Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#9201

Isaac Barrow

1613 - 1680 (67 years)

Isaac Barrow was an English clergyman and Bishop, consecutively, of Sodor and Man and St Asaph, and also served as Governor of the Isle of Man. He was the founder of the Bishop Barrow Trust. During his time as Bishop of Sodor and Man and Governor of the Isle of Man, he enacted significant social, political, and ecclesiastical reforms. He is sometimes confused with his more famous namesake and nephew, Isaac Barrow , the mathematician and theologian.

#9202

John M. Blatt

1921 - 1990 (69 years)

John Markus Blatt was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. Life Blatt was the son of a successful physician in Vienna. In 1938 the family immigrated to the US as Jews fleeing the Anschluss. Blatt studied physics at the University of Cincinnati with bachelor's degree in 1942 and received in 1946 two doctorates in physics, one from Cornell University and the other from Princeton University. He then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote, with Victor Weisskopf, the textbook Theoretical Nuclear Physics, which became a standard introduction to the subject. From 1948 to 1953 Blatt was at the University of Illinois, where the Illiac computer was being built.

#9203

Eduard Selling

1834 - 1920 (86 years)

Eduard Selling was a German mathematician and inventor of calculating machines. Selling studied mathematics at the Universities of Göttingen and Munich . He obtained the doctorate in Munich in 1859, under the supervision of Bernhard Riemann. On recommendation of Leopold Kronecker he became professor extraordinarius of mathematics at the University of Würzburg in 1860 – against the will of the philosophical faculty and the mathematics professor Aloys Mayr. There, he also taught astronomy and became conservator-restorer at the astronomical department in 1879. In 1873 he wrote an important paper...

#9204

Holbrook Mann MacNeille

1907 - 1973 (66 years)

Holbrook Mann MacNeille was an American mathematician who worked for the United States Atomic Energy Commission before becoming the first Executive Director of the American Mathematical Society. Personal life MacNeille was born May 11, 1907, in New York City and was raised in Summit, New Jersey, the first of two brothers. His father was Perry Robinson MacNeille, an architect and urban planner and his mother Clausine Mann MacNeille who was active on the Summit Board of Education. His aunt was the Jungian analyst Kristine Mann.

#9205

William Charles Brenke

1874 - 1964 (90 years)

William Charles Brenke was an American mathematician who introduced Brenke polynomials and wrote several undergraduate textbooks. He received his PhD in mathematics at Harvard under Maxime Bôcher. Brenke taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln mathematics department from 1908 to 1944 and was chair of the department from 1934 to 1944. He retired in 1943 but his successor, Ralph Hull, was put on official leave to do war work and returned from leave in 1945.

#9206

Theophilos Corydalleus

1570 - 1646 (76 years)

Theophilos Corydalleus was a Greek Neo-Aristotelian philosopher who initiated the philosophical movement known as Korydalism or Corydalism. He was also an Eastern Orthodox cleric , physician, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, author, educator and geographer. His philosophical thought kept influencing Greek education for two hundred years after its inception.

#9207

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson

1938 - 1973 (35 years)

Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty .

#9208

Hermann Boerner

Hermann Boerner

1906 - 1982 (76 years)

Hermann Boerner, also written "Börner" was a German mathematician who worked on variation calculus, complex analysis, and group representation theory. Publications Boerner Eingang zur VariationsrechnungJahresbericht DMV 1953Boerner aus dem Stokesschen SatzMathematische Zeitschrift volume 46, 1940, page 709Boerner die Legendreschen Bedingungen und die Feldtheorie in der Variationsrechnung der mehrfachen IntegraleMathem.Zeitschrift 1940, page 720Boerner die Extremalen und geodätischen Felder in der Variationsrechnung der mehrfachen IntegraleMathematische Annalen volume 112, 1936, page 187Boerne...

#9209

John Speidell

1600 - 1634 (34 years)

John Speidell was an English mathematician. He is known for his early work on the calculation of logarithms. Speidell was a mathematics teacher in London and one of the early followers of the work John Napier had previously done on natural logarithms. In 1619 Speidell published a table entitled "New Logarithmes" in which he calculated the natural logarithms of sines, tangents, and secants.

