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,
#901
Gérard Ben Arous
#13666
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gérard Ben Arous is a French mathematician, specializing in stochastic analysis and its applications to mathematical physics. He served as the director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2011 to 2016.
Go to Profile#902
Anthony W. Knapp
#20096
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Anthony W. Knapp is an American mathematician at the State University of New York, Stony Brook working on representation theory, who classified the tempered representations of a semisimple Lie group.
Go to Profile#903
Tom Sanders
#17182
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Tom Sanders is an English mathematician, working on problems in additive combinatorics at the interface of harmonic analysis and analytic number theory. Education Sanders studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 2007 for research on arithmetic combinatorics supervised by Timothy Gowers.
Go to Profile#904
Chen Chung Chang
#7663
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Chen Chung Chang was a mathematician who worked in model theory. He obtained his PhD from Berkeley in 1955 on "Cardinal and Ordinal Factorization of Relation Types" under Alfred Tarski. He wrote the standard text on model theory. Chang's conjecture and Chang's model are named after him. He also proved the ordinal partition theorem ωω→2, originally a problem of Erdős and Hajnal. He also introduced MV-algebras as models for Łukasiewicz logic. Chang was a professor at the mathematics department of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#905
Athanassios S. Fokas
#12716
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Athanassios Spyridon Fokas is a Greek mathematician, with degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Medicine. Since 2002, he is Professor of Nonlinear Mathematical Science in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#906
Warwick Tucker
#19166
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Warwick Tucker is an Australian mathematician at Monash University who works on dynamical systems, chaos theory and computational mathematics. He is a recipient of the 2002 R. E. Moore Prize, and the 2004 EMS Prize.
Go to Profile#907
Israel Gohberg
#13281
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Israel Gohberg was a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Israeli mathematician, most known for his work in operator theory and functional analysis, in particular linear operators and integral equations. Biography Gohberg was born in Tarutyne to parents Tsudik and Haya Gohberg. His father owned a small typography shop and his mother was a midwife. The young Gohberg studied in a Hebrew school in Taurtyne and then a Romanian school in Orhei, where he was influenced by the tutelage of Modest Shumbarsky, a student of the renowned topologist Karol Borsuk.
Go to Profile#908
Matthew Foreman
#14252
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Matthew Dean Foreman is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine. He has made notable contributions in set theory and in ergodic theory. Biography Born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Foreman earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 under Robert M. Solovay. His dissertation title was Large Cardinals and Strong Model Theoretic Transfer Properties.
Go to Profile#909
A. W. F. Edwards
#3979
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. Edwards has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. ...
Go to Profile#910
Robert Lawson Vaught
#8405
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Robert Lawson Vaught was a mathematical logician and one of the founders of model theory. Life Vaught was a musical prodigy in his youth, in his case playing the piano. He began his university studies at Pomona College, at age 16. When World War II broke out, he enlisted into the US Navy, which assigned him to the University of California's V-12 program. He graduated in 1945 with an AB in physics.
Go to Profile#911
Anton Kotzig
#16807
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Anton Kotzig was a Slovak–Canadian mathematician, expert in statistics, combinatorics and graph theory. The Ringel–Kotzig conjecture on graceful labeling of trees is named after him and Gerhard Ringel. Kotzig's theorem on the degrees of vertices in convex polyhedra is also named after him.
Go to Profile#912
Matthias Kreck
#18265
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Matthias Kreck is a German mathematician who works in the areas of Algebraic Topology and Differential topology. From 1994 to 2002 he was director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics and from October 2006 to September 2011 he was the director of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn, where he is currently a professor.
Go to Profile#913
Doris Schattschneider
#15355
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Doris J. Schattschneider is an American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics at Moravian College. She is known for writing about tessellations and about the art of M. C. Escher, for helping Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice, and for co-directing with Eugene Klotz the project that developed The Geometer's Sketchpad.
Go to Profile#914
Svante Janson
#19392
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Carl Svante Janson is a Swedish mathematician. A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1994, Janson has been the chaired professor of mathematics at Uppsala University since 1987. In mathematical analysis, Janson has publications in functional analysis and probability theory. In mathematical statistics, Janson has made contributions to the theory of U-statistics. In combinatorics, Janson has publications in probabilistic combinatorics, particularly random graphs and in the analysis of algorithms: In the study of random graphs, Janson introduced U-statistics and the Hoeffding...
