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
Francesco Tricomi
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Francesco Giacomo Tricomi was an Italian mathematician famous for his studies on mixed type partial differential equations. He was also the author of a book on integral equations. Biography Tricomi was born in Naples. He first enrolled in the University of Bologna, where he took chemistry courses. However, Tricomi realized that he preferred physics rather than chemistry; he moved to the University of Naples in 1915. He graduated at the University of Naples in 1918 and later was assistant to Francesco Severi, first in Padua and then in Rome. Later he was professor at Turin, called by Giuseppe...
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Samuel Vince
1749 - 1821 (72 years)
Samuel Vince FRS was an English clergyman, mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge. Life He was born in Fressingfield. The son of a plasterer, he had laboured with his father up to the age of 12, but came to the attention of a clergyman who saw to it that he entered higher education. Vince was admitted as a sizar to Caius College, Cambridge in 1771. In 1775 he was Senior Wrangler, and Winner of the Smith Prize at Cambridge. Migrating to Sidney Sussex College in 1777, he gained his M.A. in 1778 and was ordained a clergyman in 1779. He was among seven men of that college who...
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Georg Mohr
1640 - 1697 (57 years)
Jørgen Mohr was a Danish mathematician, known for being the first to prove the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem, which states that any geometric construction which can be done with compass and straightedge can also be done with compasses alone.
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Dudley Weldon Woodard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Dudley Weldon Woodard was a Galveston-born American mathematician and professor, and the second African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics; the first was Woodard's mentor Elbert Frank Cox, who earned a PhD from Cornell in 1925
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Konstantin Andreev
1848 - 1921 (73 years)
Konstantin Alekseevich Andreev was a Russian mathematician, best known for his work on geometry, especially projective geometry. He was one of the founders of the Kharkov Mathematical Society. This society is one of the early mathematics societies in Russia and was founded in 1879.
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Kinnosuke Ogura
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Kinnosuke Ogura was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. He graduated in 1905 from Tokyo College of Science , and was a lecturer there from 1910 to 1911. He was assistant at the Department of Mathematics of the new Tohoku Imperial University from 1911 to 1917, and received his Ph.D. in 1916 with a thesis on trajectories in the conservative field of force. He did research in France for two years, from 1919 to 1922. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1920 at Strasbourg.
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Hermann Schapira
1840 - 1898 (58 years)
Zvi Hermann Schapira , or Hermann Hirsch Schapira, was a Lithuanian rabbi, mathematician at the University of Heidelberg, and Zionist. He was the first to suggest founding a Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land in Palestine.
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James Cullen
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
Father James Cullen, S.J. was born at Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland. He was born at 89 West Street, Drogheda, to Michael Cullen, a baker, and Catherine McDonough. Initially, he was educated privately, then by the Christian Brothers,. He studied pure and applied mathematics at the Trinity College, Dublin, then at Mungret College, Limerick, before deciding to become a Jesuit. He studied in England in Mansera House, and St. Mary's, and was ordained as a priest on 31 July 1901.
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Gerhard Hessenberg
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Gerhard Hessenberg was a German mathematician who worked in projective geometry, differential geometry, and set theory. Career Hessenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1899 under the guidance of Hermann Schwarz and Lazarus Fuchs.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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August Derleth
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House . Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
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Mojżesz Presburger
1904 - 1943 (39 years)
Mojżesz Presburger, or Prezburger, was a Polish Jewish mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He was a student of Alfred Tarski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, and Kazimierz Kuratowski. He is known for, among other things, having invented Presburger arithmetic as a student in 1929 – a form of arithmetic in which one allows induction but removes multiplication, to obtain a decidable theory.
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Jules Molk
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Jules Molk was a French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Prix Binoux for 1913. He was appointed to the chair of applied mathematics at the University of Nancy upon the death of Émile Léonard Mathieu in 1890. From 1902 until his death in 1914, Molk was the leader and editor-in-chief of the publication of a French encyclopedia of pure and applied mathematical sciences based upon Klein's encyclopedia. It was a translation of the volumes in German and required the collaboration of many mathematicians and theoretical physicists from France, Germany, and several other European countries.
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Charles Julien Brianchon
1783 - 1864 (81 years)
Charles Julien Brianchon was a French mathematician and chemist. Life He entered into the École Polytechnique in 1804 at the age of eighteen, and studied under Monge, graduating first in his class in 1808, after which he took up a career as a lieutenant in Napoleon's artillery. Later, in 1818, Brianchon became a professor in the Artillery School of the Royal Guard at Vincennes.
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Erastus L. De Forest
1834 - 1888 (54 years)
Erastus Lyman De Forest was an American mathematician, who studied at Yale University. Life and work Son of a Yale graduate, De Forest graduated himself at Yale University in 1854 and was awarded PhB in 1856. De Forest later vanished for two years while on a trip to New York, and his family feared the worst, but he eventually turned up in Australia, teaching in Melbourne. In 1861, he returned to New Haven and devoted himself to the study of mathematics.
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Al-Nayrizi
865 - 922 (57 years)
Abū’l-‘Abbās al-Faḍl ibn Ḥātim al-Nairīzī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nayriz, now in Fars Province, Iran. Life Little is known of al-Nairīzī, though his nisba refers to the town of Neyriz. He mentioned al-Mu'tadid, the Abbasid caliph, in his works, and so scholars have assumed that al-Nairīzī flourished in Baghdad during this period. Al-Nairīzī wrote a book for al-Mu'tadid on atmospheric phenomena. He died in .
