The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9151
Al-Samawal al-Maghribi
1130 - 1180 (50 years)
Al-Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī , commonly known as Samau'al al-Maghribi, was a mathematician, astronomer and physician. Born to a Jewish family, he concealed his conversion to Islam for many years for fear of offending his father, then openly embraced Islam in 1163 after he had a dream telling him to do so. His father was a Rabbi from Morocco.
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Norman Robert Campbell
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Norman Robert Campbell was an English physicist and philosopher of science. Early life Norman Robert Campbell was born in 1880. He was the son of William Middleton Campbell, Governor of the Bank of England, and his wife Edith Agneta Bevan. He was educated at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1902.
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William Jack
1834 - 1924 (90 years)
William Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and journalist. He was Editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper from 1870 to 1876, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1879 until 1909.
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Andrea Argoli
1570 - 1657 (87 years)
Andrea Argoli , born in Tagliacozzo, was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He was one of the most important 17th-century makers of ephemerides, which gave the positions of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time or times.
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Ludwig Leichhardt
1813 - 1848 (35 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt , known as Ludwig Leichhardt, was a German explorer and naturalist, most famous for his exploration of northern and central Australia. Early life Leichhardt was born on 23 October 1813 in the hamlet of Sabrodt near the village of Trebatsch, today part of Tauche, in the Prussian Province of Brandenburg . He was the fourth son and sixth of the eight children of Christian Hieronymus Matthias Leichhardt, farmer and royal inspector and his wife Charlotte Sophie, née Strählow. Between 1831 and 1836 Leichhardt studied philosophy, language, and natural sciences at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin but never received a university degree.
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Vittorio Grünwald
1855 - 1943 (88 years)
Vittorio Grünwald was an Italian professor of mathematics and German language. His father Guglielmo Grünwald was Hungarian, his mother Fortuna Marini was Italian. In 1861 he moved to Hungary with his family, then came back in 1877 to Verona, later in November 1885 they moved to Brescia, and then to Venice. He studied at the Technische Universität Wien, where he graduated in mathematics. After coming back to Italy, he taught mathematics and German language in several schools , and then he settled in Florence.
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Gabriel Oltramare
1816 - 1906 (90 years)
Gabriel Oltramare was a Swiss mathematician, known for his book "Essai sur le Calcul de Généralisation". Oltramare studied mathematics and natural sciences in Geneva from 1836 to 1839 and then studied higher mathematics at the Sorbonne, receiving there his licence ès sciences mathématiques in 1840. He was a teacher in Aarau. He was in Egypt from 1843 to 1844 as a tutor for Isma'il, son of Ibrahim Pasha of the Muhammad Ali dynasty. At the Collège de Genève. Oltramare was privat-docent of mechanics from 1845 to 1870 and simultaneously of mathematics from 1848 to 1850. In 1848 he was appointed professor ordinarius of higher mathematics at the University of Geneva.
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Gerard of Brussels
1187 - 1260 (73 years)
Gerard of Brussels was an early thirteenth-century geometer and philosopher known primarily for his Latin book Liber de motu , which was a pioneering study in kinematics, probably written between 1187 and 1260. It has been described as "the first Latin treatise that was to take the fundamental approach to kinematics that was to characterize modern kinematics." He brought the works of Euclid and Archimedes back into popularity and was a direct influence on the Oxford Calculators in the next century. Gerard is cited by Thomas Bradwardine in his Tractatus de proportionibus velocitatum . His chi...
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Frederick A. P. Barnard
1809 - 1889 (80 years)
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was an American academic and educator who served as the 10th President of Columbia University. Born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale University in 1828 and served in a succession of academic appointments, including as Chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1856 to 1861. He assumed office as President of Columbia University in 1864, where he presided over a series of improvements to the university until his death in 1889. He was also known as an author of academic texts.
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Werner Boy
1879 - 1914 (35 years)
Werner Boy was a German mathematician. He was the discoverer and eponym of Boy's surface—a three-dimensional projection of the real projective plane without singularities, the first of its kind. He discovered it in 1901 after his thesis adviser, David Hilbert, asked him to prove that it was not possible to immerse the real projective plane in three-dimensional space. Boy sketched several models of the surface, and discovered that it could have 3-fold rotational symmetry, but was unable to find a parametric model for the surface. It was not until 1978 that Bernard Morin found the first paramet...
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Nicolas-François Canard
1754 - 1833 (79 years)
Nicolas-François Canard was a French mathematician, philosopher and economist. He was one of the pioneers of applying mathematics to economic problems, foreshadowing the works of Antoine Augustin Cournot, William Stanley Jevons, and others.
