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,
#9151
N. G. W. H. Beeger
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger was a Dutch mathematician. His 1916 doctorate was on Dirichlet series. He worked for most of his life as a teacher, working on mathematics papers in his spare evenings. After his retirement as a teacher at 65, he began corresponding with many contemporary mathematicians and dedicated himself to his work. Tilburg University still hold biennial lectures entitled the Beeger lectures in his honour.
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Norman Macleod Ferrers
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Norman Macleod Ferrers was a British mathematician and university administrator and editor of a mathematical journal. Career and research Ferrers was educated at Eton College before studying at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1851. He was appointed to a Fellowship at the college in 1852, was called to the bar in 1855 and was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860. In 1880, he was appointed Master of the college, and served as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1884 to 1885.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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Gerald Warner Brace
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
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Yutaka Taniyama
1927 - 1958 (31 years)
Yutaka Taniyama was a Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. Contribution Taniyama was best known for conjecturing, in modern language, automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field. A partial and refined case of this conjecture for elliptic curves over rationals is called the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture or the modularity theorem whose statement he subsequently refined in collaboration with Goro Shimura. The names Taniyama, Shimura and Weil have all been attached to this conjecture, but the idea is essentially due to Taniyama.
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Charles Napoleon Moore
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Charles Napoleon Moore was an American mathematician at Bowling Green State University who worked on convergence factors. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1932 in Zürich. Publications External links
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Friedrich Bachmann
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Friedrich Bachmann was a German mathematician who specialised in geometry and group theory. Life Bachmann was the son of a Lutheran minister Hans Bachmann. Bachmann came from an intellectual family, his paternal grandfather was the number theorist Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann. Bachmann took his early education at the Gymnasium in Münster. After attending the Gymnasium, he attended the University of Münster and the Humboldt University of Berlin and graduated in 1927. While there he was a member of the Münster Wingolfs.
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Cristóbal de Losada y Puga
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Cristóbal de Losada y Puga was a Peruvian mathematician and mining engineer. He was Minister of Education of Peru in the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero and Director of the National Library of Peru between 1948 and 1961.
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Clara Latimer Bacon
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Dr Clara Latimer Bacon was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. Biography Bacon was the daughter of Larkin Crouch Bacon and Louisa Latimer. She was born in Knox, Illinois, the eldest of her parents four children. She also had four other half siblings. Bacon attended North Abingdon High School and begun her college life at Hedding Collegiate Seminary.
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Gianfranco Cimmino
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Gianfranco Cimmino was an Italian mathematician, working mathematical analysis, numerical analysis, and theory of elliptic partial differential equations: he is known for being the first mathematician generalizing in a weak sense the notion of boundary value in a boundary value problem, and for doing an influential work in numerical analysis.
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Ernest Wedderburn
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Sir Ernest MacLagan Wedderburn was a Scottish lawyer, and a significant figure both in the civic life of Edinburgh and in the legal establishment. He held the posts of Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh , Deputy Keeper of the Signet , and Chairman of the General Council of Solicitors , the forerunner to the Law Society of Scotland, and chaired the latter 1949/50. He was also an enthusiastic amateur scientist, and first Treasurer then Vice President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Tord Hall
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Tord Hall was a Swedish mathematician, university professor and bestselling author. Life He was born in 1910 in Jönköping, Sweden, and died in 1987. Career He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala University. His PhD advisor was Arne Beurling. The title of his PhD thesis was On Polynomials bounded at an Infinity of Points.
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André Sainte-Laguë
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
André Sainte-Laguë was a French mathematician who was a pioneer in the area of graph theory. His research on seat allocation methods led to one being named after him, the Sainte-Laguë method. Also named after him is the Sainte-Laguë Index for measuring the proportionality of an electoral outcome.
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Ferdinand Rudio
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Ferdinand Rudio was a German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Rudio's father and maternal grandfather were both public officials in the independent Duchy of Nassau, which was annexed by Prussia when Rudio was 10. He was educated at the local gymnasium and Realgymnasium in Wiesbaden, and then in 1874 began studying at ETH Zurich, then known as the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich. His initial courses in Zurich were in civil engineering, but in his second year he switched to mathematics and physics. Finishing at Zurich in 1877, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1877 to 1880, earning his Ph.D.