#9210

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

1767 - 1794 (27 years)

Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just , sometimes nicknamed the Archangel of Terror, was a French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, a Jacobin club leader, and a major figure of the French Revolution. He was a close friend of Maximilien Robespierre and served as his most trusted ally during the period of Jacobin rule in the French First Republic. Saint-Just worked as a legislator and a military commissar, but he achieved a lasting reputation as the face of the Reign of Terror. He publicly delivered the condemnatory reports that emanated fr...

#9211

Marie Gernet

1865 - 1924 (59 years)

Marie Gernet was a German mathematician who in 1895 became the second woman to obtain a doctorate at Heidelberg University. The first was Käthe Windscheid, who earned a doctorate for her work on English pastoral poetry in the previous year. Gernet was also the first native German woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, 13 years earlier than Emmy Noether. She was the only German among the first eight women to earn a mathematics Ph.D. in Germany.

#9212

George James Lidstone

1870 - 1952 (82 years)

George James Lidstone FIA FSA FRSE was a British actuary who made several contributions to the field of statistics. He is known for Lidstone smoothing and Lidstone series. He served as President of the Faculty of Actuaries from 1924 to 1926.

#9213

Mikhail Subbotin

1893 - 1966 (73 years)

Mikhail Fedorovich Subbotin was a Soviet mathematician and astronomer who calculated orbits of planets and comets. He worked on general properties of motion in the n-body problem. Biography and education Subbotin was born on 29 June 1893 in Ostrolenka, Russian Empire .

#9214

Peter Dembowski

Peter Dembowski

1928 - 1971 (43 years)

Heinz Peter Dembowski was a German mathematician, specializing in combinatorics. He is known for the and for Dembowski-Ostrom polynomials. Education and career Dembowski studied from 1948 to 1953 at Goethe University Frankfurt. He then spent three years in the USA first at Brown University and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. At Illinois he met Reinhold Baer, with whom he returned to Frankfurt in 1956 and received in 1957 his doctorate with thesis Verallgemeinerungen von Transitivitätsklassen endlicher projektiver Ebenen . In 1964 Dembowski was habilitated in Frankfurt.

#9215

Isaak Bacharach

1854 - 1942 (88 years)

Isaak Bacharach was a German mathematics professor in Erlangen who proved the Cayley–Bacharach theorem on intersections of cubic curves. He was murdered at the Theresienstadt concentration camp during The Holocaust.

#9216

Lucjan Böttcher

1872 - 1937 (65 years)

Lucjan Emil Böttcher was a Polish mathematician who worked in Lvov in the beginning of the 20th century. Early life Böttcher was born on January 21, 1872, in Warsaw, Poland. He attended private schools in Warsaw and graduated from the classical gymnasium in Łomża in 1893, after which he entered the Imperial University of Warsaw in the Division of Mathematics and Physics. At the time, Russian was the language of instruction at the university, as Warsaw was under Russian rule.

#9217

Wade Ellis

1909 - 1989 (80 years)

Wade Ellis was an American mathematician and educator. He taught at Fort Valley State University in Georgia and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1944. He carried out classified research on radar antennas at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and taught at Boston University and Oberlin College, where he became Full Professor in 1953. The same year, he was elected to the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America.

#9218

Ladislav Rieger

1916 - 1963 (47 years)

Ladislav Svante Rieger was a Czechoslovak mathematician who worked in the areas of algebra, mathematical logic, and axiomatic set theory. He is considered to be the founder of mathematical logic in Czechoslovakia, having begun his work around 1957.

#9219

Ernst Chladni

1756 - 1827 (71 years)

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was a German physicist and musician. His most important work, for which he is sometimes labeled as the father of acoustics, included research on vibrating plates and the calculation of the speed of sound for different gases. He also undertook pioneering work in the study of meteorites and is regarded by some as the father of meteoritics.

#9220

Kunizo Yoneyama

1877 - 1968 (91 years)

was a Japanese mathematician at Kyoto University working in topology. In 1917, he published the construction of the Lakes of Wada, which he named after his teacher Takeo Wada, to whom he credited the discovery.

