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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#9101

Raphael Høegh-Krohn

1938 - 1988 (50 years)

Jan Raphael Høegh-Krohn was a Norwegian mathematician. He finished his Ph.D. in 1966, titled On Partly Gentle Perturbation with Application to Perturbation by Annihilation-Creation Operator, under the supervision of Kurt Friedrichs at the New York University.

#9102

Samuel D. Silvey

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

Samuel David Silvey was a British statistician. Among his contributions are the Lagrange multiplier test, and the use of eigenvalues of the moment matrix for the detection of multicollinearity.

#9103

Ellis Stouffer

1884 - 1965 (81 years)

Ellis Bagley Stouffer was an American mathematician specializing in projective differential geometry. Biography Stouffer received bachelor's and master's degrees from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1911 he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under Ernest Julius Wilczynski with thesis Invariants of Linear Differential Equations, with Applications to Ruled Surfaces in Five-Dimensional Space.

#9104

Jaroslav Hájek

1926 - 1974 (48 years)

Jaroslav Hájek was a Czech mathematician who worked in theoretical and nonparametric statistics. The Hajek projection and the Hájek–Le Cam convolution theorem are named for him . Life Jaroslav Hájek studied statistical and insurance engineering at the Faculty of Special Sciences of the Czech Technical University in Prague and in 1950 he successfully completed this study by obtaining an engineering degree. In 1955 he received the title of CSc. for the paper Contributions to the theory of statistical estimation, the supervisor of this thesis was Josef Novák. In 1963, he received a D.Sc. in the ...

#9105

Harry Rauch

1925 - 1979 (54 years)

Harry Ernest Rauch was an American mathematician, who worked on complex analysis and differential geometry. He was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and died in White Plains, New York. Rauch earned his PhD in 1948 from Princeton University under Salomon Bochner with thesis Generalizations of Some Classic Theorems to the Case of Functions of Several Variables. From 1949 to 1951 he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He was in the 1960s a professor at Yeshiva University and from the mid-1970s a professor at the City University of New York. His research was on differential geom...

#9106

Alexander Obukhov

1918 - 1989 (71 years)

Alexander Mikhailovich Obukhov was a Soviet and Russian geophysicist and applied mathematician known for his contributions to statistical theory of turbulence and atmospheric physics. He was one of the founders of modern boundary layer meteorology. He served as the Head of the theoretical department at Sternberg Astronomical Institute, a division of Moscow State University.

#9107

Violet B. Haas

1926 - 1986 (60 years)

Violet Bushwick Haas was an American applied mathematician specializing in control theory and optimal estimation who became a professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University College of Engineering.

#9108

Georg Hamel

1877 - 1954 (77 years)

Georg Karl Wilhelm Hamel was a German mathematician with interests in mechanics, the foundations of mathematics and function theory. Biography Hamel was born in Düren, Rhenish Prussia. He studied at Aachen, Berlin, Göttingen, and Karlsruhe. His doctoral adviser was David Hilbert. He taught at Brünn in 1905, Aachen in 1912, and at the Technical University of Berlin in 1919. In 1927, Hamel studied the size of the key space for the Kryha encryption device. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1932 at Zurich and in 1936 at Oslo. He was the author of several important treatises on mechanics. He...

#9109

Franz Rellich

1906 - 1955 (49 years)

Franz Rellich was an Austrian-German mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equations. The Rellich–Kondrachov theorem is named after him.

#9110

Frigyes Riesz

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Frigyes Riesz was a Hungarian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to functional analysis, as did his younger brother Marcel Riesz. Life and career He was born into a Jewish family in Győr, Austria-Hungary and died in Budapest, Hungary. Between 1911 and 1919 he was a professor at the Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary. The post-WW1 Treaty of Trianon transferred former Austro-Hungarian territory including Kolozsvár to the Kingdom of Romania, whereupon Kolozsvár's name changed to Cluj and the University of Kolozsvár moved to Szeged, Hungary, becoming the University of Szeged.