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Gheorghe Mihoc
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Gheorghe Mihoc was a Romanian mathematician and statistician. He was born in Brăila, the son of Ecaterina and Gheorghe Mihoc, both originally from the Banat. In 1908, his father moved the family to Bucharest. Here he attended elementary school and the Gheorghe Șincai High School. In 1925 Mihoc enrolled at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sciences, and was awarded his degree in mathematics in June 1928.
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Carlos Benjamin de Lyra
1927 - 1974 (47 years)
Carlos Benjamin de Lyra was a prominent Brazilian mathematician, a pioneer in algebraic topology in Brazil and professor at the University of São Paulo. Born in Recife, Pernambuco, he came from a family of sugarcane plantation owners and his dad was the owner of the Diário de Pernambuco, a newspaper that was known nationwide. Lyra was an important mathematician in his area, his course Introdução à Topologia Algébrica was taught in the first Colóquio Brasileiro de Matemática and would become the first text in this field written in Brazilian Portuguese.
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David Enskog
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
David Enskog was a Swedish mathematical physicist. Enskog helped develop the kinetic theory of gases by extending the Maxwell–Boltzmann equations. Biography After undergraduate studies at Uppsala University he received a licentiate degree in physics in 1911, working on gas diffusion under professor Gustaf Granqvist, who was an experimentalist. Enskog did not wish to continue with experimental physics, however, and transferred to professor Carl Wilhelm Oseen for his Ph.D. From 1913, Enskog worked as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics to support himself and his family, while continuing his research and thesis writing in his free time.
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Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
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Jessie Marie Jacobs
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Jessie Marie Jacobs Muller Offermann was an American mathematician who also made contributions to the field of genetics. Jessie M. Jacobs completed her undergraduate degree at McPherson College. After a year spent teaching high school she was awarded one of the first two fellowships to study graduate-level mathematics at the University of Kansas, where she earned her master's degree in 1916. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1919 under the supervision of Arthur Byron Coble. She became an associate professor at Rockford College and then,...
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Traian Lalescu
1882 - 1929 (47 years)
Traian Lalescu was a Romanian mathematician. His main focus was on integral equations and he contributed to work in the areas of functional equations, trigonometric series, mathematical physics, geometry, mechanics, algebra, and the history of mathematics.
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May Beenken
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
May Margaret Beenken was an American mathematician. Life Beenken was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Sophie Kirn and Henry Beenken . and she had at least three older siblings. Career Beenken completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1928. Her doctoral advisor was Ernest Preston Lane and her thesis was titled Surfaces in Five-Dimensional Space. She later became an instructor at Oshkosh Teacher's College. She also served as a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1945, as well as an associate professor at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 to 19...
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Anatoly Shirshov
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Anatoly Illarionovich Shirshov was a Soviet mathematician, known for his research on free Lie algebras. He proved the Shirshov–Witt theorem, which states that any Lie subalgebra of a free Lie algebra is itself a free Lie algebra.
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Anna Zofia Krygowska
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Anna Zofia Krygowska was a Polish mathematician, known for her work in mathematics education. Krygowska was born in Lwów, at that time the capital of Austrian Poland, on 19 September 1904. She grew up in Zakopane, and attended the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she graduated in mathematics in 1927. From 1927 to 1950 she was a primary and secondary school mathematics teacher in Poland, including a time spent underground during World War II. In 1950 she earned a doctorate from the Jagiellonian University, under the supervision of Tadeusz Ważewski, and joined the faculty of the Pedagogical University of Kraków.
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Édouard Goursat
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat was a French mathematician, now remembered principally as an expositor for his Cours d'analyse mathématique, which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. It set a standard for the high-level teaching of mathematical analysis, especially complex analysis. This text was reviewed by William Fogg Osgood for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. This led to its translation into English by Earle Raymond Hedrick published by Ginn and Company. Goursat also published texts on partial differential equations and hypergeometric series.
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Madhava of Sangamagrama
1350 - 1425 (75 years)
Mādhava of Sangamagrāma was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of the greatest mathematician-astronomers of the Late Middle Ages, Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".
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Pierre Ossian Bonnet
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Pierre Ossian Bonnet was a French mathematician. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, including the Gauss–Bonnet theorem. Biography Early years Pierre Bonnet attended the Collège in Montpellier. In 1838 he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris. He also studied at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées.
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Thābit ibn Qurra
836 - 901 (65 years)
Thābit ibn Qurra ; 826 or 836 – February 19, 901, was a polymath known for his work in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and translation. He lived in Baghdad in the second half of the ninth century during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate.
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Zu Chongzhi
429 - 500 (71 years)
Zu Chongzhi , courtesy name Wenyuan , was a Chinese astronomer, mathematician, politician, inventor, and writer during the Liu Song and Southern Qi dynasties. He was most notable for calculating pi as between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, a record in accuracy which would not be surpassed for over 800 years.
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Wilhelm Wirtinger
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
Wilhelm Wirtinger was an Austrian mathematician, working in complex analysis, geometry, algebra, number theory, Lie groups and knot theory. Biography He was born at Ybbs on the Danube and studied at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1887, and his habilitation in 1890. Wirtinger was greatly influenced by Felix Klein with whom he studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Göttingen.
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Eugène Charles Catalan
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Eugène Charles Catalan was a French and Belgian mathematician who worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics; stating the famous Catalan's conjecture, which was eventually proved in 2002; and introducing the Catalan number to solve a combinatorial problem.
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Mark Naimark
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Mark Aronovich Naimark was a Soviet mathematician who made important contributions to functional analysis and mathematical physics. Life Naimark was born on 5 December 1909 in Odessa, part of modern-day Ukraine, but which was then part of the Russian Empire. His family was Jewish, his father Aron Iakovlevich Naimark a professional artist, and his mother was Zefir Moiseevna. He was four years old at the onset of World War I in 1914, and seven when the tumultuous Russian Revolution began in 1917. Showing an early talent for mathematics, Naimark enrolled in a technical college at the age of fifteen in 1924 soon after the Russian Civil War had ended.
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Rafael Bombelli
1526 - 1573 (47 years)
Rafael Bombelli was an Italian mathematician. Born in Bologna, he is the author of a treatise on algebra and is a central figure in the understanding of imaginary numbers. He was the one who finally managed to address the problem with imaginary numbers. In his 1572 book, L'Algebra, Bombelli solved equations using the method of del Ferro/Tartaglia. He introduced the rhetoric that preceded the representative symbols +i and -i and described how they both worked.
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Wilhelm Blaschke
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Wilhelm Johann Eugen Blaschke was an Austrian mathematician working in the fields of differential and integral geometry. Education and career Blaschke was the son of mathematician Josef Blaschke, who taught geometry at the Landes Oberrealschule in Graz. After studying for two years at the Technische Hochschule in Graz, he went to the University of Vienna, and completed a doctorate in 1908 under the supervision of Wilhelm Wirtinger. His dissertation was Über eine besondere Art von Kurven vierter Klasse.
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Axel Thue
1863 - 1922 (59 years)
Axel Thue was a Norwegian mathematician, known for his original work in diophantine approximation and combinatorics. Work Thue published his first important paper in 1909. He stated in 1914 the so-called word problem for semigroups or Thue problem, closely related to the halting problem.
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Karl Schwarzschild
1873 - 1916 (43 years)
Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist and astronomer. Schwarzschild provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.
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Jean-Robert Argand
1768 - 1822 (54 years)
Jean-Robert Argand was a Genevan amateur mathematician. In 1806, while managing a bookstore in Paris, he published the idea of geometrical interpretation of complex numbers known as the Argand diagram and is known for the first rigorous proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.
