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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9001
Glen E. Baxter
1930 - 1983 (53 years)
Glen Earl Baxter was an American mathematician. Baxter's fields of research include probability theory, combinatorial analysis, statistical mechanics and functional analysis. He is known for the Baxter strong limit theorem. Lately, his 1960 work on the derivation of a specific operator identity that later bore his name, the Rota–Baxter identity, and emanated from some of the fundamental results of the famous probabilist Frank Spitzer in random walk theory has received attention in fields as remote as renormalization theory in perturbative quantum field theory.
Go to Profile#9002
Bernard Vauquois
1929 - 1985 (56 years)
Bernard Vauquois was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions.
Go to Profile#9003
Józef Schreier
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Józef Schreier was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, group theory and combinatorics. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics and a victim of the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#9004
William Elwood Byerly
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
William Elwood Byerly was an American mathematician at Harvard University where he was the "Perkins Professor of Mathematics". He was noted for his excellent teaching and textbooks. Byerly was the first to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, and Harvard's chair "William Elwood Byerly Professor in Mathematics" is named after him. Byerly Hall in Radcliffe Yard, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University is also named for him.
Go to Profile#9005
Felix Bernstein
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Felix Bernstein , was a German Jewish mathematician known for proving in 1896 the Schröder–Bernstein theorem, a central result in set theory, and less well known for demonstrating in 1924 the correct blood group inheritance pattern of multiple alleles at one locus through statistical analysis.
Go to Profile#9006
Otto Blumenthal
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Ludwig Otto Blumenthal was a German mathematician and professor at RWTH Aachen University. Biography He was born in Frankfurt, Hesse-Nassau. A student of David Hilbert, Blumenthal was an editor of Mathematische Annalen. When the Civil Service Act of 1933 became law in 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor, Blumenthal was dismissed from his position at RWTH Aachen University. He was married to Amalie Ebstein, also known as 'Mali' and daughter of Wilhelm Ebstein.
Go to Profile#9007
Heinrich Jung
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Ewald Jung was a German mathematician, who specialized in geometry and algebraic geometry. Biography Heinrich Jung was born as the son of a Bergrat in Essen and studied from 1895 to 1899 mathematics, physics, and chemistry in Marburg/Lahn and Berlin under outstanding professors including Friedrich Schottky, Kurt Hensel, Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs, Hermann Amandus Schwarz, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, and Max Planck. In his 1899 doctoral dissertation Über die kleinste Kugel, die eine räumliche Figur einschließt under Schottky he proved the eponymous Jung's Theorem. In 1902 he completed his Habilitation thesis in Marburg and remained there until 1908 as a privatdocent.
Go to Profile#9008
Axel Johannes Malmquist
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Axel Johannes Malmquist was a Swedish mathematician working in the area of ordinary differential equations. He studied in the University of Stockholm in 1900-1907 and obtained PhD in Stockholm in 1909. He worked in the university of Stockholm in 1903-1913, and then became a professor in the Stockholm Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#9009
Claude Chabauty
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Claude Chabauty was a French mathematician. Career He was admitted in 1929 to the École normale supérieure in Paris. In 1938 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on number theory and algebraic geometry. Subsequently he was a professor in Strasbourg. From 1954 on, and for 22 years, he was the director of the department of pure mathematics at the University of Grenoble.
Go to Profile#9010
Willem de Sitter
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Willem de Sitter was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Life and work Born in Sneek, de Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa . Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
Go to Profile#9011
George Henry Livens
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
George Henry Livens was a British mathematician best known for his work on electromagnetics, elasticity and thermodynamics. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1910 and was awarded the Smith Prize in 1911 for an essay entitled "The influence on density on the position of the emission and absorption lines in a gas spectrum" and was elected fellow of Jesus College. He went on to an appointment as Lecturer in Geometry at Sheffield University, a post he held until 1919 when he was appointed Fielden Lecturer in Manchester. He left this post for a chair at the University College of South Wales in 1922 where he remained for the rest of his career.
Go to Profile#9012
Louis Weisner
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Louis Weisner was an American-Canadian mathematician at the University of New Brunswick who introduced Weisner's method. He graduated in 1923 from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His thesis Groups whose maximal cyclic subgroups are independent was supervised by Frank Nelson Cole. As a postdoc, Weisner was an instructor at the University of Rochester. At Hunter College he was appointed an instructor in 1927 and was successively promoted to assistant professor and associate professor. When he was an associate professor in 1954, the Board of Higher Education of the City of New ...
Go to Profile#9013
Harold Douglas Ursell
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Harold Douglas Ursell was an English mathematician who is best known for Ursell function.
