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,
#9001
Jean-Pierre Sydler
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Jean-Pierre Sydler was a Swiss mathematician and a librarian, well known for his work in geometry, most notably on Hilbert's third problem. Biography Sydler was born in 1921 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He graduated from ETH Zürich in 1943 and received a doctorate in 1947. In 1950 he became a librarian at the ETH while continuing to publish mathematical papers in his spare time. In 1960 he received a prize of the Danish Academy of Sciences for his work on scissors congruence. In 1963 he became a director of the ETH library and pioneered the use of automatisation. He continued serving as a director until the retirement in 1986.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887 - 1920 (33 years)
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
Go to Profile#9003
Viggo Brun
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Viggo Brun was a Norwegian professor, mathematician and number theorist. Contributions In 1915, he introduced a new method, based on Legendre's version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, now known as the Brun sieve, which addresses additive problems such as Goldbach's conjecture and the twin prime conjecture. He used it to prove that there exist infinitely many integers n such that n and n+2 have at most nine prime factors, and that all large even integers are the sum of two numbers with at most nine prime factors.
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Hector Hetherington
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Sir Hector James Wright Hetherington was a Scottish philosopher, who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1927 to 1936, and Principal of the University of Glasgow until 1961. Early life Hetherington was born in Cowdenbeath, Fife, and educated at Dollar Academy where he was school dux 1904 and 1905.
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Kwan-ichi Terazawa
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
was a Japanese mathematician and administrator. Terazawa was born in Yonezawa, graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1908 following the study of physics, and earned his D.Sc. degree in 1917. His career at the Imperial University of Tokyo lasted from 1918 to his retirement in 1949 where he was professor of physics, while having served as professor at the Aeronautical Research Institute for nineteen of those years. He served as the director of that institution in 1942-1943 and as professor at the Earthquake Research Institute from 1936 to 1942 . For the period 1938-1943 he was emplo...
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Albert Lautman
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
Albert Lautman was a French philosopher of mathematics, born in Paris. An escaped prisoner of war, he was shot by the Nazi authorities in Toulouse on 1 August 1944. Family His father was a Jewish emigrant from Vienna who became a medical doctor after he was seriously wounded in the First World War.
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Rudolf Inzinger
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Rudolf Inzinger was an Austrian mathematician who made contributions to differential geometry, the theory of convex bodies, and inverse problems for sound waves. Biography Born in Vienna, he was a student at the Technische Hochschule in the same city. In 1933 he defended his PhD Die Liesche Abbildung and in 1936 he received his habilitation. After the Anschluss he had to leave. After his return from war captivity he started again working at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1945 where he was appointed associated professor in 1946 and promoted to full professor one year later.
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Aleksandr Kronrod
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Aleksandr Semyonovich Kronrod was a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula which he published in 1964. Earlier, he worked on computational solutions of problems emerging in theoretical physics. He is also known for his contributions to economics, specifically for proposing corrections and calculating price formation for the USSR. Later, Kronrod gave his fortune and life to medicine to care for terminal cancer patients. Kronrod is remembered for his captivating personality and was admired as a student, teacher and leader.
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Lev Schnirelmann
1905 - 1938 (33 years)
Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelmann was a Soviet mathematician who worked on number theory, topology and differential geometry. Work Schnirelmann sought to prove Goldbach's conjecture. In 1930, using the Brun sieve, he proved that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than C prime numbers, where C is an effectively computable constant.
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Raymond Woodard Brink
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Raymond Woodard Brink was an American mathematician. His Ph.D. advisor at Harvard was George David Birkhoff. Brink entered Kansas State College at age 14 and by age 19 had two bachelor's degrees and was employed as an instructor of mathematics in Moscow, Idaho; he taught at the state preparatory school of the University of Idaho. He returned to school at Harvard and earned a doctorate in 1916 and was a longtime professor at the University of Minnesota, and also authored numerous math textbooks. He served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1941–42.
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Jan Łukasiewicz
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Jan Łukasiewicz was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic. His work centred on philosophical logic, mathematical logic and history of logic. He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, offering one of the earliest systems of many-valued logic. Contemporary research on Aristotelian logic also builds on innovative works by Łukasiewicz, which applied methods from modern logic to the formalization of Aristotle's syllogistic.