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Pyotr Novikov
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Pyotr Sergeyevich Novikov was a Soviet mathematician. Novikov is known for his work on combinatorial problems in group theory: the word problem for groups, and his progress in the Burnside problem. He was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1957 for proving the undecidability of the word problem in groups.
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Theodorus of Cyrene
465 BC - 398 BC (67 years)
Theodorus of Cyrene was an ancient Greek mathematician who lived during the 5th century BC. The only first-hand accounts of him that survive are in three of Plato's dialogues: the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. In the former dialogue, he posits a mathematical construction now known as the Spiral of Theodorus.
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Giulio Ascoli
1843 - 1896 (53 years)
Giulio Ascoli was a Jewish-Italian mathematician. He was a student of the Scuola Normale di Pisa, where he graduated in 1868. In 1872 he became Professor of Algebra and Calculus of the Politecnico di Milano University. From 1879 he was professor of mathematics at the Reale Istituto Tecnico Superiore, where, in 1901, was affixed a plaque that remembers him.
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E. T. Whittaker
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th-century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
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Michel Plancherel
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Michel Plancherel was a Swiss mathematician. He was born in Bussy and obtained his Diplom in mathematics from the University of Fribourg and then his doctoral degree in 1907 with a thesis written under the supervision of Mathias Lerch. Plancherel was a professor in Fribourg , and from 1920 at ETH Zurich.
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Alfred Clebsch
1833 - 1872 (39 years)
Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch was a German mathematician who made important contributions to algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He attended the University of Königsberg and was habilitated at Berlin. He subsequently taught in Berlin and Karlsruhe. His collaboration with Paul Gordan in Giessen led to the introduction of Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.
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Alexander Macfarlane
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Alexander Macfarlane FRSE LLD was a Scottish logician, physicist, and mathematician. Life Macfarlane was born in Blairgowrie, Scotland, to Daniel MacFarlane and Ann Small. He studied at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral thesis "The disruptive discharge of electricity" reported on experimental results from the laboratory of Peter Guthrie Tait.
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Benjamin Peirce
1809 - 1880 (71 years)
Benjamin Peirce was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, statistics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics.
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Leonard Eugene Dickson
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Leonard Eugene Dickson was an American mathematician. He was one of the first American researchers in abstract algebra, in particular the theory of finite fields and classical groups, and is also remembered for a three-volume history of number theory, History of the Theory of Numbers. The L. E. Dickson instructorships at the University of Chicago Department of Mathematics are named after him.
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Corrado Segre
1863 - 1924 (61 years)
Corrado Segre was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to the early development of algebraic geometry. Early life Corrado's parents were Abramo Segre and Estella De Benedetti.
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Walther von Dyck
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
Walther Franz Anton von Dyck , born Dyck and later ennobled, was a German mathematician. He is credited with being the first to define a mathematical group, in the modern sense in . He laid the foundations of combinatorial group theory, being the first to systematically study a group by generators and relations.
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Nicomachus
60 - 120 (60 years)
Nicomachus of Gerasa was an Ancient Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from Gerasa, in the Roman province of Syria . Like many Pythagoreans, Nicomachus wrote about the mystical properties of numbers, best known for his works Introduction to Arithmetic and Manual of Harmonics, which are an important resource on Ancient Greek mathematics and Ancient Greek music in the Roman period. Nicomachus' work on arithmetic became a standard text for Neoplatonic education in Late antiquity, with philosophers such as Iamblichus and John Philoponus writing commentaries on it. A Latin paraphrase by Boethius of...
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Friedrich Bessel
1784 - 1846 (62 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. Certain important mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli before being generalised by Bessel.
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Scipione del Ferro
1465 - 1526 (61 years)
Scipione del Ferro was an Italian mathematician who first discovered a method to solve the depressed cubic equation. Life Scipione del Ferro was born in Bologna, in northern Italy, to Floriano and Filippa Ferro. His father, Floriano, worked in the paper industry, which owed its existence to the invention of the press in the 1450s and which probably allowed Scipione to access various works during the early stages of his life. He married and had a daughter, who was named Filippa after his mother.
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