#9221

Takeo Wada

1882 - 1944 (62 years)

Takeo Wada was a Japanese mathematician at Kyoto University working in analysis and topology. He suggested the Lakes of Wada to Kunizo Yoneyama, who wrote about them and named them after Wada. Publications

#9222

Konstantin Adolfovic Semendyayev

1908 - 1988 (80 years)

Konstantin Adolfovic Semendyayev or Semendyaev ; born 9 December 1908 in Simferopol, died 15 November 1988 Work and life Semendyayev studied at the Lomonosov University with the degree in 1929 and was then at various higher schools. From 1931 to 1936 he was in the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at Lomonosov University. He habilitated in 1940 . From 1936 he headed the Department of Mathematical Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was evacuated to Kazan with the institute during World War II. After World War II, he headed a department for numerical calculations at the Steklov I...

#9223

Al-Isfizari

Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar al-Isfazārī was an Islamic mathematician, astronomer and engineer from Khurasan. According to the historian and geographer Ibn al-Athir and the polymath Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, he worked in the Seljuq observatory of Isfahan. The Persian writer Nezami Aruzi met him in Balkh in in 1112 or 1113.

#9224

John Craig

1663 - 1731 (68 years)

John Craig was a Scottish mathematician and theologian. Biography Born in Dumfries and educated at the University of Edinburgh, Craig moved to England and became a vicar in the Church of England. A friend of Isaac Newton, he wrote several minor works about the new calculus.

#9225

A. Harry Wheeler

1873 - 1950 (77 years)

Albert Harry Wheeler was an American mathematician, inventor, and mathematics teacher, known for physical construction of polyhedral models and teaching this art to students. Education and career A. Harry Wheeler received in 1894 his Bachelor of Science degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He taught high school in Worcester, Massachusetts from 1894 to 1896 and then was a graduate student in mathematics from 1896 to 1899 at Clark University, but left without a degree. He taught high school mathematics in Worcester from 1899 to 1920. His textbooks are First Course in Algebra and Examp...

#9226

Sergei Chetverikov

Sergei Chetverikov

1880 - 1959 (79 years)

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov was a Russian biologist and one of the early contributors to the development of the field of genetics. His research showed how early genetic theories applied to natural populations, and has therefore contributed towards the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory.

#9227

Daniel Schwenter

Daniel Schwenter

1585 - 1636 (51 years)

Daniel Schwenter was a German Orientalist, mathematician, inventor, poet, and librarian. Biography Schwenter was born in Nuremberg. He was professor of oriental languages and mathematics at the University of Altdorf. This is achieved by a preface written by Schwenter in the book Kurtzer, gründtlicher, warhaffter, gebesserter und vermehrter Underricht, Zuberaitung und Gebrauch deß Circkels, Schregmeß und Linial from George Galgemair and by an old chronicle of the University of Altdorf.

#9228

István Fenyő

1917 - 1987 (70 years)

István Fenyő was a Hungarian mathematician, whose first name was also known as "Étienne, Stefan, Stephan or Stephen". He was best known for his publications of applied mathematics. He made significant contributions to analysis, algebra, geometry, integral equations and many other fields that pertain to his interests.

#9229

Menyhért Palágyi

Menyhért Palágyi

1859 - 1924 (65 years)

Menyhért Palágyi, in German Melchior or Meinhert Palagyi was a Hungarian philosopher, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent . He was the elder brother of the Hungarian poet Ludwig Palágyi.

#9230

Émile Jouguet

1871 - 1943 (72 years)

Jacques Charles Émile Jouguet was a French engineer and scientist, whose name is attached to the Chapman–Jouguet condition. He was the son of Félix Jouguet , mining engineer and mayor of Bessèges.

#9231

Anne Cobbe

1920 - 1971 (51 years)

Anne Philippa Cobbe was a mathematician at the University of Oxford. She was an inspirational and supportive pure mathematics tutor at Somerville College which, during her time there, was still a women's college.

#9232

Ibn al-Yasamin

1100 - 1204 (104 years)

Abu Muhammad 'Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Hajjaj ibn al-Yasmin al-Adrini al-Fessi more commonly known as ibn al-Yasmin, was a Berber mathematician, born in Morocco and he received his education in Fez and Sevilla. Little is known of his personal life except that he was born into a Berber family. Since some historians have given him the surname al-Ishbili, he may have been born or grown up in Seville. Besides mathematics, he also became famous in literature, law, and particularly in Andalusian poetry.