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Martin R. Gainsbrugh
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Martin Reuben Gainsbrugh was an American economist, practicing statistician, writer, and educator, He was vice-president and chief economist of The Conference Board, Adjunct Professor at the New York University, and president of the American Statistical Association in 1961.
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Gustave Juvet
1896 - 1936 (40 years)
Gustave Juvet was a Swiss mathematician. Biography Juvet received his licence in mathematical sciences from the University of Neuchâtel in 1917 and then the same degree from the Sorbonne in 1919. He taught astronomy and geodesy from 1920 to 1928 at the University of Neuchâtel. In 1928 he became a professor at the University of Lausanne, where he retained his academic position until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1936. In 1926 he received his doctorate from the Faculté des sciences de Paris.
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Harold Silverstone
1915 - 1974 (59 years)
Harold Silverstone was a New Zealand mathematician and statistician. Early life and education He was born on 20 January 1915 in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. His father Mark Woolf Silverstone was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Harold Silverstone was educated at Otago Boys High School. He later attended the University of Otago where he attained a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1935. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1939.
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Gino Loria
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Gino Benedetto Loria was a Jewish-Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Loria studied mathematics in Mantua, Turin, and Pavia and received his doctorate in 1883 from the University of Turin under the direction of Enrico D'Ovidio. For several years he was D'Ovidio's assistant in Turin. Starting in 1886 he became, as a result of winning a then-customary competition, Professor for Algebra and Analytic Geometry at the University of Genoa, where he stayed for the remainder of his career.
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René de Possel
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Lucien Alexandre Charles René de Possel was a French mathematician, one of the founders of the Bourbaki group, and later a pioneer computer scientist, working in particular on optical character recognition.
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Vyacheslav Stepanov
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
Vyacheslav Vassilievich Stepanov was a mathematician, specializing in analysis. He was from the Soviet Union. Stepanov was the son of teachers and from 1908 to 1912 studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, where in 1912 he received his Candidate of Sciences degree with Dmitri Egorov as thesis supervisor. Stepanov was also strongly influenced by Nikolai Lusin. In 1912 he undertook further study at the University of Göttingen where he attended lectures by Edmund Landau and David Hilbert. In 1915 he returned to Moscow and became a docent at Mosc...
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Hildegarde Kneeland
1889 - 1994 (105 years)
Hildegarde Kneeland was an American home economist and social statistician, known for her time-use research. Education and early career Kneeland was born in Brooklyn, studied at the Packer Collegiate Institute, and graduated from Vassar College in 1911. After graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University, she taught nutrition at the University of Missouri beginning in 1914. In 1917 she returned to graduate study at the University of Chicago, working there with Hazel Kyrk.
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Lev Kaluznin
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Lev Arkad'evich Kaluznin was a Russian mathematician. Other transliterations of his name used by himself include Kalužnin and Kaluzhnin, while he used the transliteration Léo Kaloujnine in publications while he lived in France.
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Grigorii Fikhtengol'ts
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Grigorii Mikhailovich Fikhtengol'ts was a Soviet mathematician working on real analysis and functional analysis. Fikhtengol'ts was one of the founders of the Leningrad school of real analysis. He was born in Odessa, Russian Empire in 1888, graduated Odessa University in 1911.
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Ernest Vessiot
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Ernest Vessiot was a French mathematician. He was born in Marseille, France, and died in La Bauche, Savoie, France. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1884. He was Maître de Conférences at Lille University of Science and Technology in 1892-1893, then moved at Toulouse and Lyon.
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Johannes Mollerup
1872 - 1937 (65 years)
Johannes Mollerup was a Danish mathematician. Mollerup studied at the University of Copenhagen, and received his doctorate in 1903. Together with Harald Bohr, he developed the Bohr–Mollerup theorem which provides an easy characterization of the gamma function.
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Jan Spielrein
1887 - 1938 (51 years)
Jan Nikolaevich Spielrein was a Soviet scientist in the field of Mathematics, professor, Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1887 in the Rostov-on-Don. Spielrein was educated in Rostov-on-Don. In 1907 he graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Sorbonne, in 1911 the Higher Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe. Since 1911 Spielrein was an assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart.
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Ernst Kummer
1810 - 1893 (83 years)
Ernst Eduard Kummer was a German mathematician. Skilled in applied mathematics, Kummer trained German army officers in ballistics; afterwards, he taught for 10 years in a gymnasium, the German equivalent of high school, where he inspired the mathematical career of Leopold Kronecker.