Go to Profile#915
Raphael M. Robinson
#15585
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Raphael Mitchel Robinson was an American mathematician. Born in National City, California, Robinson was the youngest of four children of a lawyer and a teacher. He was awarded from the University of California, Berkeley in mathematics: the BA , MA , and Ph.D. . His Ph.D. thesis, on complex analysis, was titled Some results in the theory of Schlicht functions.
Go to Profile#916
Jean-Benoît Bost
#17417
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jean-Benoît Bost is a French mathematician. Early life and education In 1977, Bost graduated from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and finished first in the Concours général, the national competition for the places at the elite schools. Bost studied from 1979 to 1983 at the École Normale Supérieure , where he was from 1984 to 1988 agrégé-préparateur and worked under the direction of Alain Connes.
Go to Profile#917
Bent Fuglede
#21513
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Bent Fuglede is a Danish mathematician and, since 1992, professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen. Biography He is known for his contributions to mathematical analysis, in particular functional analysis, where he has proved Fuglede's theorem and stated Fuglede's conjecture.
Go to Profile#918
Hao Wang
#4870
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Hao Wang was a Chinese-American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and commentator on Kurt Gödel. Biography Born in Jinan, Shandong, in the Republic of China , Wang received his early education in China. He obtained a BSc degree in mathematics from the National Southwestern Associated University in 1943 and an M.A. in Philosophy from Tsinghua University in 1945, where his teachers included Feng Youlan and Jin Yuelin, after which he moved to the United States for further graduate studies. He studied logic under W.V. Quine at Harvard University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. He was appoint...
Go to Profile#919
Edwin Spanier
#21965
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Edwin Henry Spanier was an American mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, working in algebraic topology. He co-invented Spanier–Whitehead duality and Alexander–Spanier cohomology, and wrote what was for a long time the standard textbook on algebraic topology .
Go to Profile#920
Ernst Specker
#7853
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Ernst Paul Specker was a Swiss mathematician. Much of his most influential work was on Quine's New Foundations, a set theory with a universal set, but he is most famous for the Kochen–Specker theorem in quantum mechanics, showing that certain types of hidden variable theories are impossible. He also proved the ordinal partition relation ω2 → 2, thereby solving a problem of Erdős.
Go to Profile#921
Andrei Zelevinsky
#17382
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Andrei Vladlenovich Zelevinsky was a Russian-American mathematician who made important contributions to algebra, combinatorics, and representation theory, among other areas. Biography Zelevinsky graduated in 1969 from the Moscow Mathematical School No. 2. After winning a silver medal as a member of the USSR team at the International Mathematical Olympiad he was admitted without examination to the mathematics department of Moscow State University where he obtained his PhD in 1978 under the mentorship of Joseph Bernstein, Alexandre Kirillov and Israel Gelfand.
Go to Profile#922
Jean-François Le Gall
#19092
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Jean-François Le Gall is a French mathematician working in areas of probability theory such as Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses and their connections with partial differential equations, the Brownian snake, random trees, branching processes, stochastic coalescence and random planar maps. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Pierre and Marie Curie University under the supervision of Marc Yor. He is currently professor at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay and is a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France. He was elected to French academy of sciences, December 201...
Go to Profile#923
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro
#11398
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro was a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician. During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science as well as pure mathematics. In his last forty years his research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry. His main contribution and impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions.
Go to Profile#924
Alexander Braverman
#20485
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Alexander Braverman is an Israeli mathematician. Life and work Braverman was born in Moscow.. He earned in 1993 a BA degree in mathematics from the University of Tel Aviv, where in 1998 he received a Ph.D. under supervision of Joseph Bernstein. From 1997 to 1999 he was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 2004 Benjamin Peirce Lecturer at Harvard University. He was an associate professor at Brown University from 2004 to 2009 and then a full professor from 2009 to 2015. He is a full professor at University of Toronto since 2015 and an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#925
Isaac Namioka
#19189
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Isaac Namioka was a Japanese-American mathematician who worked in general topology and functional analysis. He was a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Washington. He died at home in Seattle on September 25, 2019.