#9233

Tadeáš Hájek

1525 - 1600 (75 years)

Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku , also known as Tadeáš Hájek of Hájek, Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hayek or Thaddeus Nemicus, was a Czech naturalist, personal physician of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II and an astronomer in the Kingdom of Bohemia.

#9234

Heinrich Emil Timerding

Heinrich Emil Timerding

1873 - 1945 (72 years)

Heinrich Carl Franz Emil Timerding was a German mathematician, professor at the Braunschweig University of Technology, mainly known for his contributions to probability theory. He was awarded the Brunswick and the Prussian War Merit Cross, the Ritterkreuz of the Order of Henry the Lion, and in 1938 the Nazi Civil Service Faithful Service Medal.

#9235

Theodore Strong

Theodore Strong

1790 - 1869 (79 years)

Theodore Strong was an American mathematician. Early life Strong was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts on July 26, 1790. He was the second son of Rev. Joseph Strong and Sophia Strong. Through his paternal grandfather, also known as Rev. Joseph Strong, he was a direct descendant of Joseph Strong, who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1630, and through his maternal grandfather, Rev. John Woodbridge of South Hadley, he was a direct descendant of Governor Thomas Dudley, and Rev. John Woodbridge, who came to Massachusetts in 1634.

#9236

Annie Dale Biddle Andrews

Annie Dale Biddle Andrews

1885 - 1940 (55 years)

Annie Dale Biddle Andrews was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and career She was born in Hanford, California, the youngest daughter of Samuel Edward Biddle and Achsah Annie Biddle .

#9237

Ágoston Scholtz

1844 - 1916 (72 years)

Ágoston Scholtz was a Hungarian mathematician, one of the founders of the Hungarian Mathematics and Physics Association. Life and work Scholtz attended the schools of Igló , Rosenau and Löcse . After his secondary education he studied in the universities of Vienna and Berlin, graduating in 1865. After teaching several years at secondary level, he obtained the university habilitation in 1879 and began his teaching in the Hungarian Royal University of Budapest .

#9238

Lipót Klug

1854 - 1945 (91 years)

Lipót, or Leopold , Klug was a Jewish-Hungarian mathematician, professor in the Franz Joseph University of Kolozsvár. Life and work Klug attended the gymnasium of his hometown and entered in the university of Budapest in 1872 where he graduated as docent in 1874. Between 1874 and 1893 he taught mathematics in the high school of Pozsony . From 1893 to 1897 he was professor in a secondary school in Budapest and he obtained his habilitation in the university of Budapest. In 1897 he was appointed professor of geometry in the University of Kolozsvár. He retired in 1917 and moved back to Budapest.

#9239

Ugo Broggi

1880 - 1965 (85 years)

Ugo Napoleone Giuseppe Broggi was an Italian actuary, mathematician, philosopher, statistician, and mathematical economist. Education and career Broggi studied in Italy and Germany, graduating in actuarial science in 1902 and in economic science in 1904.

#9240

Albert Taylor Bledsoe

Albert Taylor Bledsoe

1809 - 1877 (68 years)

Albert Taylor Bledsoe was an American Episcopal priest, attorney, professor of mathematics, and officer in the Confederate army and was best known as a staunch defender of slavery and, after the South lost the American Civil War, an architect of the Lost Cause. He was the author of Liberty and Slavery , "the most extensive philosophical treatment of slavery ever produced by a Southern academic", which defended slavery laws as ensuring proper societal order.

#9241

Ivan Meštrović

1883 - 1962 (79 years)

Ivan Meštrović was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's Stone Workshop in Split and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he was formed under the influence of the Secession. He traveled throughout Europe and studied the works of ancient and Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, and French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol. He was the initiator of the national-romantic group Medulić . During the First World War, he lived in emigration.