Go to Profile#9014
Luciano Orlando
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Luciano Orlando was an Italian mathematician and military engineer. Biography Orlando received in 1903 his laurea from the University of Messina, where he was a student of Bagnera and Marcolongo. After a year of graduate study at the University of Pisa, he became an assistant and libero docente at the University of Messina. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto superiore di Magistero and at the Aeronautical School of Engineering of the Sapienza University of Rome. He took part in some university competitions but was unsuccessful and when, in 1915...
Go to Profile#9015
Erich Schönhardt
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Erich Schönhardt was a German mathematician known for his 1928 discovery of the Schönhardt polyhedron, a non-convex polyhedron that cannot be partitioned into tetrahedra without introducing additional vertices.
Go to Profile#9016
Torsten Carleman
1892 - 1949 (57 years)
Torsten Carleman , born Tage Gillis Torsten Carleman, was a Swedish mathematician, known for his results in classical analysis and its applications. As the director of the Mittag-Leffler Institute for more than two decades, Carleman was the most influential mathematician in Sweden.
Go to Profile#9017
Carl B. Allendoerfer
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Carl Barnett Allendoerfer was an American mathematician in the mid-twentieth century, known for his work in topology and mathematics education. Background Allendoerfer was born in Kansas City, the son of a prominent banker. He graduated from Haverford College in 1932 and attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, 1932-1934. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1937.
Go to Profile#9018
Arthur Roderick Collar
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Arthur Roderick Collar CBE FRS FREng was an English scientist and engineer who made significant contributions in the areas of aeroelasticity, matrix theory and its applications in engineering dynamics.
Go to Profile#9019
Jakob Nielsen
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Jakob Nielsen was a Danish mathematician known for his work on automorphisms of surfacess. He was born in the village Mjels on the island of Als in North Schleswig, in modern-day Denmark. His mother died when he was 3, and in 1900 he went to live with his aunt and was enrolled in the Realgymnasium. In 1907 he was expelled for being a member of an illicit student club. Nevertheless, he matriculated at the University of Kiel in 1908.
Go to Profile#9020
Henry Seely White
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Henry Seely White was an American mathematician. He was born in Cazenovia, New York to parents Aaron White and Isadore Maria Haight. He matriculated at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and graduated with honors in 1882 at the age of twenty-one. White excelled at Wesleyan in astronomy, ethics, Latin, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. At the university, John Monroe Van Vleck taught White mathematics and astronomy. Later, Van Vleck persuaded White to continue to study mathematics at the graduate level. Subsequently, White studied at the University of Göttingen under Klein, and received his ...
Go to Profile#9021
Pierre Fatou
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou was a French mathematician and astronomer. He is known for major contributions to several branches of analysis. The Fatou lemma and the Fatou set are named after him. Biography
Go to Profile#9022
Hermann Künneth
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Hermann Lorenz Künneth was a German mathematician and renowned algebraic topologist, best known for his contribution to what is now known as the Künneth theorem. In the winter semester 1910/11, Künneth joined the students' fraternity “Studentengesangverein Erlangen“, now “Akademisch-Musikalische Verbindung Fridericiana Erlangen“ . He carried out a variety of posts during his studies as well as after having left university in 1914.
Go to Profile#9023
Ingebrigt Johansson
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Ingebrigt Johansson was a Norwegian mathematician. He developed the symbolic logic system known as minimal logic. Biography Johansson was born in Narvik, Norway on October 24, 1904 as the son of bricklayer Isak Johansson and Gjertrud Kletten . In 1941 he married Gidske Jacoba Schult . He died in Oslo, Norway on April 24, 1987.
Go to Profile#9024
Johan Frederik Steffensen
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Johan Frederik Steffensen was a Danish mathematician, statistician, and actuary who did research in the fields of calculus of finite differences and interpolation. He was professor of actuarial science at the University of Copenhagen from 1923 to 1943. Steffensen's inequality and Steffensen's method are named after him. He was an Invited Speaker at the 1912 International Congress of Mathematicians in Cambridge, England and at the 1924 ICM in Toronto.
Go to Profile#9025
Jean-Louis Verdier
1935 - 1989 (54 years)
Jean-Louis Verdier was a French mathematician who worked, under the guidance of his doctoral advisor Alexander Grothendieck, on derived categories and Verdier duality. He was a close collaborator of Grothendieck, notably contributing to SGA 4 his theory of hypercovers and anticipating the later development of étale homotopy by Michael Artin and Barry Mazur, following a suggestion he attributed to Pierre Cartier. Saul Lubkin's related theory of rigid hypercovers was later taken up by Eric Friedlander in his definition of the étale topological type.
