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,
#9351
Marcel Grossmann
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Marcel Grossmann was a Swiss mathematician and a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein. Grossmann was a member of an old Swiss family from Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.
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Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro was an Italian mathematician. He is most famous as the discoverer of tensor calculus. With his former student Tullio Levi-Civita, he wrote his most famous single publication, a pioneering work on the calculus of tensors, signing it as Gregorio Ricci. This appears to be the only time that Ricci-Curbastro used the shortened form of his name in a publication, and continues to cause confusion.
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Ferdinand von Lindemann
1852 - 1939 (87 years)
Carl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann was a German mathematician, noted for his proof, published in 1882, that is a transcendental number, meaning it is not a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients.
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Tullio Levi-Civita
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Tullio Levi-Civita, was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics , analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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Simon Stevin
1548 - 1620 (72 years)
Simon Stevin , sometimes called Stevinus, was a Flemish mathematician, scientist and music theorist. He made various contributions in many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it one of the few European languages in which the word for mathematics, wiskunde , was not a loanword from Greek but a calque via Latin. He also replaced the word chemie, the Dutch for chemistry, by scheikunde , made in analogy with wiskunde.
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Eduard Heine
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Heinrich Eduard Heine was a German mathematician. Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics and Legendre functions . He also investigated basic hypergeometric series. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula.
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Dmitri Egorov
1869 - 1931 (62 years)
Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician known for contributions to the areas of differential geometry and mathematical analysis. He was President of the Moscow Mathematical Society .
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Ernst Sigismund Fischer
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Ernst Sigismund Fischer was a mathematician born in Vienna, Austria. He worked alongside both Mertens and Minkowski at the Universities of Vienna and Zurich, respectively. He later became professor at the University of Erlangen, where he worked with Emmy Noether.
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Gösta Mittag-Leffler
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Magnus Gustaf "Gösta" Mittag-Leffler was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions, which today is called complex analysis. He founded the most important mathematical periodical Acta Mathematica and was its editor for 40 years. He took great trouble and procured Sofia Kovalevskaya a position of full professor of mathematics in Stockholm University. Also Mittag-Leffler was responsible for inducing the Nobel committee to recognize and award Marie Curie as an equal contributor to the discoveries ‘on the radiation phenomena’ along ...
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Thomas Bayes
1702 - 1761 (59 years)
Thomas Bayes was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published posthumously by Richard Price.
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Edmond Halley
1656 - 1742 (86 years)
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford.
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Dmitry Grave
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Grave was a Russiann and Soviet mathematician. Naum Akhiezer, Nikolai Chebotaryov, Mikhail Kravchuk, and Boris Delaunay were among his students. Brief history Dmitry Grave was educated at the University of St Petersburg where he studied under Chebyshev and his pupils Korkin, Zolotarev and Markov. Grave began research while a student, graduating with his doctorate in 1896. He had obtained his master's degree in 1889 and, in that year, began teaching at the University of St Petersburg.
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Hermann Schubert
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Hermann Cäsar Hannibal Schubert was a German mathematician. Schubert was one of the leading developers of enumerative geometry, which considers those parts of algebraic geometry that involve a finite number of solutions. In 1874, Schubert won a prize for solving a question posed by Zeuthen. Schubert calculus was named after him.
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Paul Gordan
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Paul Albert Gordan was a Jewish-German mathematician, a student of Carl Jacobi at the University of Königsberg before obtaining his PhD at the University of Breslau , and a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Thomas Joannes Stieltjes
1856 - 1894 (38 years)
Thomas Joannes Stieltjes was a Dutch mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of moment problems and contributed to the study of continued fractions. The Thomas Stieltjes Institute for Mathematics at Leiden University, dissolved in 2011, was named after him, as is the Riemann–Stieltjes integral.
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Brook Taylor
1685 - 1731 (46 years)
Brook Taylor was an English mathematician best known for creating Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series, which are important for their use in mathematical analysis. Life and work Brook Taylor was born in Edmonton . Taylor was the son of John Taylor, MP of Patrixbourne, Kent and Olivia Tempest, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Tempest, Baronet of Durham.
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Mileva Marić
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
Mileva Marić , sometimes called Mileva Marić-Einstein , was a Serbian physicist and mathematician and the first wife of Albert Einstein from 1903 to 1919. She was the only woman among Einstein's fellow students at Zürich Polytechnic and was the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics. Marić and Einstein were collaborators and lovers and had a daughter Lieserl in 1902, who likely died of scarlet fever at one and a half years old. They later had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.
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Max Noether
1844 - 1921 (77 years)
Max Noether was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions. He has been called "one of the finest mathematicians of the nineteenth century". He was the father of Emmy Noether.
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Colin Maclaurin
1698 - 1746 (48 years)
Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. He is also known for being a child prodigy and holding the record for being the youngest professor. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, is named after him.