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Antonio Pigafetta
1492 - 1531 (39 years)
Antonio Pigafetta was a Venetian scholar and explorer. He joined the Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the world's first circumnavigation, and is best known for being the chronicler of the voyage. During the expedition, he served as Magellan's assistant until Magellan's death in the Philippine Islands, and kept an accurate journal, which later assisted him in translating the Cebuano language. It is the first recorded document concerning the language.
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Choi Seok-jeong
1646 - 1715 (69 years)
Choi Seok-jeong was a Korean politician and mathematician in the Joseon period of Korea. He published the Gusuryak in 1700, the first known literature on Latin squares, predating Leonhard Euler by at least 67 years. He also invented the hexagonal tortoise problem. Choi was a member of the Jeonju Choe clan.
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Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti was an Italian mathematician, the brother of politician Palmiro Togliatti. He was a researcher at the ETH Zurich from 1924 to 1926. He discovered Togliatti surfaces.
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Robert M. Balzer
#9166
Evgeny Yakovlevich Remez
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Evgeny Yakovlevich Remez His doctoral students include Boris Korenblum. External links Remez at MacTutor
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Claude Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac
1581 - 1638 (57 years)
Claude Gaspar Bachet Sieur de Méziriac was a French mathematician and poet born in Bourg-en-Bresse, at that time belonging to Duchy of Savoy. He wrote , , and a Latin translation of the Arithmetica of Diophantus . He also discovered means of solving indeterminate equations using continued fractions, a method of constructing magic squares, and a proof of Bézout's identity.
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Immanuel Bonfils
1300 - 1377 (77 years)
Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils was a French-Jewish mathematician and astronomer in medieval times who flourished from 1340 to 1377, a rabbi who was a pioneer of exponential calculus and is credited with inventing the system of decimal fractions. He taught astronomy and mathematics in Orange and later lived in Tarascon, both towns in the Holy Roman Empire that are now part of modern-day France. Bonfils studied the works of Gersonides , the father of modern trigonometry, and Al-Battani and even taught at the academy founded by Gersonides in Orange.
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William James Cody
#9170
Roger Abramino Levy
#9171
Richard Johnson
1756 - 1827 (71 years)
Richard Johnson was the first Christian cleric in Australia. Early life Johnson was the son of John and Mary Johnson. He was born in Welton, Yorkshire and educated at Hull Grammar School under Joseph Milner. In 1780 he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge as a sizar and graduated in 1784. His first post was as curate of Boldre, where William Gilpin was vicar. After about a year in Boldre, Johnson moved to London to work as assistant to Henry Foster, an itinerant evangelical preacher.
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Carl Jensen Burrau
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Carl Jensen Burrau was a Danish mathematician who worked on problems relating to physics and astronomy while also working as an actuary. Burrau was born in Helsingör , Denmark and was educated at Copenhagen University. He worked as an astronomy assistant at the university observatory from 1893 to 1898. He is known for his work on a three-body problem, examining the orbits of two equal masses revolving about each other. His collaborations with Törvald Thiele led to the so-called Thiele–Burrau method. His dissertation of 1895 examines methods of identifying constants from photographs of star positions using Bessel's classic method.
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Kenneth E. Batcher
#9174
James Tissot
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Jacques Joseph Tissot , better known as James Tissot , was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. He was born to a drapery merchant and a milliner and decided to pursue a career in art at a young age, coming to incorporate elements of realism, early Impressionism, and academic art into his work. He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England, but he would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life.
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Leonardo Ximenes
1716 - 1786 (70 years)
Leonardo Ximenes was a famous Italian Jesuit, mathematician, engineer, astronomer and geographer from Sicily. After having attended a Jesuit school, he became a mathematician, a hydraulic and civil engineer, and was an eminently respected astronomer in his day. The astronomical observatory, Osservatorio Ximeniano in Florence, is named after him in recognition of his services to the field.
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Gaspar Lax
1487 - 1560 (73 years)
Gaspar Lax was a Spanish mathematician, logician, and philosopher who spent much of his career in Paris. Biography Lax was born in Sariñena, the son of Leonor de la Cueva and Gaspar Lax, a physician, and had two brothers and four sisters. He studied the Seven Liberal Arts and theology at the University of Saragossa, where he acquired a master's degree. Also during this period of time, all along with another friend, Lax fatally wounded another student by hitting his head. He later moved to Paris, and there he taught in 1507–1508 at the Collège de Calvi and then at the Collège de Montaigu, where he was a student of John Mair and simultaneously was a teacher himself.
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Henry Martyn Taylor
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Henry Martyn Taylor, FRS, FRAS , was an English mathematician and barrister. Henry Martyn Taylor was the second son of the Rev. James Taylor and Eliza Johnson. He was educated in Wakefield and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. as 3rd Wrangler in 1865.
