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,
#9051
Theodor Reye
1838 - 1919 (81 years)
Karl Theodor Reye was a German mathematician. He contributed to geometry, particularly projective geometry and synthetic geometry. He is best known for his introduction of configurations in the second edition of his book, Geometrie der Lage . The Reye configuration of 12 points, 12 planes, and 16 lines is named after him.
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Alfred Pringsheim
1850 - 1941 (91 years)
Alfred Pringsheim was a German mathematician and patron of the arts. He was born in Ohlau, Prussian Silesia and died in Zürich, Switzerland. Family and academic career Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy Silesian merchant family with Jewish roots. He was the first-born child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann . He had a younger sister, Martha.
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Jacob Lüroth
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Jacob Lüroth was a German mathematician who proved Lüroth's theorem and introduced Lüroth quartics. His name is sometimes written Lueroth, following the common printing convention for umlauted characters. He began his studies in astronomy at the University of Bonn, but switched to mathematics when his poor eyesight made taking astronomical observations impossible. He received his doctorate in 1865 from Heidelberg University, for a thesis on Pascal's theorem.
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Henry Burchard Fine
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Henry Burchard Fine was an American university dean and mathematician. Life and career Henry Burchard Fine played a critical role in modernizing the American university and raising American mathematics “from a state of approximate nullity to one verging on parity with the European nations”. This tribute in Oswald Veblen’s obituary [see in "Obituary" below] accurately recognized Fine’s role both in training American mathematicians to provide international leadership to this field and in building Princeton University’s reputation in mathematics and science. Fine’s efforts contributed greatly...
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Robert of Chester
1200 - 1200 (0 years)
Robert of Chester was an English Arabist of the 12th century. He translated several historically important books from Arabic to Latin, such as:Book on the Composition of Alchemy : translated in 1144, this was the first book on alchemy to become available in EuropeCompendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing : al-Khwārizmī's book about algebra, translated in 1145In the 1140s Robert worked in Spain, where the division of the country between Muslim and Christian rulers resulted in opportunities for interchange between the different cultures. However, by the end of the decade he had returned to England.
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Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut was a German mathematician. He was the younger brother of the famous jurist Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut. He studied at the University of Göttingen along with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Beckmann, and Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. In 1797 he became lecturer in Göttingen. In 1802 he became extraodinary and in 1805 ordinary professor of philosophy. Mathematics were his favourite field of lessons, and he was well-known as a brilliant lecturer, in contrast to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was professor for astronomy in Göttingen since 1807 and disliked giving lessons.
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Nicolas Chuquet
1445 - 1488 (43 years)
Nicolas Chuquet was a French mathematician. He invented his own notation for algebraic concepts and exponentiation. He may have been the first mathematician to recognize zero and negative numbers as exponents.
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Ludwig Burmester
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
Ludwig Ernst Hans Burmester was a German kinematician and geometer. His doctoral thesis concerned lines on a surface defined by light direction. After a period as a teacher in Łódź he became professor of synthetic geometry at Dresden where his growing interest in kinematics culminated in his of 1888, developing the approach to the theory of linkagess introduced by Franz Reuleaux, whereby a planar mechanism was understood as a collection of Euclidean planes in relative motion with one degree of freedom. Burmester considered both the theory of planar kinematics and practically all actual mechanisms known in his time.
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Augustus Edward Hough Love
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Augustus Edward Hough Love FRS , often known as A. E. H. Love, was a mathematician famous for his work on the mathematical theory of elasticity. He also worked on wave propagation and his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics won for him the Adams prize in 1911 when he developed a mathematical model of surface waves known as Love waves. Love also contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced the parameters known as Love numbers, used in problems related to Earth tides, the tidal deformation of the solid Earth due to the gravitational attraction of the ...
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Callippus
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Callippus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician. Biography Callippus was born at Cyzicus, and studied under Eudoxus of Cnidus at the Academy of Plato. He also worked with Aristotle at the Lyceum, which means that he was active in Athens prior to Aristotle's death in 322 BC. He observed the movements of the planets and attempted to use Eudoxus' scheme of connected spheres to account for their movements. However, he found that 27 spheres were insufficient to account for the planetary movements, and so he added seven more for a total of 34. According to the description in Aristotle's Metaphys...