#9111

Hans Heilbronn

1908 - 1975 (67 years)

Hans Arnold Heilbronn was a mathematician. Education He was born into a German-Jewish family. He was a student at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg and Göttingen, where he met Edmund Landau, who supervised his doctorate. In his thesis, he improved a result of Hoheisel on the size of prime gaps.

#9112

Hyman Levy

1889 - 1975 (86 years)

Prof Hyman Levy was a Scottish-Jewish philosopher, Emeritus Professor of Imperial College London, mathematician, political activist and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life The son of Minna Cohen and Marcus Levy, a picture-framer and occasional art dealer in Edinburgh, Hyman was the third oldest of eight children. They lived at 70 Bristo Street in Edinburgh's South Side.

#9113

Carlo Miranda

1912 - 1982 (70 years)

Carlo Miranda was an Italian mathematician, working on mathematical analysis, theory of elliptic partial differential equations and complex analysis: he is known for giving the first proof of the Poincaré–Miranda theorem, for Miranda's theorem in complex analysis, and for writing an influential monograph in the theory of elliptic partial differential equations.

#9114

Solomon Mikhlin

Solomon Mikhlin

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Solomon Grigor'evich Mikhlin was a Soviet mathematician of who worked in the fields of linear elasticity, singular integrals and numerical analysis: he is best known for the introduction of the symbol of a singular integral operator, which eventually led to the foundation and development of the theory of pseudodifferential operators.

#9115

Allan Birnbaum

1923 - 1976 (53 years)

Allan Birnbaum was an American statistician who contributed to statistical inference, foundations of statistics, statistical genetics, statistical psychology, and history of statistics. Life and career Birnbaum was born in San Francisco. His parents were Russian-born Orthodox Jews. He studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, doing a premedical programme at the same time. After taking a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1945, he spent two years doing graduate courses in science, mathematics and philosophy, planning perhaps a career in the philosophy of science. One of h...

#9116

Leo Moser

1921 - 1970 (49 years)

Leo Moser was an Austrian-Canadian mathematician, best known for his polygon notation. A native of Vienna, Leo Moser immigrated with his parents to Canada at the age of three. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba in 1943, and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto in 1945. After two years of teaching he went to the University of North Carolina to complete a PhD, supervised by Alfred Brauer. There, in 1950, he began suffering recurrent heart problems. He took a position at Texas Technical College for one year, and joined the faculty of the Uni...

#9117

Eduard Helly

1884 - 1943 (59 years)

Eduard Helly was a mathematician after whom Helly's theorem, Helly families, Helly's selection theorem, Helly metric, and the Helly–Bray theorem were named. Life Helly earned his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1907, with two advisors, Wilhelm Wirtinger and Franz Mertens. He then continued his studies for another year at the University of Göttingen. Richard Courant, also studying there at the same time, tells a story of Helly disrupting one of Courant's talks, which fortunately did not prevent David Hilbert from eventually hiring Courant as an assistant. After returning to Vienna, ...

#9118

Paul Althaus Smith

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Paul Althaus Smith was an American mathematician. His name occurs in two significant conjectures in geometric topology: the Smith conjecture, which is now a theorem, and the Hilbert–Smith conjecture, which was proved in dimension 3 in 2013. Smith theory is a theory about homeomorphisms of finite order of manifolds, particularly spheres.

#9119

Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid

1927 - 1985 (58 years)

Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid was an American mathematician and theorist who worked extensively on probability theory, Markov chains, and statistics. The author of more than 70 papers and 6 books, his work touched on such diverse fields as economics, physics, and biology.

#9120

Pavel Alexandrov

Pavel Alexandrov

1896 - 1982 (86 years)

Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov , sometimes romanized Paul Alexandroff , was a Soviet mathematician. He wrote roughly three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology. In topology, the Alexandroff compactification and the Alexandrov topology are named after him.