#9242

Ole Peder Arvesen

Ole Peder Arvesen

1895 - 1991 (96 years)

Ole Peder Arvesen was a Norwegian engineer and mathematician. Arvesen was born in Fredrikstad. He was appointed professor of descriptive geometry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1938 to 1965. He served as secretary general of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters from 1950 to 1966, having been a fellow since 1934, and was also a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. Among his publications are Under Duskens billedbok from 1928, the textbook Innføring i nomografi from 1932, Mennesker og matematikere from 1940, Glimt av den store karikatur from 1941, and the memoir book Men bare om løst og fast from 1976.

#9243

Nelli Neumann

1886 - 1942 (56 years)

Nelli Neumann was a German mathematician who worked in synthetic geometry. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics at a German university. Biography Nelli Neumann was born in Breslau, Prussia, the only child of Jewish parents Max and Sophie Neumann. Her father was a judicial officer, while her mother died when Nelli was two years old. After ten years in the private Höhere Töchterschule in Breslau, Neumann attended grammar courses and graduated from the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium boys' school in 1905. Her father promoted her mathematical talent by arranging private mathematics lessons given by Richard Courant.

#9244

August Gutzmer

1860 - 1924 (64 years)

Karl Friedrich August Gutzmer was a German mathematician who was chairman of some German commissions about improvement of the teaching of mathematics. Life and work Gutzmer was born near Schwerin but his family moved to Berlin when he was eight years old. In Berlin he studied in Friedrichswerdersche Gymnasium till 1881. From 1881 to 1884 he attended mathematics lectures at Berlin University despite not being registered as a student. He graduated in 1887 in Berlin.

#9245

Yitzchak Ratner

1857 - Present (169 years)

Yitzchak ben Nechemia Ratner was a nineteenth-century Jewish maskilic mathematician. He wrote mathematical and astronomical articles for various journals, and was the author of Mishpat Emet , a criticism of Lichtenfeld's pamphlets against Slonimski's works. In 1888 he edited a second edition of Slonimski's Yesodei Chokmat ha-Shi'ur on the principles of algebra.

#9246

Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen

1778 - 1852 (74 years)

Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen was a cartographer, explorer, and naval officer of the Russian Empire, who ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. He participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, and subsequently became a leader of another circumnavigation expedition that discovered the continent of Antarctica. Like Otto von Kotzebue and Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Bellingshausen belonged to the cohort of prominent Baltic German navigators who helped Russia launch its naval expeditions.

#9247

Ruth Goulding Wood

1875 - 1939 (64 years)

Ruth Goulding Wood was a professor of mathematics who researched non-Euclidean geometry at Smith College. Wood was also a member of the American Mathematical Society. Life and career Wood was born on January 29, 1875, in the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. After attending primary and secondary school in Pawtucket, Wood pursued and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1898. Wood then decided to further her education by attending Yale University, graduating with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1901. Her thesis, Non-Euclidean displacements and symmetry transformations, concerned t...

#9248

Thomas Cavendish

Thomas Cavendish

1560 - 1592 (32 years)

Sir Thomas Cavendish was an English explorer and a privateer known as "The Navigator" because he was the first who deliberately tried to emulate Sir Francis Drake and raid the Spanish towns and ships in the Pacific and return by circumnavigating the globe. Magellan's, Loaisa's, Drake's, and Loyola's expeditions had preceded Cavendish in circumnavigating the globe. His first trip and successful circumnavigation made him rich from captured Spanish gold, silk and treasure from the Pacific and the Philippines. His richest prize was the captured 600-ton sailing ship the Manila Galleon Santa Ana . He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I of England after his return.

#9249

James Edward Oliver

1829 - 1895 (66 years)

James Edward Oliver was an American mathematician known for his role in establishing the mathematics department at Cornell University. Born in Portland, Maine, Oliver graduated from Harvard College in 1849 and was immediately appointed assistant in the office of the American Nautical Almanac in Cambridge. Two decades would elapse before, in 1871, he became assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell, and two years later was appointed as full professor.

#9250

Plato Tiburtinus

1110 - 1145 (35 years)

Plato Tiburtinus was a 12th-century Italian mathematician, astronomer and translator who lived in Barcelona from 1116 to 1138. He is best known for translating Hebrew and Arabic documents into Latin, and was apparently the first to translate information on the astrolabe from Arabic.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions