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,
#9101
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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Elwin Bruno Christoffel
1829 - 1900 (71 years)
Elwin Bruno Christoffel was a German mathematician and physicist. He introduced fundamental concepts of differential geometry, opening the way for the development of tensor calculus, which would later provide the mathematical basis for general relativity.
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Pafnuty Chebyshev
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician and considered to be the founding father of Russian mathematics. Chebyshev is known for his fundamental contributions to the fields of probability, statistics, mechanics, and number theory. A number of important mathematical concepts are named after him, including the Chebyshev inequality , the Bertrand–Chebyshev theorem, Chebyshev polynomials, Chebyshev linkage, and Chebyshev bias.
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Gerolamo Cardano
1501 - 1576 (75 years)
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.
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August Ferdinand Möbius
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.
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Daniel Bernoulli
1700 - 1782 (82 years)
Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family from Basel. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
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Edmund Landau
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Edmund Georg Hermann Landau was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopold Landau, a gynecologist, and his mother was Johanna Jacoby. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation in 1901. His doctoral thesis was 14 pages long.
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James Joseph Sylvester
1814 - 1897 (83 years)
James Joseph Sylvester was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was a professor at Oxford University.
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Vito Volterra
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
Vito Volterra was an Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology and integral equations, being one of the founders of functional analysis. Biography Born in Ancona, then part of the Papal States, into a very poor Jewish family: his father was Abramo Volterra and his mother, Angelica Almagià. Abramo Volterra died in 1862 when Vito was two years old. The family moved to Turin, and then to Florence, where he studied at the Dante Alighieri Technical School and the Galileo Galilei Technical Institute.
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Adolf Hurwitz
1859 - 1919 (60 years)
Adolf Hurwitz was a German mathematician who worked on algebra, analysis, geometry and number theory. Early life He was born in Hildesheim, then part of the Kingdom of Hanover, to a Jewish family and died in Zürich, in Switzerland. His father Salomon Hurwitz, a merchant, was not wealthy. Hurwitz's mother, Elise Wertheimer, died when he was three years old. Family records indicate that he had siblings and cousins, but their names have yet to be confirmed except for an older brother, Julius, with whom he developed an arithmetical theory for complex continued fractions circa 1890. Hurwitz entered the in Hildesheim in 1868.
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Galileo Galilei
1564 - 1642 (78 years)
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei , commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei or simply Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
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Eudoxus of Cnidus
408 BC - 355 BC (53 years)
Eudoxus of Cnidus was an ancient Greek astronomer, mathematician, doctor, and lawmaker. He was a student of Archytas and Plato. All of his original works are lost, though some fragments are preserved in Hipparchus' Commentaries on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus. Spherics by Theodosius of Bithynia may be based on a work by Eudoxus.
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Harold Jeffreys
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS was a British geophysicist who made significant contributions to mathematics and statistics. His book, Theory of Probability, which was first published in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the objective Bayesian view of probability.
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René-Louis Baire
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
René-Louis Baire was a French mathematician most famous for his Baire category theorem, which helped to generalize and prove future theorems. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Sur les fonctions de variables réelles in 1899.
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Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
1849 - 1917 (68 years)
Ferdinand Georg Frobenius was a German mathematician, best known for his contributions to the theory of elliptic functions, differential equations, number theory, and to group theory. He is known for the famous determinantal identities, known as Frobenius–Stickelberger formulae, governing elliptic functions, and for developing the theory of biquadratic forms. He was also the first to introduce the notion of rational approximations of functions , and gave the first full proof for the Cayley–Hamilton theorem. He also lent his name to certain differential-geometric objects in modern mathematical...
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Pappus of Alexandria
290 - 350 (60 years)
Pappus of Alexandria was one of the last great Greek mathematicianss of antiquity; he is known for his Synagoge or Collection , and for Pappus's hexagon theorem in projective geometry. Nothing is known of his life, other than what can be found in his own writings: that he had a son named Hermodorus, and was a teacher in Alexandria.
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Aleksandr Lyapunov
1857 - 1918 (61 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov was a Russian mathematician, mechanician and physicist. His surname is variously romanized as Ljapunov, Liapunov, Liapounoff or Ljapunow. He was the son of the astronomer Mikhail Lyapunov and the brother of the pianist and composer Sergei Lyapunov.
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Nikolai Lobachevsky
1792 - 1856 (64 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was a Russian mathematician and geometer, known primarily for his work on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry, and also for his fundamental study on Dirichlet integrals, known as the Lobachevsky integral formula.
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Arend Heyting
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Arend Heyting was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to the formalisation of certain intuitionistic principles .
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Nicolaus Copernicus
1473 - 1543 (70 years)
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
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Liu Hui
225 - 295 (70 years)
Liu Hui was a Chinese mathematician who published a commentary in 263 CE on Jiu Zhang Suan Shu . He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Eastern Han dynasty and lived in the state of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of China.
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Max Dehn
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Max Wilhelm Dehn was a German mathematician most famous for his work in geometry, topology and geometric group theory. Dehn's early life and career took place in Germany. However, he was forced to retire in 1935 and eventually fled Germany in 1939 and emigrated to the United States.
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Johann Heinrich Lambert
1728 - 1777 (49 years)
Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.