Go to Profile#9026
Erich Bessel-Hagen
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Erich Bessel-Hagen was a German mathematician and a historian of mathematics. Erich Paul Werner Bessel-Hagen was born in 1898 in Charlottenburg, a suburb, later a district in Berlin. He studied at the University of Berlin where in 1920 he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics under the direction of Constantin Carathéodory.
Go to Profile#9027
Sergei Bernstein
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Sergei Natanovich Bernstein was a Ukrainian and Russian mathematician of Jewish origin known for contributions to partial differential equations, differential geometry, probability theory, and approximation theory.
Go to Profile#9028
Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy was an Indian mathematician who wrote the first textbook of point-set topology in India. Life He was born in India on 24 October 1894. Vaidyanathaswamy studied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, under Prof Edmund Taylor Whittaker graduating around 1914. He then did postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge under Prof H. F. Baker. After his return to India, he was a professor at the University of Madras, and after his retirement was associated with the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta.
Go to Profile#9029
Erich Kamke
1890 - 1961 (71 years)
Erich Kamke was a German mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. Also, his book on set theory became a standard introduction to the field. Biography Kamke was born in Marienburg, West Prussia, German Empire .
Go to Profile#9030
Guido Ascoli
1887 - 1957 (70 years)
Guido Ascoli was an Italian mathematician, known for his contributions to the theory of partial differential equations, and for his works on the teaching of mathematics in secondary high schools. Selected publications . A book collecting the winning papers of the 1935 prize of the Annali della Reale Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. An English translation of the title reads as:-"Partial differential equations of elliptic and parabolic type".
Go to Profile#9031
Stefan Kaczmarz
1895 - 1939 (44 years)
Stefan Marian Kaczmarz was a Polish mathematician. His Kaczmarz method provided the basis for many modern imaging technologies, including the CAT scan. Kaczmarz was a professor of mathematics in the faculty of mechanical engineering of Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów from 1919 to 1939, where he collaborated with Stefan Banach.
Go to Profile#9032
Ernst Leonard Lindelöf
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Ernst Leonard Lindelöf was a Finnish mathematician, who made contributions in real analysis, complex analysis and topology. Lindelöf spaces are named after him. He was the son of mathematician Lorenz Leonard Lindelöf and brother of the philologist .
Go to Profile#9033
Clifford Hugh Dowker
1912 - 1982 (70 years)
Clifford Hugh Dowker was a topologist known for his work in point-set topology and also for his contributions in category theory, sheaf theory and knot theory. Biography Clifford Hugh Dowker grew up on a small farm in Western Ontario, Canada. He excelled in mathematics and was paid to teach his math teacher math at his secondary school. He was awarded a scholarship at Western Ontario University, where he got his B.S. in 1933. He wanted to pursue a career as a teacher, but he was persuaded to continue with his education because of his extraordinary mathematical talent. He earned his M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1936 and his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#9034
Hilda Geiringer
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Hilda Geiringer , also known as Hilda von Mises and Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer, was an Austrian mathematician. Life Geiringer was born in 1893 in Vienna, Austria into a Jewish family. Her father, Ludwig Geiringer, was born in Hungary and her mother, Martha Wertheimer, was from Vienna. Her parents had married while her father was working in Vienna as a textile manufacturer.
Go to Profile#9035
Eric van Douwen
1946 - 1987 (41 years)
Eric Karel van Douwen was a Dutch mathematician specializing in set-theoretic topology. He received his Ph.D. in 1975 from Vrije Universiteit under the supervision of Maarten Maurice and Johannes Aarts, both of whom were in turn students of Johannes de Groot.
Go to Profile#9036
Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze was an Austrian mathematician, famous for the Tietze extension theorem on functions from topological spaces to the real numbers. He also developed the Tietze transformations for group presentations, and was the first to pose the group isomorphism problem. Tietze's graph is also named after him; it describes the boundaries of a subdivision of the Möbius strip into six mutually-adjacent regions, found by Tietze as part of an extension of the four color theorem to non-orientable surfaces.
Go to Profile#9037
Theophil Henry Hildebrandt
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
Theophil Henry Hildebrandt was an American mathematician who did research on functional analysis and integration theory. Hildebrandt was born in Dover, Ohio, graduated from high school at age 14 and at age 17 in 1905 received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago he earned his master's degree in 1906 and his PhD in 1910, with thesis A Contribution to the Foundations of Fréchet's Calcul Fonctionnel written under the direction of E. H. Moore. He became an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1909 and then a full professor in 1923, serving as chair of the mathematics department from 1934 until his retirement in 1957.
