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,
#8951
Maurice Quenouille
1924 - 1973 (49 years)
Prof Maurice Henry Quenouille FRSE FRSS was a 20th-century British statistician remembered as the creator of Jackknife resampling. Biography The unusual surname is French in origin, meaning "distaff". The surname has transposed to Kenoly in most English-speaking countries.
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Pál Turán
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Pál Turán also known as Paul Turán, was a Hungarian mathematician who worked primarily in extremal combinatorics. In 1940, because of his Jewish origins, he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to a labour camp in Transylvania, later being transferred several times to other camps. While imprisoned, Turán came up with some of his best theories, which he was able to publish after the war.
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Edward J. McShane
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Edward James McShane was an American mathematician noted for his advancements of the calculus of variations, integration theory, stochastic calculus, and exterior ballistics. His name is associated with the McShane–Whitney extension theorem and McShane integral. McShane was professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia, president of the American Mathematical Society, president of the Mathematical Association of America, a member of the National Science Board and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Raj Chandra Bose
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Raj Chandra Bose was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him. He also invented the notions of partial geometry, association scheme, and strongly regular graph and started a systematic study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs. He was notable for his work along with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that for no n do there exist two ...
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Israel Nathan Herstein
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Israel Nathan Herstein was a mathematician, appointed as professor at the University of Chicago in 1951. He worked on a variety of areas of algebra, including ring theory, with over 100 research papers and over a dozen books.
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Nachman Aronszajn
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Nachman Aronszajn was a Polish American mathematician. Aronszajn's main field of study was mathematical analysis, where he systematically developed the concept of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. He also contributed to mathematical logic.
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Paul Lévy
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Paul Pierre Lévy was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions. Lévy processes, Lévy flights, Lévy measures, Lévy's constant, the Lévy distribution, the Lévy area, the Lévy arcsine law, and the fractal Lévy C curve are named after him.
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Philip Hall
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Philip Hall FRS , was an English mathematician. His major work was on group theory, notably on finite groups and solvable groups. Biography He was educated first at Christ's Hospital, where he won the Thompson Gold Medal for mathematics, and later at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 and awarded its Sylvester Medal in 1961. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1955–1957, and awarded its Berwick Prize in 1958 and De Morgan Medal in 1965.
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Zeev Nehari
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Zeev Nehari was a mathematician who worked on Complex Analysis, Univalent Functions Theory and Differential and Integral Equations. He was a student of Michael Fekete. The Nehari manifold is named after him.
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Constantin Carathéodory
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Constantin Carathéodory was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to real and complex analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. He also created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. Carathéodory is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity.
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Harold Grad
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Harold Grad was an American applied mathematician. His work specialized in the application of statistical mechanics to plasma physics and magnetohydrodynamics. Work In statistical mechanics he had developed in his thesis new methods for the solution of the Boltzmann equation. He derived the Boltzmann equation from Liouville equation using BBGKY hierarchy under certain limits, known as Boltzmann–Grad limit. Harold Grad was the founder of the Magneto-fluid Dynamics Division of the Courant Institute and served as its head until shortly before his death From 1964 to 1967 and 1974 to 1977 he was ...
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René Maurice Fréchet
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
René Maurice Fréchet was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionalss on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.
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Stefan Bergman
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Stefan Bergman was a Congress Poland-born American mathematician whose primary work was in complex analysis. His name is also written Bergmann; he dropped the second "n" when he came to the U. S. He is best known for the kernel function he discovered while at University of Berlin in 1922. This function is known today as the Bergman kernel. Bergman taught for many years at Stanford University, and served as an advisor to several students.
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Bernard Koopman
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Bernard Osgood Koopman was a French-born American mathematician, known for his work in ergodic theory, the foundations of probability, statistical theory and operations research. Education and work After living in France and Italy, Koopman emigrated to the United States in 1915. Koopman was a student of George David Birkhoff and his initial work concentrated on dynamical systems and mathematical physics.
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Wilfrid Norman Bailey
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Wilfrid Norman Bailey was a mathematician who introduced Bailey's lemma and Bailey pairs into the theory of basic hypergeometric series. Bailey chains and Bailey transforms are named after him. External links
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Richard Brauer
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Richard Dagobert Brauer was a leading German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.
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Henry Scheffé
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Henry Scheffé was an American statistician. He is known for the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and Scheffé's method. Education and career Scheffé was born in New York City on April 11, 1907, the child of German immigrants. The family moved to Islip, New York, where Scheffé went to high school. He graduated in 1924, took night classes at Cooper Union, and a year later entered the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics there in 1931. Staying at Wisconsin, he married his wife Miriam in 1934 and finished his...