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Jacques Charles François Sturm
1803 - 1855 (52 years)
Jacques Charles François Sturm was a French mathematician, who made a significant addition to equation theory with his work, the Sturm's theorem. Early life Sturm was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1803. The family of his father, Jean-Henri Sturm, had emigrated from Strasbourg around 1760—about 50 years before Charles-François's birth. His mother's name was Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Gremay.
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Christian Goldbach
1690 - 1764 (74 years)
Christian Goldbach was a Prussian mathematician connected with some important research mainly in number theory; he also studied law and took an interest in and a role in the Russian court. After traveling around Europe in his early life, he landed in Russia in 1725 as a professor at the newly founded Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Goldbach jointly led the Academy in 1737. However, he relinquished duties in the Academy in 1742 and worked in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until his death in 1764. He is remembered today for Goldbach's conjecture and the Goldbach–Euler Theorem. He...
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François Viète
1540 - 1603 (63 years)
François Viète, Seigneur de la Bigotière , commonly known by his mononym, Vieta, was a French mathematician whose work on new algebra was an important step towards modern algebra, due to his innovative use of letters as parameters in equations. He was a lawyer by trade, and served as a privy councillor to both Henry III and Henry IV of France.
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Gaspard Monge
1746 - 1818 (72 years)
Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry. During the French Revolution he served as the Minister of the Marine, and was involved in the reform of the French educational system, helping to found the École Polytechnique.
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Bhāskara II
1114 - 1185 (71 years)
Bhāskara II , also known as Bhāskarāchārya , and as Bhāskara II to avoid confusion with Bhāskara I, was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. From verses, in his main work, Siddhānta Shiromani , it can be inferred that he was born in 1114 in Vijjadavida and living in the Satpuda mountain ranges of Western Ghats, believed to be the town of Patana in Chalisgaon, located in present-day Khandesh region of Maharashtra by scholars. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been immortalized on a monument. In a temple in Maharashtra, an inscription supposedly created by his grandson Changadeva...
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Charles Babbage
1791 - 1871 (80 years)
Charles Babbage was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered by some to be "father of the computer". Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom. Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his 1832 book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery.
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János Bolyai
1802 - 1860 (58 years)
János Bolyai or Johann Bolyai, was a Hungarian mathematician who developed absolute geometry—a geometry that includes both Euclidean geometry and hyperbolic geometry. The discovery of a consistent alternative geometry that might correspond to the structure of the universe helped to free mathematicians to study abstract concepts irrespective of any possible connection with the physical world.
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Jean Gaston Darboux
1842 - 1917 (75 years)
Jean-Gaston Darboux FAS MIF FRS FRSE was a French mathematician. Life According to his birth certificate, he was born in Nîmes in France on 14 August 1842, at 1 am. However, probably due to the midnight birth, Darboux himself usually reported his own birthday as 13 August, e.g. in his filled form for Légion d'Honneur.
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Aryabhata
476 - 550 (74 years)
Aryabhata or Aryabhata I was the first of the major mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His works include the Āryabhaṭīya and the Arya-siddhanta.
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Teiji Takagi
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Teiji Takagi was a Japanese mathematician, best known for proving the Takagi existence theorem in class field theory. The Blancmange curve, the graph of a nowhere-differentiable but uniformly continuous function, is also called the Takagi curve after his work on it.
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Gotthold Eisenstein
1823 - 1852 (29 years)
Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein was a German mathematician. He specialized in number theory and analysis, and proved several results that eluded even Gauss. Like Galois and Abel before him, Eisenstein died before the age of 30. He was born and died in Berlin, Prussia.
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Ibn al-Haytham
965 - 1038 (73 years)
Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from present-day Iraq. Referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled Kitāb al-Manāẓir , written during 1011–1021, which survived in a Latin edition. The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the scientific revolution by Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Galileo Galilei.
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Marin Mersenne
1588 - 1648 (60 years)
Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those written in the form for some integer . He also developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string , and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics". Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest, had many contacts in the scientific world and has been called "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of ...
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John Wallis
1616 - 1703 (87 years)
John Wallis was an English clergyman and mathematician, who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. John Wallis was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics.
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Alfréd Haar
1885 - 1933 (48 years)
Alfréd Haar was a Hungarian mathematician. In 1904 he began to study at the University of Göttingen. His doctorate was supervised by David Hilbert. The Haar measure, Haar wavelet, and Haar transform are named in his honor. Between 1912 and 1919 he taught at Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Together with Frigyes Riesz, he made the University of Szeged a centre of mathematics. He also founded the Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum journal together with Riesz.
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Abraham de Moivre
1667 - 1754 (87 years)
Abraham de Moivre FRS was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
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Hermann Schwarz
1843 - 1921 (78 years)
Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis. Life Schwarz was born in Hermsdorf, Silesia . In 1868 he married Marie Kummer, who was the daughter to the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and Ottilie née Mendelssohn . Schwarz and Kummer had six children, including his daughter Emily Schwarz.
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Thales of Miletus
650 BC - 548 BC (102 years)
Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece, and credited with the saying "know thyself" which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
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Francis Sowerby Macaulay
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Francis Sowerby Macaulay FRS was an English mathematician who made significant contributions to algebraic geometry. He is known for his 1916 book The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems , which greatly influenced the later course of commutative algebra. Cohen–Macaulay rings, Macaulay duality, the Macaulay resultant and the Macaulay and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems are named for Macaulay.
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