#9121

Thomas Muirhead Flett

1923 - 1976 (53 years)

Thomas Muirhead Flett was an English mathematician at Sheffield University working on analysis. Biography Thomas Muirhead Flett was born on 28 July 1923, in London, England, when his parents moved from Scotland to London. At age 11, he won a scholarship by the County of Middlesex from a state primary school to University College School , Hampstead.

#9122

Beatrice Worsley

1921 - 1972 (51 years)

Beatrice Helen Worsley was the first female Canadian computer scientist. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.

#9123

David Milman

1912 - 1982 (70 years)

David Pinhusovich Milman was a Soviet and later Israeli mathematician specializing in functional analysis. He was one of the major figures of the Soviet school of functional analysis. In the 70s he emigrated to Israel and was on the faculty of Tel Aviv University.

#9124

Caleb Andrew Stewart

1888 - 1959 (71 years)

Caleb Andrew Stewart FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician. He is noted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life He was born on 16 September 1888 in Glasgow the son of John Stewart, a patternmaker. He attended Barrowfield Primary School then John Street Higher Grade School, completing his education at the High School of Glasgow. He then studied Mathematics and Physics at Glasgow University graduating MA in 1909, BSc in 1910. Winning a Ferguson Scholarship he attended Cambridge University gaining a further BA in 1912. He then began lecturing at the City and Guilds College i...

#9125

László Rédei

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

László Rédei was a Hungarian mathematician. Rédei graduated from the University of Budapest and initially worked as a schoolteacher. In 1940 he was appointed professor in the University of Szeged and in 1967 moved to the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

#9126

Roman Sikorski

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Roman Sikorski was a Polish mathematician. Biography Sikorski was a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1952 until 1982. Since 1962, he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Sikorski's research interests included: Boolean algebrass, mathematical logic, functional analysis, the theory of distributions, measure theory, general topology, and descriptive set theory.

#9127

Arthur Sard

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Arthur Sard was an American mathematician, famous for his work in differential topology and in spline interpolation. His fame stems primarily from Sard's theorem, which says that the set of critical valuess of a differential function which has sufficiently many derivatives has measure zero.

#9128

Bronisław Knaster

Bronisław Knaster

1893 - 1980 (87 years)

Bronisław Knaster was a Polish mathematician; from 1939 a university professor in Lwów and from 1945 in Wrocław. He is known for his work in point-set topology and in particular for his discoveries in 1922 of the hereditarily indecomposable continuum or pseudo-arc and of the Knaster continuum, or buckethandle continuum. Together with his teacher Hugo Steinhaus and his colleague Stefan Banach, he also developed the last diminisher procedure for fair cake cutting.

#9129

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet was a British mathematician who worked in analysis, especially Fourier series. His daughter, Rosamund Caroline Bosanquet was a British cellist, music teacher and composer.

#9130

Otto M. Nikodym

Otto M. Nikodym

1887 - 1974 (87 years)

Otto Marcin Nikodym was a Polish mathematician. Education and career Nikodym studied mathematics at the University of Lemberg . Immediately after his graduation in 1911, he started his teaching job at a high school in Kraków where he remained until 1924. He eventually obtained his doctorate in 1925 from the University of Warsaw; he also spent an academic year in Sorbonne. Nikodym taught at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and University of Warsaw and at the Akademia Górnicza in Kraków in the years that followed. He moved to the United States in 1948 and joined the faculty of Kenyon College.

#9131

Emmy Noether

1882 - 1935 (53 years)

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

#9132

Pavel Korovkin

1913 - 1985 (72 years)

Pavel Petrovich Korovkin was a Soviet mathematician whose main fields of research were orthogonal polynomials, approximation theory and potential theory. In 1947 he proved a generalization of Egorov's theorem: from the early 1950s on, his research interests turned to functional analysis and he examined the stability of the exterior Dirichlet problem and the convergence and approximation properties of linear positive operators on spaces of continuous functions. The set of terms and Korovkin approximation are named after him.

