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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9301
Stefan Cohn-Vossen
1902 - 1936 (34 years)
Stefan Cohn-Vossen was a mathematician, who was responsible for Cohn-Vossen's inequality and the Cohn-Vossen transformation is also named for him. He proved the first version of the splitting theorem.
Go to Profile#9302
Vasily Zubov
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Zubov was a Russian and Soviet philosopher who wrote on architecture, art, and the history of science based on studies of texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He received a posthumous George Sarton medal from the history of science society in 1963.
Go to Profile#9303
José Sebastião e Silva
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
José Sebastião e Silva was a Portuguese mathematician. Silva graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1937, and in 1942 he received a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura allowing him to travel to Rome, where he studied mathematics with several members of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. After writing a thesis on geometric transformations that was rejected by Federigo Enriques, he wrote a second thesis, on functional analysis, and earned his doctorate in 1949 from the University of Lisbon. He became a professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia from 1951 to 1961, and then ...
Go to Profile#9304
Mayme Logsdon
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Mayme Farmer Irwin Logsdon was an American mathematician known for her research in algebraic geometry and mathematics education. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the University of Chicago mathematics department.
Go to Profile#9305
Fernando de Helguero
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Fernando de Helguero was an Italian mathematician, statistician and pioneer of biostatistics. Fernando de Helguero was born near Florence. He studied mathematics at the University of Rome. After receiving his licentiate degree in 1903, he taught mathematics while he studied natural sciences, biology, statistics, and biometry. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Rome in April 1908. However, he died later the same year in the 1908 Messina earthquake.
Go to Profile#9306
Giovanni Giambelli
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Giovanni Zeno Giambelli was an Italian mathematician who is best known for Giambelli's formula. External links Giovanni Zeno Giambelli bio
Go to Profile#9307
Teresa Cohen
1892 - 1992 (100 years)
Teresa Cohen was an American mathematician. Early life and education She was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Rebecca Sinsheimer and Benjamin Cohen. She graduated in 1909 from the Friends School of Baltimore whose teachers she credited with her interest in mathematics and teaching. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Goucher College in 1912. Cohen was resident fellow at Goucher from 1912 to 1913. In 1915, she earned a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University where she later earned her PhD in 1918. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Mathematics.
Go to Profile#9308
Helen Popova Alderson
1924 - 1972 (48 years)
Helen Popova Alderson was a Soviet and British mathematician and mathematics translator known for her research on quasigroups and on higher reciprocity laws. Life Alderson was born on 14 May 1924 in Baku, then part of the Soviet Union, to a family of two academics from Moscow. Her father, a neurophysiologist, had been a student of Ivan Pavlov. She began studying mathematics at Moscow University in 1937, when she was only 13. She had to break off her studies because of World War II, moving to Paris as a refugee with her family.
Go to Profile#9309
Edgar Krahn
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Edgar Krahn was an Estonian mathematician. Krahn was born in Sootaga , Governorate of Livonia, as a member of the Baltic German minority. He died in Rockville, Maryland, United States. Krahn studied at the University of Tartu and the University of Göttingen. He graduated at Tartu in 1918, received his doctoral degree at Göttingen in 1926, with Richard Courant as his advisor, and his habilitation took place at Tartu in 1928. He is co-author of the Rayleigh–Faber–Krahn inequality.
Go to Profile#9310
Bibhutibhushan Datta
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Bibhutibhushan Datta was a historian of Indian mathematics. Datta came from a poor Bengali family. He was a student of Ganesh Prasad, studied at University of Calcutta and secured the master's degree in mathematics in 1914 and doctorate degree in 1920 in applied mathematics. He taught at Calcutta University where he was lecturer at University Science College, and from 1924 to 1929 he was Rhashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics. During the 1920s and 1930s he created a reputation as an authority on the history of Indian mathematics. He was also deeply interested in Indian philosophy and religion.
Go to Profile#9311
David K. Rubins
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
David Kresz Rubins was an American sculptor and professor. He taught at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and his various works adorn the Indiana State House, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#9312
Alfreds Meders
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders was a German-Latvian mathematician, and a student of Leopold Kronecker. He was a professor at the Riga Technical University until his mandatory repatriation to Germany in 1939.
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Danilo Blanuša
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Danilo Blanuša was a Croatian Serb mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb. Biography Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary , into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957–58 school year.