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Leopold Löwenheim
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Leopold Löwenheim [ˈle:o:pɔl̩d ˈlø:vɛnhaɪm] was a German mathematician doing work in mathematical logic. The Nazi regime forced him to retire because under the Nuremberg Laws he was considered only three quarters Aryan. In 1943 much of his work was destroyed during a bombing raid on Berlin. Nevertheless, he survived the Second World War, after which he resumed teaching mathematics.
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Ernst Schröder
1841 - 1902 (61 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schröder was a German mathematician mainly known for his work on algebraic logic. He is a major figure in the history of mathematical logic, by virtue of summarizing and extending the work of George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Hugh MacColl, and especially Charles Peirce. He is best known for his monumental Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik , in three volumes, which prepared the way for the emergence of mathematical logic as a separate discipline in the twentieth century by systematizing the various systems of formal logic of the day.
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Kazimierz Żorawski
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Paulin Kazimierz Stefan Żorawski was a Polish mathematician. His work earned him an honored place in mathematics alongside such Polish mathematicians as Wojciech Brudzewski, Jan Brożek , Nicolas Copernicus, Samuel Dickstein, Stefan Banach, Stefan Bergman, Marian Rejewski, Wacław Sierpiński, Stanisław Zaremba and Witold Hurewicz.
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Delfino Codazzi
1824 - 1873 (49 years)
Delfino Codazzi was an Italian mathematician. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, such as the Codazzi–Mainardi equations. Biography He graduated in mathematics at the University of Pavia, where he was a pupil of Antonio Bordoni. For a long period Codazzi taught first at the Ginnasio Liceale of Lodi, then at the liceo of Pavia. Meanwhile, he devoted himself to research in differential geometry.
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Émile Picard
1856 - 1941 (85 years)
Charles Émile Picard was a French mathematician. He was elected the fifteenth member to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1924. Life He was born in Paris on 24 July 1856 and educated there at the Lycée Henri-IV. He then studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure.
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Albert Girard
1595 - 1632 (37 years)
Albert Girard was a French-born mathematician. He studied at the University of Leiden. He "had early thoughts on the fundamental theorem of algebra" and gave the inductive definition for the Fibonacci numbers. He was the first to use the abbreviations 'sin', 'cos' and 'tan' for the trigonometric functions in a treatise. Girard was the first to state, in 1625, that each prime of the form 1 mod 4 is the sum of two squares. It was said that he was quiet-natured and, unlike most mathematicians, did not keep a journal for his personal life.
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Isidor Natanson
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Isidor Pavlovich Natanson was a Swiss-born Soviet mathematician known for contributions to real analysis and constructive function theory, in particular, for his textbooks on these subjects. His son, Garal'd Natanson , was also a known mathematician.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Levi
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Levi was a German mathematician known for his work in abstract algebra, especially torsion-free abelian groups. He also worked in geometry, topology, set theory, and analysis.
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Nicolas Fuss
1755 - 1826 (71 years)
Nicolas Fuss , also known as Nikolai Fuss, was a Swiss mathematician, living most of his life in Imperial Russia. Biography Fuss was born in Basel, Switzerland. He moved to Saint Petersburg to serve as a mathematical assistant to Leonhard Euler from 1773–1783, and remained there until his death. He contributed to spherical trigonometry, differential equations, the optics of microscopes and telescopes, differential geometry, and actuarial science. He also contributed to Euclidean geometry, including the problem of Apollonius.
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Robert Alfred Herman
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Robert Alfred Herman was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who coached many students to a high wrangler rank in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Herman was senior wrangler in 1882. In the early days of Tripos, coaches were in private business in rooms off-campus. In the 1880s and 1890s instruction at college improved to the point that coaches merely supervised their students’ progress. Under these conditions the tradition of private coaching fell away, and fellows such as Herman coached students.
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Hugo Hadwiger
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Hugo Hadwiger was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work in geometry, combinatorics, and cryptography. Biography Although born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hadwiger grew up in Bern, Switzerland. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bern, where he majored in mathematics but also studied physics and actuarial science. He continued at Bern for his graduate studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Willy Scherrer. He was for more than forty years a professor of mathematics at Bern.
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Carlo Emilio Bonferroni
1892 - 1960 (68 years)
Carlo Emilio Bonferroni was an Italian mathematician who worked on probability theory. Biography Bonferroni studied piano and conducting in Turin Conservatory and at University of Turin under Giuseppe Peano and Corrado Segre, where he obtained his laurea. During this time he also studied at University of Vienna and ETH Zurich. During World War I, he was an officer among the engineers. Bonferroni held a position as assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and in 1923 took up the chair of financial mathematics at the Economics Institute of the University of Bari. In 1933 he t...
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Theaetetus
416 BC - 369 BC (47 years)
Theaetetus of Athens , possibly the son of Euphronius of the Athenian deme Sunium, was a Greek mathematician. His principal contributions were on irrational lengths, which was included in Book X of Euclid's Elements and proving that there are precisely five regular convex polyhedra. A friend of Socrates and Plato, he is the central character in Plato's eponymous Socratic dialogue.
