (63 years)
Heinrich Brucaeus, also Heinrich van den Brock, sometimes falsely Heinrich Brucaeus of Aalst was a German physician, astronomer and mathematician. Life Heinrich Brucaeus was born in Aalst, Flanders as the son of the patron Gerhard van den Brock. He was educated at schools and universities in Ghent, Paris, and Bologna, studied medicine and philosophy, and became a doctor of both disciplines at University of Paris. After that, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Leuven
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Karl von den Steinen
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Karl von den Steinen was a German physician , ethnologist, explorer, and author of important anthropological work, which is particularly to the study of Indian cultures of Central Brazil, and the art of the Marquesas. He laid the permanent foundations for Brazilian ethnology.
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