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.
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.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9201
Ernst Jacobsthal
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Ernst Erich Jacobsthal was a German mathematician, and brother to the archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal. In 1906, he earned his PhD at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Georg Frobenius, Hermann Schwarz and Issai Schur; his dissertation, Anwendung einer Formel aus der Theorie der quadratischen Reste , provided a proof that prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 are the sum of two square numbers. In 1934, he was fired from his professorship at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, because of his Jewish origins. In 1939 he fled to Norway and became after the war a professor at the Norwegian ...
Go to Profile#9202
Evgenii Nikishin
1945 - 1986 (41 years)
Evgenii Mikhailovich Nikishin was a Russian mathematician, who specialized in harmonic analysis. Biography Nikishin, at age of 24, earned his candidate doctorate at Moscow State University, becoming the youngest Candidate Doctorate in a history of MSU and in 1971 his habilitation at the Steklov Institute under Pyotr Ulyanov . In 1977 he became a professor at Moscow State University, where he remained until his death after a long battle with cancer.
Go to Profile#9203
Karel deLeeuw
1930 - 1978 (48 years)
Karel deLeeuw, or de Leeuw , was a mathematics professor at Stanford University, specializing in harmonic analysis and functional analysis. Life and career Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1950. He stayed at Chicago to earn an M.S. degree in mathematics in 1951, then went to Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1954. His thesis, titled "The relative cohomology structure of formations", was written under the direction of Emil Artin.
Go to Profile#9204
Michael Sadowsky
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Michael A. Sadowsky was a researcher in solid mechanics, particularly the mathematical theory of elasticity and materials science. Born in the Russian Empire, he earned his doctorate in 1927 under the applied mathematician Georg Hamel at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled Spatially periodic solutions in the theory of elasticity . He made contributions in the use of potential functions in elasticity and force transfer mechanisms in composites. Many of his early papers were written in German.
Go to Profile#9205
Henry Jack
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Henry Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician at University College Dundee. The Jack polynomials are named after him. His research dealt with the development of analytic methods to evaluate certain integrals over matrix spaces. His most famous paper relates his integrals to classes of symmetric polynomials important in the theory of the representation of the symmetric group. He discovered a new, natural basis for the symmetric polynomials.
Go to Profile#9206
Robert Remak
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Robert Erich Remak was a German mathematician. He is chiefly remembered for his work in group theory . His other interests included algebraic number theory, mathematical economics and geometry of numbers. Robert Remak was the son of the neurologist Ernst Julius Remak and the grandson of the embryologist Robert Remak. He was murdered in the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#9207
Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
Go to Profile#9208
Anil Kumar Gain
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Anil Kumar Gain FRSS FCPS was an Indian mathematician and statistician best known for his works on the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient in the field of applied statistics, with his colleague Ronald Fisher. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Henry Ellis Daniels, who was the then President of the Royal Statistical Society. He was honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#9209
Marion Cameron Gray
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Marion Gray was a Scottish mathematician who discovered a graph with 54 vertices and 81 edges while working at American Telephone & Telegraph. The graph is commonly known as the Gray graph. Early life and education Marion Gray was born in Ayr, Scotland on 26 March 1902 to Marion and James Gray. She attended Ayr Grammar School and Ayr Academy . In 1919 she entered the University of Edinburgh where she graduated in 1922 with a first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. She continued on at the University for a further two years as a post doctoral student in mathematics where she was supervised by E.T.
Go to Profile#9210
Jerome Cornfield
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Jerome Cornfield was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role in the early development of input-output analysis and linear programming. Cornfield played a crucial role in establishing the causal link between smoking and incidence of lung cancer. He introduced the Rare disease assumption and the "Cornfield condition" that allows one to assess whether an unmeasured confounder can explain away the observed relative risk due to ...
Go to Profile#9211
Bernard Vauquois
1929 - 1985 (56 years)
Bernard Vauquois was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions.
Go to Profile#9212
Józef Schreier
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Józef Schreier was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, group theory and combinatorics. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics and a victim of the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#9213
Herman Müntz
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Herman Müntz was a German mathematician, now remembered for the Müntz approximation theorem. Biography He was born in Łódź in a secular Jewish family, who had adopted a German spelling of the surname Minc. He was educated there and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, graduating in 1906. He wrote a doctoral dissertation there on partial differential equations and the Plateau problem, in 1910, supervised by H. A. Schwarz.