Go to Profile#926
Vladimir Berkovich
#19948
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Vladimir Berkovich is a mathematician at the Weizmann Institute of Science who introduced Berkovich spaces. His Ph.D. advisor was Yuri I. Manin. Berkovich was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1991-92 and again in the summer of 2000.
Go to Profile#927
Lajos Szilassi
#18563
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Lajos Szilassi was a professor of mathematics at the University of Szeged who worked in projective and non-Euclidean geometry, applying his research to computer generated solutions of geometric problems.
Go to Profile#928
Howard Jerome Keisler
#7490
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Howard Jerome Keisler is an American mathematician, currently professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research has included model theory and non-standard analysis. His Ph.D. advisor was Alfred Tarski at Berkeley; his dissertation is Ultraproducts and Elementary Classes .
Go to Profile#929
Preda Mihăilescu
#11637
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Preda V. Mihăilescu is a Romanian mathematician, best known for his proof of the 158-year-old Catalan's conjecture. Biography Born in Bucharest, he is the brother of Vintilă Mihăilescu. After leaving Romania in 1973, he settled in Switzerland. He studied mathematics and computer science in Zürich, receiving a PhD from ETH Zürich in 1997. His PhD thesis, titled Cyclotomy of rings and primality testing, was written under the direction of Erwin Engeler and Hendrik Lenstra.
Go to Profile#930
William Hamilton Meeks, III
#20579
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
William Hamilton Meeks III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and minimal surfaces. Meeks studied at the University of California, Berkeley, with bachelor's degree in 1971, master's degree in 1974, and Ph.D. in 1975 with supervisor H. Blaine Lawson and thesis . He was an assistant professor in 1975–1977 at the University of California, Los Angeles , in 1977–1978 at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada , and in 1978–1979 at Stanford University. From 1979 to 1983 he was a professor at IMPA. He was from 1983 to 1984 a visiting member of the Institute for ...
Go to Profile#931
Jianqing Fan
#10083
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Go to Profile#932
Vladimir Platonov
#19161
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Vladimir Petrovich Platonov is a Soviet, Belarusian and Russian mathematician. He is an expert in algebraic geometry and topology and member of the Russian Academy of Science. From 1992–2004 he worked at research centers in the United States, Canada and Germany.
Go to Profile#933
George W. Whitehead
#20617
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
George William Whitehead, Jr. was an American professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is known for his work on algebraic topology. He invented the J-homomorphism, and was among the first to systematically calculate the homotopy groups of spheres. He is also central to the study of Stable homotopy theory, in particular making concrete the connections between Spectra and Generalized homology/cohomology theories.
Go to Profile#934
Zoghman Mebkhout
#20910
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Zoghman Mebkhout is a French-Algerian mathematician. He is known for his work in algebraic analysis, geometry and representation theory, more precisely on the theory of D-moduless. Career Mebkhout is currently a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and in 2002 Zoghman received the Servant Medal from the CNRS a prize given every two years with an amount of €10,000.
Go to Profile#935
Donal O'Shea
#20435
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Donal O'Shea is a Canadian mathematician, who is also noted for his bestselling books. He served as the fifth president of New College of Florida in Sarasota, from July 1, 2012, until June 30, 2021. He was succeeded by Patricia Okker on July 1, 2021. Before coming to New College, he served in various roles at Mount Holyoke College, including professor of mathematics, dean of faculty, and vice president for academic affairs.
Go to Profile#936
Akihiro Kanamori
#13047
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
is a Japanese-born American mathematician. He specializes in set theory and is the author of the monograph on large cardinals, The Higher Infinite. He has written several essays on the history of mathematics, especially set theory.
Go to Profile#937
F. Michael Christ
#21951
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Francis Michael Christ is an American mathematician and professor at University of California, Berkeley, specializing in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and several complex variables. He is known for the Christ–Kiselev maximal inequality.
Go to Profile#938
John Crank
#16240
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
John Crank was a mathematical physicist, best known for his work on the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Crank was born in Hindley in Lancashire, England. His father was a carpenter's pattern-maker. Crank studied at Manchester University from 1934 to 1938, where he was awarded a BSc and MSc as a student of Lawrence Bragg and Douglas Hartree. In 1953, Manchester University awarded him a DSc.