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Kōsaku Yosida
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Kōsaku Yosida was a Japanese mathematician who worked in the field of functional analysis. He is known for the Hille-Yosida theorem concerning C0-semigroups. Yosida studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, and held posts at Osaka and Nagoya Universities. In 1955, Yosida returned to the University of Tokyo.
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Leonard Jimmie Savage
1917 - 1971 (54 years)
Leonard Jimmie Savage was an American mathematician and statistician. Economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius." Education and career Savage was born and grew up in Detroit. He studied at Wayne State University in Detroit before transferring to University of Michigan, where he first majored in chemical engineering, then switched to mathematics, graduating in 1938 with a Bachelor's degree. He continued at the University of Michigan with a PhD on differential geometry in 1941 under the supervision of Sumner Byron Myers.
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Abram Besicovitch
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch was a Russiann mathematician, who worked mainly in England. He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov to a Karaite Jewish family. Life and career Abram Besicovitch studied under the supervision of Andrey Markov at the St. Petersburg University, graduating with a PhD in 1912. He then began research in probability theory. He converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, joining the Russian Orthodox Church, on marrying in 1916. He was appointed professor at the University of Perm in 1917, and was caught up in the Russian Civil War over the next two years. In 1920, he took a ...
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Thomas Murray MacRobert
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Thomas Murray MacRobert was a Scottish mathematician. He became professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow and introduced the MacRobert E function, a generalisation of the generalised hypergeometric series.
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Charles B. Morrey Jr.
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the calculus of variations and the theory of partial differential equations. Life Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. was born July 23, 1907, in Columbus, Ohio; his father was a professor of bacteriology at Ohio State University, and his mother was president of a school of music in Columbus, therefore it can be said that his one was a family of academicians. Perhaps from his mother's influence, he had a lifelong love for piano, even if mathematics was his main interest since his childhood. He was at firs...
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Walter A. Shewhart
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Walter Andrew Shewhart was an American physicist, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control and also related to the Shewhart cycle. W. Edwards Deming said of him:
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Emil Artin
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Emil Artin was an Austrian mathematician of Armenian descent. Artin was one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. He is best known for his work on algebraic number theory, contributing largely to class field theory and a new construction of L-functions. He also contributed to the pure theories of rings, groups and fields.
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Eduard Stiefel
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Eduard L. Stiefel was a Swiss mathematician. Together with Cornelius Lanczos and Magnus Hestenes, he invented the conjugate gradient method, and gave what is now understood to be a partial construction of the Stiefel–Whitney classes of a real vector bundle, thus co-founding the study of characteristic classes.
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Hans Lewy
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Hans Lewy was a Jewish American mathematician, known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables. Life Lewy was born in Breslau, Silesia, on October 20, 1904. He began his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1922, after being advised to avoid the more local University of Breslau because it was too old-fashioned, supporting himself during the Weimar hyperinflation by a side job doing railroad track maintenance. At Göttingen, he studied both mathematics and physics; his teachers there included Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether, and Alexander Ostrowski.
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Hans Rademacher
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Hans Adolph Rademacher was a German-born American mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and number theory. Biography Rademacher received his Ph.D. in 1916 from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; Constantin Carathéodory supervised his dissertation. In 1919, he became privatdozent under Constantin Carathéodory at University of Berlin. In 1922, he became an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg, where he supervised budding mathematicians like Theodor Estermann. He was dismissed from his position at the University of Breslau by the Nazis in 1933 due to his public supp...
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Herbert Turnbull
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Prof Herbert Westren Turnbull FRS FRSE LLD was an English mathematician. From 1921 to 1950 he was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. Life He was born in the Tettenhall district, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton on 31 August 1885, the eldest of five sons of William Peveril Turnbull, HM Inspector of Schools. He was educated at Sheffield Grammar School then studied Mathematics at Cambridge University graduating MA.
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Antoni Zygmund
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Antoni Zygmund was a Polish mathematician. He worked mostly in the area of mathematical analysis, including especially harmonic analysis, and he is considered one of the greatest analysts of the 20th century. Zygmund was responsible for creating the Chicago school of mathematical analysis together with his doctoral student Alberto Calderón, for which he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1986.
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Solomon Lefschetz
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Solomon Lefschetz was a Russian-born American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations.