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James Mercer
1883 - 1932 (49 years)
James Mercer FRS was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England. He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I and, after decades of ill health, died in London.
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Johan Jensen
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen, mostly known as Johan Jensen , was a Danish mathematician and engineer. He was the president of the Danish Mathematical Society from 1892 to 1903. Biography Jensen was born in Nakskov, Denmark, but spent much of his childhood in northern Sweden, because his father obtained a job there as the manager of an estate. Their family returned to Denmark before 1876, when Jensen enrolled to the College of Advanced Technology. Although he studied mathematics among various subjects at college, and even published a research paper in mathematics, he learned advanced math topics later by himself and never held any academic position.
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John Graunt
1620 - 1674 (54 years)
John Graunt has been regarded as the founder of demography. Graunt was one of the first demographers, and perhaps the first epidemiologist, though by profession he was a haberdasher. He was bankrupted later in life by losses suffered during Great Fire of London and the discrimination he faced following his conversion to Catholicism.
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Vladimir Varićak
1865 - 1942 (77 years)
Vladimir Varićak was a Croatian mathematician and theoretical physicist of Serbian origin. Biography Varićak, an ethnic Serb, was born on March 1, 1865, in the village of Švica near Otočac, Austrian Empire . He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Zagreb from 1883 to 1887. He made his PhD in 1889 and got his habilitation in 1895. In 1899 he became professor of mathematics in Zagreb, where he gave lectures until his death in 1942.
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Alexey Lyapunov
1911 - 1973 (62 years)
Alexey Andreyevich Lyapunov was a Soviet mathematician and an early pioneer of computer science. One of the founders of Soviet cybernetics, Lyapunov was member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and a specialist in the fields of real function theory, mathematical problems of cybernetics, set theory, programming theory, mathematical linguistics, and mathematical biology.
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Franciszek Leja
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Franciszek Leja was a Polish mathematician. He was born to a poor peasant family in the southeastern Poland. After graduating from the University of Lwów he was a teacher of mathematics and physics in high schools from 1910 until 1923, among others in Kraków. From 1924 until 1936 he was a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and Warsaw University, from 1936 until 1960 in the Jagiellonian University.
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Stanisław Ruziewicz
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Stanisław Ruziewicz was a Polish mathematician and one of the founders of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was a former student of Wacław Sierpiński, earning his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Lwów; his thesis concerned continuous functions that are not differentiable. He became a professor at the same university and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. During the Second World War, Ruziewicz's home city of Lwów was annexed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but then taken over by the General Government of German-occupied Poland in July 1941; Ruziewicz was arr...
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Carl Anton Bretschneider
1808 - 1878 (70 years)
Carl Anton Bretschneider was a mathematician from Gotha, Germany. Bretschneider worked in geometry, number theory, and history of geometry. He also worked on logarithmic integrals and mathematical tables for Euler's constant when he published his 1837 paper. He is best known for his discovery of Bretschneider's formula for the area of a general quadrilateral on a plane,
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Otto Haupt
1887 - 1988 (101 years)
Otto Haupt was a German mathematician. Biography Haupt obtained his PhD in 1911 under the supervision of Georg Rost and Emil Hilb at the University of Würzburg, and became a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He retired from teaching in 1953, but continued his mathematical research for many subsequent years.
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Sofya Yanovskaya
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Sofya Aleksandrovna Yanovskaya was a Soviet mathematician and historian, specializing in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. She is best known for her efforts in restoring the research of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union and publishing and editing the mathematical works of Karl Marx.
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Lyudmila Keldysh
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology. Biography Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh. Her family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage. Because her father was a construction expert for the military, they moved frequently and she lived in Helsinki between 1905 and 1907, then in Saint Petersburg until 1909, and then moved to Riga, Latvia.
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Orymbek Zhautykov
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Orymbek Akhmetbekovich Zhautykov was a Kazakh mathematician. His mathematical work focussed on stability theory of motion, equations which govern physics and infinite systems of differential equations. Throughout his life he published many different pieces of work including research papers, textbooks and biographies of mathematicians on their birth/death anniversaries.
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Kazimierz Zarankiewicz
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Kazimierz Zarankiewicz was a Polish mathematician and Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who was interested primarily in topology and graph theory. Biography Zarankiewicz was born in Częstochowa to father Stanisław and mother Józefa . He studied at the University of Warsaw, together with Zygmunt Janiszewski, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Stanisław Saks.