Go to Profile#9214
David Francis Barrow
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
David Francis Barrow was an American mathematician who introduced Barrow's inequality in 1937. Barrow's father, David Crenshaw Barrow Jr., was also a mathematician, and served as chancellor of the University of Georgia from 1906 to 1925. His son, David F. Barrow, did his undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia and then studied at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1913. After a year abroad, he taught for two years at the University of Texas, and then at the Sheffield Scientific School. After a brief stint in the U.S. armed services, he joined the faculty of his father's university in 1920.
Go to Profile#9215
István Fáry
1922 - 1984 (62 years)
István Fáry was a Hungarian-born mathematician known for his work in geometry and algebraic topology. He proved Fáry's theorem that every planar graph has a straight-line embedding in 1948, and the Fáry–Milnor theorem lower-bounding the curvature of a nontrivial knot in 1949.
Go to Profile#9216
Alfred Brousseau
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Brother Alfred Brousseau, F.S.C. , was an educator, photographer and mathematician and was known mostly as a founder of the Fibonacci Association and as an educator. Biography Brother Alfred Brousseau was born in North Beach, San Francisco, as one of six children. On August 14, 1920, Brousseau entered the juniorate of the De La Salle Christian Brothers , a religious institute of teachers in the Roman Catholic Church. He was accepted into the Christian Brothers novitiate on 31 July 1923 and advanced to the scholasticate on the campus of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, in 1924.
Go to Profile#9217
Guido Hoheisel
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Guido Karl Heinrich Hoheisel was a German mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Cologne. Academic life He did his PhD in 1920 from the University of Berlin under the supervision of Erhard Schmidt. During World War II Hoheisel was required to teach classes simultaneously at three universities, in Cologne, Bonn, and Münster. His doctoral students include Arnold Schönhage.
Go to Profile#9218
Frithiof Nevanlinna
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Frithiof Edvard Henrik Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician and professor who worked on classical and complex analysis. He was born in Joensuu, and was the older brother of Rolf Nevanlinna. Publications
Go to Profile#9219
Helene Stähelin
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Helene Stähelin was a Swiss mathematician, teacher, and peace activist. Between 1948 and 1967, she was president of the Swiss section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and its representative in the Swiss Peace Council.
Go to Profile#9220
William Anthony Granville
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
William Anthony Granville was an American mathematician, and served as president of Gettysburg College from 1910 until 1923. Overview Granville began his teaching career at Bethany College, where he was an instructor of mathematics and served as the college treasurer. In 1893 he was awarded a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University. For fifteen years, beginning in 1895, he was professor of mathematics at Yale, and was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from that institution in 1897 under James Pierpont. His dissertation was titled, "Referat on the Origin and Development of the Addition-Theorem in Elliptic Functions".
Go to Profile#9221
Lorado Taft
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Lorado Zadok Taft was an American sculptor, writer and educator. Part of the American Renaissance movement, his monumental pieces include, Fountain of Time, Spirit of the Great Lakes, and The Eternal Indian. His 1903 book, The History of American Sculpture, was the first survey of the subject and stood for decades as the standard reference. He has been credited with helping to advance the status of women as sculptors.
Go to Profile#9222
Lillian Rosanoff Lieber
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Lillian Rosanoff Lieber was a Russian-American mathematician and popular author. She often teamed up with her illustrator husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, to produce works. Life and career Early life and education Lieber was one of four children of Abraham H. and Clara Rosanoff. Her brothers were Denver publisher Joseph Rosenberg, psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff, and chemist Martin André Rosanoff. Aaron and Martin changed their names to sound more Russian, less Jewish. Lieber moved to the US with her family in 1891. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1908, her M.A. from Columbia University in 1911, and her Ph.D.
Go to Profile#9223
Ida Rhodes
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ida Rhodes was an American mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States. Childhood Hadassah Itzkowitz was born in a Jewish village Kamianets-Podilskyi between Nemyriv and Tulchyn in Ukraine on May 15, 1900.