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Mathias Metternich
1747 - 1825 (78 years)
Mathias Metternich was a German mathematician and professor at the University of Mainz. As a revolutionary, he was active in the Republic of Mainz. Early life and education Metternich was born on 8 May 1747 in Steinefrenz, a village in the Electorate of Trier close to Montabaur. He was born into a family of farmers who had lived in the area since the 17th century. Supported by a nobleman, the count of Waldersdorff, Metternich was able to study at the Jesuit gymnasium in Hadamar. In 1770, he went to Mainz, where he was educated as an elementary school teacher at the normal school. He became a teacher at the school of the and in 1780 at the normal school.
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David Masson
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
David Mather Masson , was a Scottish academic, supporter of women's suffrage, literary critic and historian. Biography Masson was born in Aberdeen, the son of Sarah Mather and William Masson, a stone-cutter.
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Eugène Fabry
1856 - 1944 (88 years)
Charles Eugène Fabry was a French mathematician. Fabry is best known for studying the singularities of analytic functions. Biography Eugène Fabry, born in Marseille, was the second of five sons in his family.
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Nathaniel Palmer
1799 - 1877 (78 years)
Nathaniel Brown Palmer was an American seal hunter, explorer, sailing captain, and ship designer. He gave his name to Palmer Land, Antarctica, which he explored in 1820 on his sloop Hero. He was born in Stonington, Connecticut, and was a descendant of Walter Palmer, one of the town's founders.
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Daniel Buchanan
1880 - 1950 (70 years)
Daniel Buchanan was a Canadian mathematics and astronomy professor and academic administrator. Biography Buchanan received from McMaster University B.A. in 1906, from Hamilton College B.A. in 1906 and M.A. in 1908, and from the University of Chicago Ph.D. in 1911. He was a professor of astronomy and mathematics from 1911 to 1920 at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He was elected in 1921 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. At the University of British Columbia he became in 1920 professor and head of the department of mathematics and astronomy and in 1928 dean of the faculty of arts...
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Sai Baba of Shirdi
1836 - 1918 (82 years)
Sai Baba of Shirdi , also known as Shirdi Sai Baba, was an Indian spiritual master and fakir, considered to be a saint, revered by both Hindu and Muslim devotees during and after his lifetime. According to accounts from his life, Sai Baba preached the importance of "realisation of the self" and criticised "love towards perishable things". His teachings concentrated on a moral code of love, forgiveness, helping others, charity, contentment, inner peace, and devotion to God and Guru.
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Gottfred Eickhoff
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Gottfred Eickhoff was a Danish sculptor. Inspired by French trends, his work contrasted with that of his predecessors, exhibiting a spirit of harmony, peace and balance. Early life After matriculating from high school in 1920, Eickhoff embarked on law studies but changed paths in 1926 when he became a pupil of Harald Giersing. Realizing he would now concentrate on sculpture, he continued his studies in Paris from 1927 to 1933 under Charles Despiau, associating with a wide range of sculptors including Jean Osouf and Paul Cornet from France, Charles Leplae from Belgium, Han Wezelaar from the Ne...
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Haseb-i Tabari
Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Ayyub-i Haseb-i Tabari was a Persian astronomer. All of his works are in Persian language and none of them are written in Arabic . Not much is known about his life. His works are among the oldest scientific works in Persian language. He used many Persian equivalents for Arabic words. He was from Amol, Tabaristan.
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Norrie Paramor
1914 - 1979 (65 years)
Norman William Paramor , known professionally as Norrie Paramor, was a British record producer, composer, arranger, pianist, bandleader, and orchestral conductor. He is best known for his work with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, both together and separately, steering their early careers and producing and arranging most of their material from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Paramor was a composer of studio albums, theatrical productions, and film scores.
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William Watson
1884 - 1952 (68 years)
William Watson FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish physicist and mathematician. Life He was born on 15 June 1884 in Musselburgh just east of Edinburgh, the son of Janet Watson of Tranent and her husband, William Watson of Fossoway, then headmaster of Musselburgh Grammar School. He attended his father's school from 1891 to 1898 then completed his education at the Royal High School, Edinburgh. He was school dux in 1902.
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Concetta Scaravaglione
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Concetta Scaravaglione was an American sculptor. Her parents immigrated from Calabria, Italy, and Concetta was the youngest of nine children. She is known for her monumental figurative sculpture, her work for the Federal Art Project , and her teaching career.
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Gerrard Winstanley
1609 - 1676 (67 years)
Gerrard Winstanley was an English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist during the period of the Commonwealth of England. Winstanley was the leader and one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers. The group occupied formerly common land that had been privatised by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.