#9133

Theodore William Chaundy

1889 - 1966 (77 years)

Theodore William Chaundy was an English mathematician who introduced Burchnall–Chaundy theory. Chaundy was born to widowed businessman John Chaundy and his second wife Sarah Pates in their shop-cum-home at 49 Broad Street in Oxford. John had eight children, one of whom died as a toddler, with his late first wife and died barely a year after Chaundy was born. The Chaundy home along Broad Street has since been demolished.

#9134

Samuel Newby Curle

1930 - 1989 (59 years)

Samuel Newby Curle FRSE was a British mathematician. He served as Professor of Applied Mathematics at St Andrews University from 1967 until 1989. St Andrews University created the Curle Lecture in his memory.

#9135

Charles Henry Rowe

1893 - 1943 (50 years)

Charles Henry Rowe was an Irish mathematician, specializing in geometry. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin . Career Rowe received his bachelor's degree from University College Cork in 1914 and his M.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin in 1917. He was a close friend of the mathematical physicist J. L. Synge. By winning a competitive examination in 1920, Rowe became a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and retained the fellowship until his death. He spent the academic year 1920–1921 in Paris, where he studied under Hadamard, Lebesgu...

#9136

Adele Goldstine

1920 - 1964 (44 years)

Adele Goldstine was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.

#9137

Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler

Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler

1883 - 1966 (83 years)

Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler was an American mathematician. She is best known for early work on linear algebra in infinite dimensions, which has later become a part of functional analysis. Biography Anna Johnson was born on May 5, 1883, to Swedish immigrant parents in Calliope, Iowa in the United States. Her father, Andrew Gustav Johnson, was a furniture dealer and undertaker. Her mother, Amelia , was a homemaker. Both of Johnson's parents came from the parish of Lyrestad, in Västergötland, Sweden. Johnson had two older siblings, Esther and Elmer. At the age of nine her family moved to Akron, Iowa and she was enrolled in a private school.

#9138

Leonid Kantorovich

Leonid Kantorovich

1912 - 1986 (74 years)

Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician and economist, known for his theory and development of techniques for the optimal allocation of resources. He is regarded as the founder of linear programming. He was the winner of the Stalin Prize in 1949 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975.

#9139

Richard Cockburn Maclaurin

Richard Cockburn Maclaurin

1870 - 1920 (50 years)

Richard Cockburn Maclaurin was a Scottish-born U.S. educator and mathematical physicist. He was made president of MIT in 1909, and held the position until his death in 1920. During his tenure as president of MIT, the Institute moved across the Charles River from Boston to its present campus in Cambridge. In Maclaurin's honor, the buildings that surround Killian Court on the oldest part of the campus are sometimes called the Maclaurin Buildings.

#9140

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.

#9141

Srinivasa Ramanujan

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.

#9142

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.

#9143

Shirley Jackson Case

Shirley Jackson Case

1872 - 1947 (75 years)

Shirley Jackson Case was an historian of early Christianity, and a liberal theologian. He served as dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Biography Case was born on September 28, 1872, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Acadia University. He taught mathematics at the New Hampton Library Institute. In 1904, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1908. He was professor of New Testament literature and interpretation at University of Chicago Divinity School until 1925.

#9144

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr.

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr. was an American mathematician, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis working on analysis. Life Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform. Hirschman spent most of his career at Washington University, where he published mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey. While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem.

#9145

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.

#9146

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...

#9147

Joseph Wedderburn

Joseph Wedderburn

1882 - 1948 (66 years)

Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra.

#9148

John Myhill

1923 - 1987 (64 years)

John R. Myhill Sr. was a British mathematician. Education Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.

#9149

Joseph Slepian

1891 - 1969 (78 years)

Joseph Slepian was an American electrical engineer known for his contributions to the developments of electrical apparatus and theory. Born in Boston, MA of Jewish Russian immigrants, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, from which he was awarded a B.Sc. , a M.Sc. and Ph.D. on the thesis On the Functions of a Complex Variable Defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order and First Degree advised by George Birkhoff . Meanwhile, he also worked at Boston Elevated Railway.

#9150

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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