Go to Profile#9224
Alessandro Padoa
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Alessandro Padoa was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano. He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory, a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms.
Go to Profile#9225
Tadao Tannaka
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Tadao Tannaka was a Japanese mathematician who worked in algebraic number theory. Biography Tannaka was born in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture on December 27, 1908. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Tohoku Imperial University in 1932, he was appointed a lecturer in the university in 1934 and received a Doctor of Science degree from the university in 1941. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1942 and full professor in 1945. Tannaka was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study from September 1955 to April 1957. Tannaka retired from Tohoku University in 1972, after ...
Go to Profile#9226
Edna Kramer
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Edna Ernestine Kramer Lassar , born Edna Ernestine Kramer, was an American mathematician and author of mathematics books. Kramer was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics from Hunter College in 1922. While teaching at local high schools, she earned her M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1930 in mathematics from Columbia University with Edward Kasner as her advisor.
Go to Profile#9227
Jan Marcin Szancer
1902 - 1973 (71 years)
Jan Marcin Szancer was a Polish illustrator, scenographer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Szancer was born into a Jewish family in Kraków. He studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, and later in France and Italy.
Go to Profile#9228
Robert König
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Robert Johann Maria König was an Austrian mathematician. He studied from 1903 to 1907 at the University of Vienna and at the University of Göttingen, where he received his PhD under David Hilbert with thesis Oszillationseigenschaften der Eigenfunktionen der Integralgleichung mit definitem Kern und das Jacobische Kriterium der Variationsrechnung. In 1911 he earned his Habilitation qualification at the University of Leipzig with thesis Konforme Abbildung der Oberfläche einer räumlichen Ecke.
Go to Profile#9229
Ludwig Berwald
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
Ludwig Berwald was a German mathematician best known for his contributions to differential geometry, especially Finsler geometry. He taught in Munich and Prague for 32 years, publishing 54 papers, before being deported by the SS to the Łódź Ghetto, where he and his wife Hedwig died within a year.
Go to Profile#9230
Octav Onicescu
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Octav Onicescu was a Romanian mathematician and a member of the Romanian Academy. Together with his student, Gheorghe Mihoc, he is considered to be the founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics.
Go to Profile#9231
Gerhard Haenzel
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
Gerhard Karl Theodor Haenzel was a German mathematician. Education and career Haenzel, whose father was a teacher and school board member, completed his Abitur after studying from 1907 to 1915 at the Peter Gröning-Gymnasium in Stargard. Shortly after his Abitur, he was called up in July 1915 for active military service. His military service lasted until 30 September 1920 and he attained the rank of lieutenant. He was on the Eastern and Western fronts and in the German fight against the Polish uprising. He suffered a serious wound and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. From 1920 to ...
Go to Profile#9232
Giuseppe Colombo
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo was an Italian scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy. Mercury Colombo studied the planet Mercury, and it was his calculations which showed how to get a spacecraft into a solar orbit which would encounter Mercury multiple times, using a gravity assist maneuver with Venus. Due to this idea, NASA was able to have the Mariner 10 accomplish three fly-bys of Mercury instead of one. Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist. Since then, the technique has become common.
Go to Profile#9233
Wilhelm Grunwald
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Wilhelm Grunwald was a German mathematician who introduced the Grunwald–Wang theorem, though his original statement and proof of this contained a small error that was corrected by Shianghao Wang. He later left mathematics to become a science librarian, and was director of the Göttingen university library .
Go to Profile#9234
Louis Lazarus Silverman
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Louis Lazarus Silverman was an American mathematician, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an academic institution in the state of Missouri. Born in a village in Lithuania, Silverman moved with his parents to the United States when he was eight years old. He received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and then his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1910. From 1910 to 1918 he was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Cornell University, where he worked with Wallie Abraham Hurwitz on divergent series and summability methods. From 19...
Go to Profile#9235
Ronald M. Foster
1896 - 1998 (102 years)
Ronald Martin Foster , was an American mathematician at Bell Labs whose work was of significance regarding electronic filters for use on telephone lines. He published an important paper, A Reactance Theorem, which quickly inspired Wilhelm Cauer to begin his program of network synthesis filters which put the design of filters on a firm mathematical footing. He is also known for the Foster census of cubic, symmetric graphs and the 90-vertex cubic symmetric Foster graph.
Go to Profile#9236
Paul Riebesell
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Paul Louis Riebesell was a German mathematician, statistician, actuary, and president of Hamburger Feuerkasse. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he was an invited speaker in 1932 in Zürich and in 1936 in Oslo.
Go to Profile#9237
Luigi Fantappiè
1901 - 1956 (55 years)
Luigi Fantappiè was an Italian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and for creating the theory of analytic functionals: he was a student and follower of Vito Volterra. Later in life, he proposed scientific theories of sweeping scope.
Go to Profile#9238
Pasquale Joseph Federico
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Pasquale Joseph Federico was a lifelong mathematician and longtime high-ranking official of the United States Patent Office. Biography He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania. About 1910 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he gained a bachelor's degree in physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1923. He then received his LL.B or law degree from Washington College of Law in 1932.
Go to Profile#9239
Federico Cafiero
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Federico Cafiero was an Italian mathematician known for his contributions in real analysis, measure and integration theory, and in the theory of ordinary differential equations. In particular, generalizing the Vitali convergence theorem, the Fichera convergence theorem and previous results of Vladimir Mikhailovich Dubrovskii, he proved a necessary and sufficient condition for the passage to the limit under the sign of integral: this result is, in some sense, definitive. In the field of ordinary differential equations, he studied existence and uniqueness problems under very general hypotheses ...
Go to Profile#9240
Guglielmo Tagliacarne
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Tagliacarne Guglielmo was an Italian statistician Biography Guglielmo Tagliacarne was born in Orta San Giulio, Novara, on May 31, 1893. He studied at the Bocconi University, Milan, obtaining a master's degree in Economics. He carried on his statistical studies analyzing supply chains, buying and consumption behaviors, demographic and occupational trends and the provincial and regional calculation of National Income.
Go to Profile#9241
Clyde E. Love
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Clyde Elton Love was an American contract bridge author and mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a native of Bancroft, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905.
Go to Profile#9242
Paul Neményi
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...
Go to Profile#9243
Erika Pannwitz
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S. After the war, she became editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH.
Go to Profile#9244
Giacomo Albanese
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Giacomo Albanese was an Italian mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He took a permanent position in the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1936. Biography Albanese attended the school in Palermo, Sicily. He graduated from there in 1909. Then he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as a student of mathematics, and received his doctorate in 1913. He was awarded the Ulisse Dini prize for his doctoral essay on the topic Continuous systems of curves on an algebraic surface, written under the direction of Eugenio Bertini.
Go to Profile#9245
William Henry Roever
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
William Henry Roever was an American applied mathematician. Roever received in 1897 a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received an A.M. in 1904 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1906 from Harvard University with advisor Maxime Bôcher and thesis Brilliant points. Roever taught astronomy from 1899 to 1901 at Washington University in St. Louis and mathematics from 1905 to 1908 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then returned to Washington University in St. Louis to teach mathematics and later became the chair of the department of mathe...
Go to Profile#9246
George H. Bryan
1864 - 1928 (64 years)
George Hartley Bryan FRS was an English applied mathematician who was an authority on thermodynamics and aeronautics. He was born in Cambridge, and was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, obtaining his BA in 1886 , MA in 1890, and DSc in 1896. He was a professor at University College of North Wales, and is generally credited with developing the modern mathematical treatment of the motion of airplanes in flight as rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom.
Go to Profile#9247
Gaspare Mignosi
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Gaspare Mignósi was an Italian mathematician. Mignosi became in 1930 a professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Cagliari and in 1932 a professor at the University of Palermo. He continued the studies of the school of algebraic geometry and number theory, which flourished in Sicily around 1920 with Gaetano Scorza and Michele Cipolla. Particularly noteworthy is the contribution made by Mignosi to the so-called apiristic solution of binomial congruences.
Go to Profile#9248
Nikolai Luzin
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Nikolai Nikolayevich Luzin was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.
Go to Profile#9249
Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin
1866 - 1962 (96 years)
Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin was a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for proving the prime number theorem. The King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.
Go to Profile#9250
Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
Go to Profile