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Arturo Salazar Valencia
1855 - 1943 (88 years)
Arturo Edmundo Salazar Valencia was a scientist, researcher, innovator and professor of electrical engineering in Chile, who in his role as a self-taught individual, explored a wide variety of fields of interest and is considered a true pioneer in the technological development of his country.
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Stefan Lech Sokołowski
1904 - 1940 (36 years)
Stefan Lech Sokołowski was a Polish mathematician, climber and lieutenant of artillery in the Polish Land Forces. He was aLwów Eaglet, a group of children who defended the city of Lviv in 1918-1919 during the Polish-Ukrainian War. He was also a Doctor of mathematical sciences. He died as a result of the Katyn massacre, a Soviet massacre of Polish military officers in 1940.
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John Wood
1812 - 1871 (59 years)
John Wood was a Scottish naval officer, surveyor, cartographer and explorer, principally remembered for his exploration of central Asia. Biography Wood was born in Perth, Scotland. After schooling at Perth Academy, he joined the British Indian Navy, was made a Lieutenant, and soon demonstrated a flair for surveying. Many of the maps of southern Asia which he compiled remained standard for the rest of the 19th century.
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Jan Śleszyński
1854 - 1931 (77 years)
Ivan Vladislavovich Sleshinsky or Jan Śleszyński was a Polish-Russian mathematician. He was born in Lysianka, Russian Empire to Polish parents. Life Śleszyński's main work was on continued fractions, least squares and axiomatic proof theory based on mathematical logic. He and Alfred Pringsheim, working separately, proved what is now called the Śleszyński–Pringsheim theorem.
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Gabriel Bethlen
1580 - 1629 (49 years)
Gabriel Bethlen was Prince of Transylvania from 1613 to 1629 and Duke of Opole from 1622 to 1625. He was also King-elect of Hungary from 1620 to 1621, but he never took control of the whole kingdom. Bethlen, supported by the Ottomans, led his Calvinist principality against the Habsburgs and their Catholic allies.
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Gertrude Lawrence
1898 - 1952 (54 years)
Gertrude Lawrence was an English actress, singer, dancer and musical comedy performer known for her stage appearances in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York. Early life Lawrence was born Gertrude Alice Dagmar Klasen, Alexandra Dagmar Lawrence-Klasen, Gertrude Alexandra Dagmar Klasen or some variant , of English and Danish extraction, in Newington, London. Her father was a basso profondo who performed under the name Arthur Lawrence. His heavy drinking led her mother Alice to leave him soon after Gertrude's birth.
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Carl Thomsen
1847 - 1912 (65 years)
Carl Christian Frederik Jacob Thomsen was a Danish painter and illustrator. He specialized in genre painting and also illustrated the works of several Danish authors. Biography Born in Copenhagen, Thomsen was the son of Chamber Councillor Ludvig Frederik Thomsen and the brother of the acclaimed linguist Vilhelm Thomsen . From an early age, Thomsen was interested in drawing but his parents first encouraged him to study philosophy. After he had graduated in 1866, he began studying art with Frederik Vermehren the same year. He then attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Wilhelm Marstrand, graduating in 1871.
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Alexander Wilson
1714 - 1786 (72 years)
Alexander Wilson was a Scottish surgeon, type-founder, astronomer, mathematician and meteorologist. He was the first scientist to use kites in meteorological investigations. He was the first Regius Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of Glasgow.
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Stanisław Lentz
1861 - 1920 (59 years)
Stanisław Lentz was a Polish painter, portraitist, illustrator, and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1909. Biography Stanisław Lentz was born in Warsaw, Poland, and studied at the Krakow School of Fine Arts with Feliks Szynalewski and Izydor Jabłoński 1877–1879, then continued his studies in Wojciech Gerson's drawing class in Warsaw. In 1880–1884 he studied abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Alexander von Wagner and Gyula Benczúr, and in 1884–1887 at the Académie Julian in Paris.
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George Frederick Barker
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
George Frederick Barker was an American physician and scientist. He graduated from the Yale Scientific School in 1858. He was successively chemical assistant in Harvard Medical School in 1858–1859 and 1860–1861, professor of chemistry and geology in Wheaton College. In 1864 he became the Professor of Natural Science at the Western University of Pennsylvania, now known as the University of Pittsburgh, where he undertook experiments to produce electric light by passing the current through a resisting filament which he claimed was "the first steady electric light generated in Pittsburgh, if not in the country".
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Howard Roberts
1843 - 1900 (57 years)
Howard Roberts was an American sculptor based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the time of the 1876 Centennial Exposition, he was "considered the most accomplished American sculptor." But his output was small, his reputation was soon surpassed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and others, and he is now all but forgotten. Examples of his work are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the U.S. Capitol.
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