Go to Profile#9314
Arthur Preston Mellish
1905 - 1930 (25 years)
Arthur Preston Mellish was a Canadian mathematician, known for his generalization of Barbier's theorem. Arthur Mellish received in 1928 an M.A. in mathematics from the University of British Columbia with thesis An illustrative example of the ellipsoid pendulum. He died at age 24 and had no mathematical publications during his lifetime. After his death, his colleagues at Brown University examined his notes on mathematics. Jacob Tamarkin prepared a paper based upon the notes and published it in the Annals of Mathematics in 1931.
Go to Profile#9315
Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was an Indian mathematician who introduced the four-vertex theorem and Mukhopadhyaya's theorem in plane geometry. Biography Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was born at Haripal, Hooghly district, in Bengal Presidency, British India. He graduated from Hooghly College, received his M.A. degree from Presidency College in Calcutta, and his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1910. He also took classes from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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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.
Go to Profile#9321
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.
Go to Profile#9322
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
Go to Profile#9323
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.
Go to Profile#9325
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.
Go to Profile#9326
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.
Go to Profile#9327
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.
Go to Profile#9328
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.
Go to Profile#9329
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.
Go to Profile#9331
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.
Go to Profile#9332
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.
Go to Profile#9333
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,...
Go to Profile#9336
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.
Go to Profile#9340
Charles Pisot
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Charles Pisot was a French mathematician. He is chiefly recognized as one of the primary investigators of the numerical set associated with his name, the Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers. He followed the classical path of great French mathematicians by studying at the École Normale Supérieure on Ulm street, where he was received first at the agrégation in 1932. He then began his academic career at the Bordeaux University before being offered a chair at the Science Faculty of Paris and at the École Polytechnique. He was a member of Bourbaki.
Go to Profile#9341
Louis Bachelier
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his doctoral thesis The Theory of Speculation .
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Henry Louis Smith
1859 - 1951 (92 years)
Henry Louis Smith was the ninth president of Davidson College and the first president to not be an ordained Presbyterian minister. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Smith graduated from Davidson in 1881 but returned as a professor of physics before becoming president in 1901. It was during his time as a professor that Smith and a group of students created one of the first x-ray images in America.
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Charles Thompson Sullivan
1884 - 1948 (64 years)
Charles Thompson Sullivan, was a Canadian mathematician. Education and career Sullivan graduated with B.A. in 1906 from Dalhousie University and was Science Master at Alberta College, Edmonton from 1906 to 1908. He enrolled as a graduate student in 1908 at McGill University and graduated there with M.Sc. in 1909. In 1910 he became a lecturer in mathematics at McGill. At the University of Chicago he attended summer quarters in 1909 and in 1910 and 4 consecutive quarters in 1911-1912, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1912. His thesis advisor was Ernest Julius Wilczynski.
Go to Profile#9344
Fibonacci
1170 - Present (856 years)
Fibonacci , also known as Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Bigollo Pisano , was an Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be "the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages".
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J. C. P. Miller
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Jeffrey Charles Percy Miller was an English mathematician and computing pioneer. He worked in number theory and on geometry, particularly polyhedra, where Miller's monster refers to the great dirhombicosidodecahedron.
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William James Sidis
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 , in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.
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Alexander Gelfond
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Alexander Osipovich Gelfond was a Soviet mathematician. Gelfond's theorem, also known as the Gelfond-Schneider theorem is named after him. Biography Alexander Gelfond was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the son of a professional physician and amateur philosopher Osip Gelfond. He entered Moscow State University in 1924, started his postgraduate studies there in 1927, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1930. His advisors were Aleksandr Khinchin and Vyacheslav Stepanov.
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Joseph Pérès
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Joseph Pérès was a French mathematician. Early life and education Pérès was born in Clermont-Ferrand on 31 October 1890. Former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure, he worked in Rome with Vito Volterra and defended his doctoral thesis in 1915.
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R. Catesby Taliaferro
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Robert Catesby Taliaferro was an American mathematician, science historian, classical philologist, philosopher, and translator of ancient Greek and Latin works into English. An Episcopalian from an old Virginia family, he taught in the mathematics department of the University of Notre Dame. He is cited as R. Catesby Taliaferro or R. C. Taliaferro.
Go to Profile#9350
Amedeo Agostini
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Amedeo Agostini was an Italian mathematician born in Capugnano di Porretta Terme. Biography In 1919 he graduated at the University of Bologna, where he later worked on a freelance basis as teaching assistant and professor of History of Mathematics. Since 1925 he taught analytical geometry at the Naval Academy in Livorno. Agostini also held - on assignment - several lectures at the University of Pisa. He dealt mainly with the history of mathematics following the principles of his own teacher, Ettore Bortolotti, emphasizing the assessment of the facts more than their synthesis.
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