The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#8901
István Fáry
1922 - 1984 (62 years)
István Fáry was a Hungarian-born mathematician known for his work in geometry and algebraic topology. He proved Fáry's theorem that every planar graph has a straight-line embedding in 1948, and the Fáry–Milnor theorem lower-bounding the curvature of a nontrivial knot in 1949.
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Alfred Brousseau
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Brother Alfred Brousseau, F.S.C. , was an educator, photographer and mathematician and was known mostly as a founder of the Fibonacci Association and as an educator. Biography Brother Alfred Brousseau was born in North Beach, San Francisco, as one of six children. On August 14, 1920, Brousseau entered the juniorate of the De La Salle Christian Brothers , a religious institute of teachers in the Roman Catholic Church. He was accepted into the Christian Brothers novitiate on 31 July 1923 and advanced to the scholasticate on the campus of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, in 1924.
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Guido Hoheisel
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Guido Karl Heinrich Hoheisel was a German mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Cologne. Academic life He did his PhD in 1920 from the University of Berlin under the supervision of Erhard Schmidt. During World War II Hoheisel was required to teach classes simultaneously at three universities, in Cologne, Bonn, and Münster. His doctoral students include Arnold Schönhage.
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Frithiof Nevanlinna
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Frithiof Edvard Henrik Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician and professor who worked on classical and complex analysis. He was born in Joensuu, and was the older brother of Rolf Nevanlinna. Publications
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Helene Stähelin
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Helene Stähelin was a Swiss mathematician, teacher, and peace activist. Between 1948 and 1967, she was president of the Swiss section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and its representative in the Swiss Peace Council.
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William Anthony Granville
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
William Anthony Granville was an American mathematician, and served as president of Gettysburg College from 1910 until 1923. Overview Granville began his teaching career at Bethany College, where he was an instructor of mathematics and served as the college treasurer. In 1893 he was awarded a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University. For fifteen years, beginning in 1895, he was professor of mathematics at Yale, and was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from that institution in 1897 under James Pierpont. His dissertation was titled, "Referat on the Origin and Development of the Addition-Theorem in Elliptic Functions".
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Lorado Taft
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Lorado Zadok Taft was an American sculptor, writer and educator. Part of the American Renaissance movement, his monumental pieces include, Fountain of Time, Spirit of the Great Lakes, and The Eternal Indian. His 1903 book, The History of American Sculpture, was the first survey of the subject and stood for decades as the standard reference. He has been credited with helping to advance the status of women as sculptors.
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Lillian Rosanoff Lieber
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Lillian Rosanoff Lieber was a Russian-American mathematician and popular author. She often teamed up with her illustrator husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, to produce works. Life and career Early life and education Lieber was one of four children of Abraham H. and Clara Rosanoff. Her brothers were Denver publisher Joseph Rosenberg, psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff, and chemist Martin André Rosanoff. Aaron and Martin changed their names to sound more Russian, less Jewish. Lieber moved to the US with her family in 1891. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1908, her M.A. from Columbia University in 1911, and her Ph.D.
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Ida Rhodes
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ida Rhodes was an American mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States. Childhood Hadassah Itzkowitz was born in a Jewish village Kamianets-Podilskyi between Nemyriv and Tulchyn in Ukraine on May 15, 1900.
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Alessandro Padoa
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Alessandro Padoa was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano. He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory, a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms.
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Tadao Tannaka
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Tadao Tannaka was a Japanese mathematician who worked in algebraic number theory. Biography Tannaka was born in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture on December 27, 1908. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Tohoku Imperial University in 1932, he was appointed a lecturer in the university in 1934 and received a Doctor of Science degree from the university in 1941. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1942 and full professor in 1945. Tannaka was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study from September 1955 to April 1957. Tannaka retired from Tohoku University in 1972, after ...
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Edna Kramer
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Edna Ernestine Kramer Lassar , born Edna Ernestine Kramer, was an American mathematician and author of mathematics books. Kramer was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics from Hunter College in 1922. While teaching at local high schools, she earned her M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1930 in mathematics from Columbia University with Edward Kasner as her advisor.
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Jan Marcin Szancer
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Jan Marcin Szancer was a Polish illustrator, scenographer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Szancer was born into a Jewish family in Kraków. He studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, and later in France and Italy.
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Robert König
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Robert Johann Maria König was an Austrian mathematician. He studied from 1903 to 1907 at the University of Vienna and at the University of Göttingen, where he received his PhD under David Hilbert with thesis Oszillationseigenschaften der Eigenfunktionen der Integralgleichung mit definitem Kern und das Jacobische Kriterium der Variationsrechnung. In 1911 he earned his Habilitation qualification at the University of Leipzig with thesis Konforme Abbildung der Oberfläche einer räumlichen Ecke.
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Ludwig Berwald
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
Ludwig Berwald was a German mathematician best known for his contributions to differential geometry, especially Finsler geometry. He taught in Munich and Prague for 32 years, publishing 54 papers, before being deported by the SS to the Łódź Ghetto, where he and his wife Hedwig died within a year.