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment, especially electric motorss for use in industry.
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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
1718 - 1799 (81 years)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.
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Wilhelm Lexis
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Wilhelm Lexis , full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
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G. B. Halsted
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
George Bruce Halsted , usually cited as G. B. Halsted, was an American mathematician who explored foundations of geometry and introduced non-Euclidean geometry into the United States through his translations of works by Bolyai, Lobachevski, Saccheri, and Poincaré. He wrote an elementary geometry text, Rational Geometry, based on Hilbert's axioms, which was translated into French, German, and Japanese. Halsted produced original works in synthetic geometry, first with an elementary text in 1896, and with a text on synthetic projective geometry in 1906.
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Franz Josef Gerstner
1756 - 1832 (76 years)
Franz Josef Gerstner was a German-Bohemian physicist, astronomer and engineer. Life Gerstner was born in Komotau in Bohemia then part of the Habsburg monarchy. . He was the son of Florian Gerstner and Maria Elisabeth, born Englert. He studied at the Jesuits gymnasium in Komotau. After that he studied mathematics and astronomy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague between 1772 and 1777. In 1781 he started to study medicine at the University of Vienna, but later decided to quit his studies. Instead, he worked as an assistant at the astronomical observatory in Vienna under supervision of Maximilian Hell.
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Artashes Shahinian
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Artashes Shahinian was an Armenian mathematician, Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics , Professor , and member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences Shahinian held several positions, including Head of Chair of Yerevan State University , Dean , Head of the Mathematics and Mechanics Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR , Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics , Academy-secretary of the Department of Physics-Mathematical Sciences .
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Hugh Blackburn
1823 - 1909 (86 years)
Bailie Hugh Blackburn was a Scottish mathematician. A lifelong friend of William Thomson , and the husband of illustrator Jemima Blackburn, he was professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1849 to 1879. He succeeded Thomson's father James in the Chair of Mathematics.
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Henry William Watson
1827 - 1903 (76 years)
Rev. Henry William Watson FRS was a mathematician and author of a number of mathematics books. He was an ordained priest and Cambridge Apostle. Life Watson was born at Marylebone on 25 Feb. 1827, the son of Thomas Watson, R.N., and Eleanor Mary Kingston.
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Bohumil Bydžovský
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Bohumil Bydžovský was a Czech mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and algebra. Education and career Bydzovsky in 1898 completed his Abitur at the Academic Gymnasium in Prague and then studied mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague. There Bydzovsky received his Ph.D. in 1903 with thesis supervised by Karel Petr. Bydzovksy became a teacher at secondary schools, including the reálce in Prague-Karlín from 1907 to 1910 . In 1909 he received his habilitation in mathematics, then lectured at the Polytechnic in Prague, and then in 1911 received his habilitation in engineering.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Ibn Yunus
950 - 1009 (59 years)
Abu al-Hasan 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad ibn Yunus al-Sadafi al-Misri was an important Egyptian astronomer and mathematician, whose works are noted for being ahead of their time, having been based on meticulous calculations and attention to detail.
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François Budan de Boislaurent
1761 - 1840 (79 years)
Ferdinand François Désiré Budan de Boislaurent was a French amateur mathematician, best known for a tract, Nouvelle méthode pour la résolution des équations numériques, first published in Paris in 1807, but based on work from 1803.
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Klara Löbenstein
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Klara Löbenstein was a German mathematician. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Löbenstein was born in Hildesheim, Prussia on 15 February 1883 to merchant Lehmann Löbenstein and his wife Sofie .
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Klavdiya Latysheva
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Klavdiya Yakovlevna Latysheva was a Soviet mathematician known for her contributions to the theory of differential equations, electrodynamics and probability. She was honoured with the Order of Lenin and the Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945".
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Ruy Luís Gomes
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Ruy Luís Gomes was a Portuguese mathematician who made significant contributions to the development of mathematical physics and the state of academia in Portugal during the twentieth century. He was part of a generation of young Portuguese mathematicians, including António Aniceto Monteiro , Hugo Baptista Ribeiro and José Sebastião e Silva , who held the common goal of involving Portugal in the global progression of science through conducting and publishing original research. Because of this, however, he began to gain notoriety as a dissident of the Salazar regime, which condemned independent thinking.