Go to Profile#9038
Bohuslav Hostinský
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Bohuslav Hostinský was a Czechoslovak mathematician and theoretical physicist. Family His father Otakar Hostinský was a musicologist and professor of aesthetics at Charles University. Bohuslav Hostinský was the eldest of four siblings.
Go to Profile#9039
Hellmuth Kneser
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Hellmuth Kneser was a Baltic German mathematician, who made notable contributions to group theory and topology. His most famous result may be his theorem on the existence of a prime decomposition for 3-manifolds. His proof originated the concept of normal surface, a fundamental cornerstone of the theory of 3-manifolds.
Go to Profile#9040
Clarence Raymond Adams
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Clarence Raymond Adams was an American mathematician who worked on partial difference equations. He entered Brown University in the fall of 1915 and graduated in 1918. Adams received his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under the direction of G. D. Birkhoff. On August 17, 1922, he married Rachel Blodgett, who earned a PhD from Radcliffe College in 1921. As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard University, he studied at the Sapienza University of Rome under Tullio Levi-Civita and at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant. In 1923 Adams returned to Brown University as an instructo...
Go to Profile#9041
Eric Harold Neville
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Eric Harold Neville, known as E. H. Neville was an English mathematician. A heavily fictionalised portrayal of his life is rendered in the 2007 novel The Indian Clerk. He is the one who convinced Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England.
Go to Profile#9042
Valentin Belousov
1925 - 1988 (63 years)
Valentin Danilovich Belousov was a Soviet and Moldovan mathematician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR . He graduated from the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute , Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , Professor , honored worker of science and technology of the Moldavian SSR.
Go to Profile#9043
Anne C. Morel
Anne C. Morel was an American mathematician known for her work in logic, order theory, and algebra. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Education and career Morel graduated in 1941 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She began graduate study in mathematics in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley, but left her studies to serve in the WAVES during World War II. She returned to her studies in Berkeley in 1946, and completed her Ph.D. in 1953. Her dissertation, A Study in the Arithmetic of Order Types, was supervised by Al...
Go to Profile#9044
Arnold Walfisz
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Arnold Walfisz was a Jewish-Polish mathematician working in analytic number theory. Life After the Abitur in Warsaw , Arnold Walfisz studied in Germany at Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen. Edmund Landau was his doctoral-thesis supervisor at the University of Göttingen. Walfisz lived in Wiesbaden from 1922 through 1927, then he returned to Warsaw, worked at an insurance company and at the mathematical institute of the university . In 1935, together with , he founded the mathematical journal Acta Arithmetica. In 1936, Walfisz became professor at the University of Tbilisi in the nation of Georgia .
Go to Profile#9045
Edwin E. Floyd
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Edwin Earl Floyd was an American mathematician, specializing in topology . Education and career Floyd studied received in 1943 his bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama and in 1948 his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia under Gordon Whyburn with thesis The extension of homeomorphisms. He was in the academic year 1948–1949 an instructor at Princeton University and became in 1949 a member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, where in the 1960s he collaborated with Pierre Conner in research on cobordism theory. At the University of Virginia, he was the chair of the department of mathematics from 1966 to 1969 and since 1966 the Robert C.
Go to Profile#9046
Oscar P. Snyder
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Oscar Peter Snyder was a United States Army major general who served in the Army Medical Department as a Chief of the U.S. Army Dental Corps from 1954 to 1956. Biography World War I Oscar Peter Snyder was born to Emil and Anna Snyder on 6 January 1895 near Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio. He attended the Orrsville public schools graduating in 1912. He entered The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery in June 1916. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Regular Army on 24 October 1916. He first served at Columbus Barracks...
Go to Profile#9047
Victor Thébault
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Victor Michael Jean-Marie Thébault was a French mathematician best known for propounding three problems in geometry. The name Thébault's theorem is used by some authors to refer to the first of these problems and by others to refer to the third.
Go to Profile#9048
Félix Pollaczek
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Félix Pollaczek was an Austrian-French engineer and mathematician, known for numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and probability theory. He is best known for the Pollaczek–Khinchine formula in queueing theory , and the Pollaczek polynomials.
Go to Profile#9049
James Lewin McGregor
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
James Lewin McGregor was a mathematician who introduced Karlin–McGregor polynomials. A native of Canada he served in the Canadian military during World War II. He received his undergrad degree from the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Cal Tech and then became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#9050
Helen M. Walker
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Helen Mary Walker was a statistician and prominent educational researcher, and the first female president of the American Statistical Association when she was elected in 1944. From 1949 to 1950, she was also president of the American Educational Research Association and served on the Young Women's Christian Association from 1936 to 1950.
Go to Profile