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Octav Onicescu
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Octav Onicescu was a Romanian mathematician and a member of the Romanian Academy. Together with his student, Gheorghe Mihoc, he is considered to be the founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics.
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Gerhard Haenzel
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
Gerhard Karl Theodor Haenzel was a German mathematician. Education and career Haenzel, whose father was a teacher and school board member, completed his Abitur after studying from 1907 to 1915 at the Peter Gröning-Gymnasium in Stargard. Shortly after his Abitur, he was called up in July 1915 for active military service. His military service lasted until 30 September 1920 and he attained the rank of lieutenant. He was on the Eastern and Western fronts and in the German fight against the Polish uprising. He suffered a serious wound and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. From 1920 to ...
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Giuseppe Colombo
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo was an Italian scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy. Mercury Colombo studied the planet Mercury, and it was his calculations which showed how to get a spacecraft into a solar orbit which would encounter Mercury multiple times, using a gravity assist maneuver with Venus. Due to this idea, NASA was able to have the Mariner 10 accomplish three fly-bys of Mercury instead of one. Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist. Since then, the technique has become common.
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Wilhelm Grunwald
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Wilhelm Grunwald was a German mathematician who introduced the Grunwald–Wang theorem, though his original statement and proof of this contained a small error that was corrected by Shianghao Wang. He later left mathematics to become a science librarian, and was director of the Göttingen university library .
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Louis Lazarus Silverman
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Louis Lazarus Silverman was an American mathematician, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an academic institution in the state of Missouri. Born in a village in Lithuania, Silverman moved with his parents to the United States when he was eight years old. He received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and then his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1910. From 1910 to 1918 he was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Cornell University, where he worked with Wallie Abraham Hurwitz on divergent series and summability methods. From 19...
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Ronald M. Foster
1896 - 1998 (102 years)
Ronald Martin Foster , was an American mathematician at Bell Labs whose work was of significance regarding electronic filters for use on telephone lines. He published an important paper, A Reactance Theorem, which quickly inspired Wilhelm Cauer to begin his program of network synthesis filters which put the design of filters on a firm mathematical footing. He is also known for the Foster census of cubic, symmetric graphs and the 90-vertex cubic symmetric Foster graph.
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Paul Riebesell
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Paul Louis Riebesell was a German mathematician, statistician, actuary, and president of Hamburger Feuerkasse. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he was an invited speaker in 1932 in Zürich and in 1936 in Oslo.
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Luigi Fantappiè
1901 - 1956 (55 years)
Luigi Fantappiè was an Italian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and for creating the theory of analytic functionals: he was a student and follower of Vito Volterra. Later in life, he proposed scientific theories of sweeping scope.
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Pasquale Joseph Federico
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Pasquale Joseph Federico was a lifelong mathematician and longtime high-ranking official of the United States Patent Office. Biography He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania. About 1910 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he gained a bachelor's degree in physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1923. He then received his LL.B or law degree from Washington College of Law in 1932.
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Federico Cafiero
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Federico Cafiero was an Italian mathematician known for his contributions in real analysis, measure and integration theory, and in the theory of ordinary differential equations. In particular, generalizing the Vitali convergence theorem, the Fichera convergence theorem and previous results of Vladimir Mikhailovich Dubrovskii, he proved a necessary and sufficient condition for the passage to the limit under the sign of integral: this result is, in some sense, definitive. In the field of ordinary differential equations, he studied existence and uniqueness problems under very general hypotheses ...
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Guglielmo Tagliacarne
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Tagliacarne Guglielmo was an Italian statistician Biography Guglielmo Tagliacarne was born in Orta San Giulio, Novara, on May 31, 1893. He studied at the Bocconi University, Milan, obtaining a master's degree in Economics. He carried on his statistical studies analyzing supply chains, buying and consumption behaviors, demographic and occupational trends and the provincial and regional calculation of National Income.
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Clyde E. Love
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Clyde Elton Love was an American contract bridge author and mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a native of Bancroft, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905.
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Paul Neményi
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...
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Erika Pannwitz
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S. After the war, she became editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH.
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Giacomo Albanese
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Giacomo Albanese was an Italian mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He took a permanent position in the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1936. Biography Albanese attended the school in Palermo, Sicily. He graduated from there in 1909. Then he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as a student of mathematics, and received his doctorate in 1913. He was awarded the Ulisse Dini prize for his doctoral essay on the topic Continuous systems of curves on an algebraic surface, written under the direction of Eugenio Bertini.
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William Henry Roever
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
William Henry Roever was an American applied mathematician. Roever received in 1897 a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received an A.M. in 1904 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1906 from Harvard University with advisor Maxime Bôcher and thesis Brilliant points. Roever taught astronomy from 1899 to 1901 at Washington University in St. Louis and mathematics from 1905 to 1908 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then returned to Washington University in St. Louis to teach mathematics and later became the chair of the department of mathe...
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George H. Bryan
1864 - 1928 (64 years)
George Hartley Bryan FRS was an English applied mathematician who was an authority on thermodynamics and aeronautics. He was born in Cambridge, and was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, obtaining his BA in 1886 , MA in 1890, and DSc in 1896. He was a professor at University College of North Wales, and is generally credited with developing the modern mathematical treatment of the motion of airplanes in flight as rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom.