Go to Profile#939
Sarvadaman Chowla
#13948
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Sarvadaman D. S. Chowla was an Indian American mathematician, specializing in number theory. Early life He was born in London, since his father, Gopal Chowla, a professor of mathematics in Lahore, was then studying in Cambridge. His family returned to India, where he received his master's degree in 1928 from the Government College in Lahore. In 1931 he received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge, where he studied under J. E. Littlewood.
Go to Profile#940
Daniel Wise
#20563
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Daniel T. Wise is an American mathematician who specializes in geometric group theory and 3-manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at McGill University. Education Daniel Wise obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1996 supervised by Martin Bridson His thesis was titled non-positively curved squared complexes, aperiodic tilings, and non-residually finite groups.
Go to Profile#941
Tobias Colding
#18580
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Tobias Holck Colding is a Danish mathematician working on geometric analysis, and low-dimensional topology. He is the great grandchild of Ludwig August Colding. Biography He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Torben Holck Colding and Benedicte Holck Colding. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1992 at the University of Pennsylvania under Chris Croke. Since 2005 Colding has been a professor of mathematics at MIT. He was on the faculty at the Courant Institute of New York University in various positions from 1992 to 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT and at Princeton University and a postdoctoral fellow at MSRI .
Go to Profile#942
Michel Balinski
#9888
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Michel Louis Balinski was an American and French applied mathematician, economist, operations research analyst and political scientist. Educated in the United States, from 1980 he lived and worked in France. He was known for his work in optimisation , convex polyhedra, stable matching, and the theory and practice of electoral systems, jury decision, and social choice. He was Directeur de Recherche de classe exceptionnelle of the C.N.R.S. at the École Polytechnique . He was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize by INFORMS in 2013.
Go to Profile#943
Shahn Majid
#9383
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Shahn Majid is an English pure mathematician and theoretical physicist, trained at Cambridge University and Harvard University and, since 2001, a professor of mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#944
Dan Freed
#21721
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Daniel Stuart Freed is an American mathematician, specializing in global analysis and its applications to supersymmetry, string theory, and quantum field theory. He is currently the Shiing-Shen Chern Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#945
Pavel Etingof
#16346
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Pavel Ilyich Etingof is an American mathematician of Russian-Ukrainian origin. He does research on the intersection of mathematical physics and representation theory, e.g., quantum groups. Biography Etingof was born in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, and studied in the Kyiv Natural Science Lyceum No. 145 in 1981–1984, and at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1984–1986. He received his M.S. in applied mathematics from the Oil and Gas Institute in Moscow in 1989 and then went to the US in 1990. In 1994, he received his PhD in mathematics at Yale University under Igor Frenkel with thesis Representation Theory and Holonomic Systems.
Go to Profile#946
Florian Luca
#15972
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Florian Luca is a Romanian mathematician who specializes in number theory with emphasis on Diophantine equations, linear recurrences and the distribution of values of arithmetic functions. He has made notable contributions to the proof that irrational automatic numbers are transcendental and the proof of a conjecture of Erdős on the intersection of the Euler Totient function and the sum of divisors function.
Go to Profile#947
Motosaburo Masuyama
#10284
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Motosaburo Masuyama was a Japanese statistician who championed the ideas of R.A. Fisher and went on to influence the fields of quality control and biometrics. Life Born Otaru, Hokkaidō, Masuyama graduated in physics from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1937 and earned his doctorate in 1943. Characterising Fisher's approach to statistics as the science of inference and planning, Masuyama worked across a wide range of agencies including: the Japan Meteorological Agency; the University of Tokyo School of Medicine; the Institute of Statistical Mathematics; the Indian Statistical Institute, whe...
Go to Profile#948
Newton da Costa
#4201
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Newton Carneiro Affonso da Costa is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He studied engineering and mathematics at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba and the title of his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation was Topological spaces and continuous functions.
Go to Profile#949
Yitzhak Katznelson
#23041
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Yitzhak Katznelson is an Israeli mathematician. Katznelson was born in Jerusalem. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Paris in 1956. He is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#950
Heinz Bauer
#23115
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Heinz Bauer was a German mathematician. Bauer studied at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and received his PhD there in 1953 under the supervision of Otto Haupt and finished his habilitation in 1956, both for work with Otto Haupt. After a short time from 1961 to 1965 as professor at the University of Hamburg he stayed his whole career at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His research focuses were potential theory, probability theory, and functional analysis.
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