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Charles Roy Henderson
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Charles Roy Henderson was an American statistician and a pioneer in animal breeding — the application of quantitative methods for the genetic evaluation of domestic livestock. This is critically important because it allows farmers and geneticists to predict whether a crop or animal will have a desired trait, and to what extent the trait will be expressed. He developed mixed model equations to obtain best linear unbiased predictions of breeding values and, in general, any random effect. He invented three methods for the estimation of variance components in unbalanced settings of mixed models, ...
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Hans Freudenthal
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hans Freudenthal was a Jewish German-born Dutch mathematician. He made substantial contributions to algebraic topology and also took an interest in literature, philosophy, history and mathematics education.
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Claude Chevalley
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Claude Chevalley was a French mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, class field theory, finite group theory and the theory of algebraic groups. He was a founding member of the Bourbaki group.
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Jack Kiefer
1924 - 1981 (57 years)
Jack Carl Kiefer was an American mathematical statistician at Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley . His research interests included the optimal design of experiments, which was his major research area, as well as a wide variety of topics in mathematical statistics.
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J. H. C. Whitehead
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
John Henry Constantine Whitehead FRS , known as "Henry", was a British mathematician and was one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Chennai , in India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1960.
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Marston Morse
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Harold Calvin Marston Morse was an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large, a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse–Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue–Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications.
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Jacob Wolfowitz
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish-born American Jewish statistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz.
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William Prager
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
William Prager, Willy Prager, was a German-born US applied mathematician. In the field of mechanics he is well known for the Drucker–Prager yield criterion. Willy Prager studied civil engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and received his diploma in 1925. He received his doctorate in 1926 and worked as a research assistant in the field of mechanics from 1925 to 1929. From 1927 to 1929 he habilitated. He was a deputy director at University of Göttingen, professor at Karlsruhe, University of Istanbul, the University of California, San Diego and Brown University, where he advised Bernard Budiansky.
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John Conrad Jaeger
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
John Conrad Jaeger, FRS was an Australian mathematical physicist. Biography Jaeger was born in Sydney, Australia to Carl Jaeger, a cigar manufacturer of German origin. In 1924 Jaeger entered Sydney University at the age of 16 and studied engineering, mathematics and physics, gaining a B.Sc. in 1928. He then spent a further two years studying mathematics at Cambridge University, completing Part II of the Mathematical Tripos, after which he stayed on to carry out research in theoretical physics.
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John von Neumann
1903 - 1957 (54 years)
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analy...
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G. I. Taylor
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor OM FRS FRSE was a British physicist and mathematician, who made contributions to fluid dynamics and wave theory. Early life and education Taylor was born in St. John's Wood, London. His father, Edward Ingram Taylor, was an artist, and his mother, Margaret Boole, came from a family of mathematicians . As a child he was fascinated by science after attending the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and performed experiments using paint rollers and sticky-tape.
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Richard E. Bellman
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Richard Ernest Bellman was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences.
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Maurice Kendall
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Sir Maurice George Kendall, FBA was a prominent British statistician. The Kendall tau rank correlation is named after him. Education and early life Maurice Kendall was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire as the only child of engineering worker John Roughton Kendall and Georgina, née Brewer. His paternal grandfather was a publican, running The Woolpack at Kettering.
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Raymond Louis Wilder
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Raymond Louis Wilder was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests. Life Wilder's father was a printer. Raymond was musically inclined. He played cornet in the family orchestra, which performed at dances and fairs, and accompanied silent films on the piano.
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Samarendra Nath Roy
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Samarendra Nath Roy was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician. Early life Roy was the first of three children of Kali Nath Roy and Suniti Bala Roy. His father, was a freedom fighter and the Chief Editor of the newspaper The Tribune, then publishing from Lahore. During the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919, The Tribune published a news report titled "Prayer at the Jama Masjid", on 6 April 1919. For this "offence" Kali Nath Roy was sentenced to imprisonment of two years along with a fine of one thousand rupees.
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Dudley E. Littlewood
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Dudley Ernest Littlewood was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. He read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was John Edensor Littlewood . He was a lecturer at University College, Swansea from 1928 to 1947, and in 1948 took up the chair of mathematics at University College of North Wales, Bangor, retiring in 1970.
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Hans Petersson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Hans Petersson was a German mathematician. He introduced the Petersson inner product and is also known for the Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture. See also Weil–Petersson metric
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Heinz Rutishauser
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...
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Aleksandr Khinchin
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin was a Soviet mathematician and one of the most significant contributors to the Soviet school of probability theory. Due to romanization conventions, his name is sometimes written as "Khinchin" and other times as "Khintchine".
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Erhard Schmidt
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Erhard Schmidt was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu , in the Governorate of Livonia .
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