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Georg Scheffers
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Georg Scheffers was a German mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Life Scheffers was born on 21 November 1866 in the village of Altendorf near Holzminden . Scheffers began his university career at the University of Leipzig where he studied with Felix Klein and Sophus Lie. Scheffers was a coauthor with Lie for three of the earliest expressions of Lie theory:Lectures on Differential equations with known Infinitesimal transformations ,Lectures on Continuous groups , andGeometry of Contact Transformations .All three are now available online through archive.org.
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Marcel J. E. Golay
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Marcel Jules Edouard Golay was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, and information theorist, who applied mathematics to real-world military and industrial problems. He was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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Michel Rolle
1652 - 1719 (67 years)
Michel Rolle was a French mathematician. He is best known for Rolle's theorem . He is also the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination . Life Rolle was born in Ambert, Basse-Auvergne. Rolle, the son of a shopkeeper, received only an elementary education. He married early and as a young man struggled to support his family on the meager wages of a transcriber for notaries and attorney. In spite of his financial problems and minimal education, Rolle studied algebra and Diophantine analysis on his own. He moved from Ambert to Paris in 1675.
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Karl Rohn
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Rohn was a German mathematician, who studied geometry. Life and work Rohn studied in Darmstadt, Leipzig and Munich, initially engineering but then mathematics by the influence of Alexander von Brill, among the others. In 1878 he received a doctorate under the supervision of Felix Klein in Munich, and in 1879 he habilitated at Leipzig. The subject of his doctoral thesis and habilitation was the Kummer surfaces of order 4 and their relationship with hyperelliptic functions . In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Leipzig and a year later at the Dresden University of Technology, where in 1887 he was a professor of descriptive geometry.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich
1711 - 1787 (76 years)
Roger Joseph Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. He studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works.
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Aleksey Krylov
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov was a Russian naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist. Biography Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr, Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov , was the local landlord and vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the zemskaya uprava in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family .
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Otakar Borůvka
1899 - 1995 (96 years)
Otakar Borůvka was a Czech mathematician best known today for his work in graph theory. Education and career Borůvka was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia , the son of a school headmaster. He attended the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště beginning in 1910. In 1916, influenced by the ongoing World War I, he moved to the military school in Hranice, and later he enrolled into the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling near Vienna.
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George William Hill
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
George William Hill was an American astronomer and mathematician. Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal, "on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy". Today, he is chiefly remembered for the Hill differential equation.
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Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich
1875 - 1929 (54 years)
Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was an English mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Life Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was born on 8 February 1875, in Wolverhampton, England. He was descended from Bryan I'Anson, of Ashby St Ledgers, Sheriff of London and father of the 17th century 1st Baronet Sir Bryan I'Anson of Bassetsbury.
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Thomas Harriot
1560 - 1621 (61 years)
Thomas Harriot , also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his contributions in navigational techniques, working closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics and navigation, he remains obscure because he published little of it, namely only The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia . This book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Arthur Moritz Schoenflies
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Arthur Moritz Schoenflies , sometimes written as Schönflies, was a German mathematician, known for his contributions to the application of group theory to crystallography, and for work in topology. Schoenflies was born in Landsberg an der Warthe . Arthur Schoenflies married Emma Levin in 1896. He studied under Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, and was influenced by Felix Klein.
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Jan Mikusiński
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Jan Mikusiński was a Polish mathematician based at the University of Wrocław known for his pioneering work in mathematical analysis. Mikusiński developed an operational calculus – known as the Calculus of Mikusiński , which is relevant for solving differential equations. His operational calculus is based upon an algebra of the convolution of functions with respect to the Fourier transform. From the convolution product he goes on to define what in other contexts is called the field of fractions or a quotient field. These ordered pairs of functions Mikusiński calls "operators", the "Mikusiński ...
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Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647 (39 years)
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
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Paul du Bois-Reymond
1831 - 1889 (58 years)
Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond. His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent. His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost eve...
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Theodor Schneider
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Theodor Schneider was a German mathematician, best known for providing proof of what is now known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Schneider studied from 1929 to 1934 in Frankfurt; he solved Hilbert's 7th problem in his PhD thesis, which then came to be known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Later he became an assistant to Carl Ludwig Siegel in Göttingen, where he stayed until 1953. Then he became a professor in Erlangen and finally until his retirement in Freiburg . During his time in Freiburg he also served as the director of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach from 1959 to 1963.
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Andrey Kiselyov
1852 - 1940 (88 years)
Andrey Petrovich Kiselyov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician. Biography Kiselyov attended the district school in Mtsensk and later enrolled at the Gymnasium in Oryol, the main city in the region. He graduated from the Gymnasium in 1871 with the gold medal and, in the same year, entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St Petersburg University. In 1875, Kiselyov graduated from the university with a degree that allowed him to teach in a Gymnasium. He taught mathematics, mechanics, and drawing. It was at that time when he started writing his own textbooks.
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