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Adrien-Marie Legendre
1752 - 1833 (81 years)
Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him. He is also known for his contributions to the method of least squares, and was the first to officially publish on it, though Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered it before him.
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Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet
1805 - 1859 (54 years)
Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was a German mathematician who made contributions to number theory , and to the theory of Fourier series and other topics in mathematical analysis; he is credited with being one of the first mathematicians to give the modern formal definition of a function.
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William Kingdon Clifford
1845 - 1879 (34 years)
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
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Jacob Bernoulli
1655 - 1705 (50 years)
Jacob Bernoulli was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Swiss Bernoulli family. He sided with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy and was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus, which he made numerous contributions to; along with his brother Johann, he was one of the founders of the calculus of variations. He also discovered the fundamental mathematical constant . However, his most important contribution was in the field of probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi.
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Niels Henrik Abel
1802 - 1829 (27 years)
Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
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Apollonius of Perga
262 BC - 190 BC (72 years)
Apollonius of Perga was an ancient Greek geometer and astronomer known for his work on conic sections. Beginning from the earlier contributions of Euclid and Archimedes on the topic, he brought them to the state prior to the invention of analytic geometry. His definitions of the terms ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are the ones in use today. With his predecessors Euclid and Archimedes, Apollonius is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity.
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Hermann Grassmann
1809 - 1877 (68 years)
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V.
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Oliver Heaviside
1850 - 1925 (75 years)
Oliver Heaviside FRS was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations , independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today. He significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood and applied in the decades following Maxwell's death. His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology. Altho...
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Christiaan Huygens
1629 - 1695 (66 years)
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain the first idealization of a physical problem by a se...
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Siméon Denis Poisson
1781 - 1840 (59 years)
Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, elasticity, and fluid mechanics. Moreover, he predicted the Poisson spot in his attempt to disprove the wave theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, which was later confirmed.
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Andrey Markov
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician best known for his work on stochastic processes. A primary subject of his research later became known as the Markov chain. He was also a strong, close to master-level chess player.
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Johannes Kepler
1571 - 1630 (59 years)
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science.
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Charles Hermite
1822 - 1901 (79 years)
Charles Hermite FRS FRSE MIAS was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra. Hermite polynomials, Hermite interpolation, Hermite normal form, Hermitian operators, and cubic Hermite splines are named in his honor. One of his students was Henri Poincaré.
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Camille Jordan
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan was a French mathematician, known both for his foundational work in group theory and for his influential Cours d'analyse. Biography Jordan was born in Lyon and educated at the École polytechnique. He was an engineer by profession; later in life he taught at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France, where he had a reputation for eccentric choices of notation.
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Brahmagupta
598 - 665 (67 years)
Brahmagupta was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. He is the author of two early works on mathematics and astronomy: the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta , a theoretical treatise, and the Khaṇḍakhādyaka , a more practical text.
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Wilhelm Killing
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing was a German mathematician who made important contributions to the theories of Lie algebras, Lie groups, and non-Euclidean geometry. Life Killing studied at the University of Münster and later wrote his dissertation under Karl Weierstrass and Ernst Kummer at Berlin in 1872. He taught in gymnasia from 1868 to 1872. In 1875, he married Anna Commer, who was the daughter of a music lecturer. He became a professor at the seminary college Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg . He took holy orders in order to take his teaching position. He became rector of the college and chair of the town council.
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Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.
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Karl Pearson
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Karl Pearson was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol.
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Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662 (39 years)
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines , establishing him as one of the first two...
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Augustus De Morgan
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. Biography Childhood Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India in 1806. His father was Lieut.-Colonel John De Morgan , who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth , was the daughter of John Dodson and granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms . Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born.
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George Boole
1815 - 1864 (49 years)
George Boole Jnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age, alongside the work of Claude Shannon.
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Johann Bernoulli
1667 - 1748 (81 years)
Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is known for his contributions to infinitesimal calculus and educating Leonhard Euler in the pupil's youth.
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Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
1804 - 1851 (47 years)
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations, determinants, and number theory. His name is occasionally written as Carolus Gustavus Iacobus Iacobi in his Latin books, and his first name is sometimes given as Karl.
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Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
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