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Mikhail Suslin
1894 - 1919 (25 years)
Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin was a Russian mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of general topology and descriptive set theory. Biography Mikhail Suslin was born on November 15, 1894, in the village of Krasavka, the only child of poor peasants Yakov Gavrilovich and Matrena Vasil'evna Suslin. From a young age, Suslin showed a keen interest in mathematics and was encouraged to continue his education by his primary school teacher, Vera Andreevna Teplogorskaya-Smirnova. From 1905 to 1913 he attended Balashov boys' grammar school.
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Zdzisław Krygowski
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Zdzisław Jan Ewangelii Antoni Krygowski was a Polish mathematician, rector of the Lwów Polytechnic , and professor at Poznań University . Enigma Krygowski has become famous in the history of cryptology for having assisted the Polish General Staff in setting up its cryptology course for Poznań University mathematics students that began on 15 January 1929. This led eventually to the General Staff's Cipher Bureau's recruitment of Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, who would jointly break and decrypt the World War II-era German Enigma-machine ciphers, beginning at the end of Dece...
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Zoel García de Galdeano
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Zoel García de Galdeano y Yanguas was a Spanish mathematician. He was considered by Julio Rey Pastor as "The apostle of modern mathematics". Biography His father was a military man, and was killed in war action, so his maternal grandfather, the historian José Yanguas y Miranda , took care of Zoel. To continue his studies, in 1863, Zoel moved to Zaragoza, where he received the title of professor and expert surveyor. In 1869 he graduated as Bachelor. Later he began his studies of Philosophy and Letters, and Sciences at the University of Zaragoza. In 1871, he graduated from these two specialties...
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Gusztáv Rados
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Gusztáv Rados was a Hungarian mathematician. Rados specialized in number theory, linear algebra, algebra, and differential geometry. In 1936, he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Yang Hui
1238 - 1298 (60 years)
Yang Hui , courtesy name Qianguang , was a Chinese mathematician and writer during the Song dynasty. Originally, from Qiantang , Yang worked on magic squares, magic circles and the binomial theorem, and is best known for his contribution of presenting Yang Hui's Triangle. This triangle was the same as Pascal's Triangle, discovered by Yang's predecessor Jia Xian. Yang was also a contemporary to the other famous mathematician Qin Jiushao.
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Cardinal Richelieu
1585 - 1642 (57 years)
Armand Jean du Plessis, 1st Duke of Richelieu , known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French statesman and clergyman. He became known as l'Éminence rouge, or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the title "Eminence" applied to cardinals and from the red robes that they customarily wear.
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Joichi Suetsuna
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Joichi Suetsuna was a Japanese mathematician who worked mainly on number theory. In addition to working in Japan, where he held a chair at Tokyo University and was eventually selected to the Japan Academy, Suetsuna also spent time studying in Europe and introduced to Japan research styles he witnessed there. Later in life, especially after World War II, he studied Buddhist philosophy.
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Gregorio Fontana
1735 - 1803 (68 years)
Gregorio Fontana, born Giovanni Battista Lorenzo Fontana was an Italian mathematician and a religious of the Piarist order. He was chair of mathematics at the university of Pavia succeeding Roger Joseph Boscovich. He has been credited with the introduction of polar coordinates.
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Paul Taunton Matthews
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Paul Taunton Matthews CBE FRS was a British theoretical physicist. Biography Matthews was born in Erode in British India, and was educated at Mill Hill School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he was awarded MA and PhD degrees. He was awarded the Adams Prize in 1958, elected to the Royal Society in 1963, and awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1978. He became head of the Physics Department of Imperial College, London and later vice chancellor of the University of Bath. He was also awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Bath in 1983. He was also chairman of the Nuclear Physic...
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Attilio Palatini
1889 - 1949 (60 years)
Attilio Palatini was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso. Biography Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele and Ilde Furlanetto . In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
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Paul Funk
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Paul Georg Funk was an Austrian mathematician who introduced the Funk transform and who worked on the calculus of variations. Biography Born in Vienna in 1886, Paul Funk was the son of a deputy bank manager and went to high school in Baden and Gmunden. Then, studied mathematics in Tübingen, Vienna, and Göttingen, writing his PhD dissertation under the supervision of David Hilbert.
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