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Gaspare Mignosi
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Gaspare Mignósi was an Italian mathematician. Mignosi became in 1930 a professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Cagliari and in 1932 a professor at the University of Palermo. He continued the studies of the school of algebraic geometry and number theory, which flourished in Sicily around 1920 with Gaetano Scorza and Michele Cipolla. Particularly noteworthy is the contribution made by Mignosi to the so-called apiristic solution of binomial congruences.
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Nikolai Luzin
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Nikolai Nikolayevich Luzin was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.
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Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin
1866 - 1962 (96 years)
Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin was a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for proving the prime number theorem. The King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.
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Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
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Vadim Yefremovich
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Vadim Arsenyevich Yefremovich was a Soviet mathematician. Yefremovich was a member of the Moscow Topological School and specialized in the geometric aspects of general topology. He introduced the notion of proximity spaces at the First International Topological Conference in Moscow in 1935. He was imprisoned from 1937 to 1944, and did not publish on proximity spaces until 1951, at which point the theory was developed rapidly by Efremovič and associates.
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Ganesh Prasad
1876 - 1935 (59 years)
Ganesh Prasad was an Indian mathematician who specialised in the theory of potentials, theory of functions of a real variable, Fourier series and the theory of surfaces. He was trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Göttingen and on return to India he helped develop the culture of mathematical research in India. The mathematical community of India considers Ganesh Prasad as the ′Father of Mathematical Research in India′. He was also an educator taking special interest in the advancement of primary education in the rural areas of India.
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Walter Schnee
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Walter Schnee was a German mathematician. From 1904 to 1908 he studied mathematics in Berlin. From 1909 to 1917 he worked at the University of Breslau. He then went to the University of Leipzig, where he stayed till 1954. He worked in the field of number theory.
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Georgi Bradistilov
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Georgi Delchev Bradistilov was a Bulgarian mathematician. Biography Georgi Bradistilov, the fourth and youngest child in the family of the high-ranked civil servant at Bulgarian Ministry of Finance, Delcho Petkov Bradistilov , and teacher Nona Georgieva Bradistilova , was born on 12 October 1904 OS in Panagyurishte. He attended 3rd Sofia gymnasium and in 1922 entered Sofia University to study physics and mathematics. In 1927 he graduated with honors and the same year was appointed as assistant professor in mathematics. In the 1930s he studied at the University of Paris and the University of Munich.
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Francesco Paolo Cantelli
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Francesco Paolo Cantelli was an Italian mathematician. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, probability theory, and actuarial science. Biography Cantelli was born in Palermo. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1899 from the University of Palermo with a thesis on celestial mechanics and continued his interest in astronomy by working until 1903 at Palermo Astronomical Observatory , which was under the direction of Annibale Riccò. Cantelli's early papers were on problems in astronomy and celestial mechanics.
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S. L. Loney
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Sydney Luxton Loney, M.A. was a Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Holloway College, Egham, Surrey, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England. He authored a number of mathematics texts, some of which have been reprinted numerous times. He is known as an early influence on Srinivasa Ramanujan.
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Geoffrey Timms
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Geoffrey Timms OBE FRSE was a 20th century British mathematician and cryptoanalyst. In the Second World War he was one of the several mathematicians working alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma code.
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Edward Collingwood
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbriann family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.
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Ralph Leigh
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Ralph Alexander Leigh was a modern languages scholar, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of French in the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1982, later Sandars Reader in Bibliography, in 1986–87. He specialized in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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Zygmunt Zalcwasser
1898 - 1943 (45 years)
Zygmunt Zalcwasser was a Polish mathematician from the Warsaw School of Mathematics in the period between the World Wars collaborating especially in the fields of logic, set theory, general topology and real analysis. Zalcwasser, who worked on the Fourier series, introduced the Zalcwasser rank [Za] measuring the uniform convergence of sequences of continuous functions on the unit interval. Zalcwasser received his Ph.D. at the Warsaw University in 1928. He served as professor at the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in 1933–34 and after the invasion of Poland in 1939 lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was m...
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Gyula Pál
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Gyula Pál was a noted Hungarian-Danish mathematician. He is known for his work on Jordan curves both in plane and space, and on the Kakeya problem. He proved that every locally connected planar continuum with at least two points is the orthogonal projection of a closed Jordan curve of the Euclidean 3-space.
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Boris Delaunay
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay or Delone was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, mountain climber, and the father of physicist, Nikolai Borisovich Delone. The spelling Delone is a straightforward transliteration from Cyrillic he often used in later publications, while Delaunay is the French version he used in the early French and German publications.
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Ernest Esclangon
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Ernest Benjamin Esclangon was a French astronomer and mathematician. Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university.
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Luigi Sante Da Rios
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Luigi Sante Da Rios was an Italian mathematician and physicist who worked on fluid dynamics. In his 1906 work "Sul moto d'un liquido indefinito con un filetto vorticoso di forma qualunque" , he presented the basic equations for the vortex filament model, today used to simulate quantised vortex lines in superfluids.
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