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Johann Faulhaber
1580 - 1635 (55 years)
Johann Faulhaber was a German mathematician, specifically, a Rechenmeister. Born in Ulm, Faulhaber was a trained weaver who later took the role of a surveyor of the city of Ulm. He collaborated with Johannes Kepler and Ludolph van Ceulen. In 1620, while in Ulm, Descartes probably corresponded with Faulhaber to discuss algebraic solutions of polynomial equations
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Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi
920 - 980 (60 years)
Abu'l Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim Al-Uqlidisi was a Muslim Arab mathematician, who was active in Damascus and Baghdad. He wrote the earliest surviving book on the positional use of the Arabic numerals, Kitab al-Fusul fi al-Hisab al-Hindi around 952. It is especially notable for its treatment of decimal fractions, and that it showed how to carry out calculations without deletions.
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Gustav Conrad Bauer
1820 - 1906 (86 years)
Gustav Conrad Bauer was a German mathematician, known for the Bauer-Muir transformation and Bauer's conic sections. He earned a footnote in the history of science as the doctoral advisor of Heinrich Burkhardt, who became one of the two referees of Albert Einstein's doctoral dissertation.
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Henry Schultz
1893 - 1938 (45 years)
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Life Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893, in a Polish Jewish family in Sharkawshchyna, in the Russian Empire . " Schultz's family - father, mother with their 2 sons - Henry and his brother Joseph moved to New York City in the United States. Henry Schultz completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiving a BA in 1916. For gradu...
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Jessie MacWilliams
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Florence Jessie Collinson MacWilliams was an English mathematician who contributed to the field of coding theory, and was one of the first women to publish in the field. MacWilliams' thesis "Combinatorial Problems of Elementary Group Theory" contains one of the most important combinatorial results in coding theory, and is now known as the MacWilliams Identity.
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Franz Josef Gerstner
1756 - 1832 (76 years)
Franz Josef Gerstner was a German-Bohemian physicist, astronomer and engineer. Life Gerstner was born in Komotau in Bohemia then part of the Habsburg monarchy. . He was the son of Florian Gerstner and Maria Elisabeth, born Englert. He studied at the Jesuits gymnasium in Komotau. After that he studied mathematics and astronomy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague between 1772 and 1777. In 1781 he started to study medicine at the University of Vienna, but later decided to quit his studies. Instead, he worked as an assistant at the astronomical observatory in Vienna under supervision of Maximilian Hell.
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Artashes Shahinian
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Artashes Shahinian was an Armenian mathematician, Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics , Professor , and member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences Shahinian held several positions, including Head of Chair of Yerevan State University , Dean , Head of the Mathematics and Mechanics Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR , Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics , Academy-secretary of the Department of Physics-Mathematical Sciences .
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Hugh Blackburn
1823 - 1909 (86 years)
Bailie Hugh Blackburn was a Scottish mathematician. A lifelong friend of William Thomson , and the husband of illustrator Jemima Blackburn, he was professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1849 to 1879. He succeeded Thomson's father James in the Chair of Mathematics.
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Henry William Watson
1827 - 1903 (76 years)
Rev. Henry William Watson FRS was a mathematician and author of a number of mathematics books. He was an ordained priest and Cambridge Apostle. Life Watson was born at Marylebone on 25 Feb. 1827, the son of Thomas Watson, R.N., and Eleanor Mary Kingston.
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Bohumil Bydžovský
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Bohumil Bydžovský was a Czech mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and algebra. Education and career Bydzovsky in 1898 completed his Abitur at the Academic Gymnasium in Prague and then studied mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague. There Bydzovsky received his Ph.D. in 1903 with thesis supervised by Karel Petr. Bydzovksy became a teacher at secondary schools, including the reálce in Prague-Karlín from 1907 to 1910 . In 1909 he received his habilitation in mathematics, then lectured at the Polytechnic in Prague, and then in 1911 received his habilitation in engineering.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Ibn Yunus
950 - 1009 (59 years)
Abu al-Hasan 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad ibn Yunus al-Sadafi al-Misri was an important Egyptian astronomer and mathematician, whose works are noted for being ahead of their time, having been based on meticulous calculations and attention to detail.
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François Budan de Boislaurent
1761 - 1840 (79 years)
Ferdinand François Désiré Budan de Boislaurent was a French amateur mathematician, best known for a tract, Nouvelle méthode pour la résolution des équations numériques, first published in Paris in 1807, but based on work from 1803.
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Klara Löbenstein
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Klara Löbenstein was a German mathematician. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Löbenstein was born in Hildesheim, Prussia on 15 February 1883 to merchant Lehmann Löbenstein and his wife Sofie .
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Klavdiya Latysheva
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Klavdiya Yakovlevna Latysheva was a Soviet mathematician known for her contributions to the theory of differential equations, electrodynamics and probability. She was honoured with the Order of Lenin and the Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945".
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Ruy Luís Gomes
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Ruy Luís Gomes was a Portuguese mathematician who made significant contributions to the development of mathematical physics and the state of academia in Portugal during the twentieth century. He was part of a generation of young Portuguese mathematicians, including António Aniceto Monteiro , Hugo Baptista Ribeiro and José Sebastião e Silva , who held the common goal of involving Portugal in the global progression of science through conducting and publishing original research. Because of this, however, he began to gain notoriety as a dissident of the Salazar regime, which condemned independent thinking.
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Mikhail Suslin
1894 - 1919 (25 years)
Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin was a Russian mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of general topology and descriptive set theory. Biography Mikhail Suslin was born on November 15, 1894, in the village of Krasavka, the only child of poor peasants Yakov Gavrilovich and Matrena Vasil'evna Suslin. From a young age, Suslin showed a keen interest in mathematics and was encouraged to continue his education by his primary school teacher, Vera Andreevna Teplogorskaya-Smirnova. From 1905 to 1913 he attended Balashov boys' grammar school.
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Zdzisław Krygowski
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Zdzisław Jan Ewangelii Antoni Krygowski was a Polish mathematician, rector of the Lwów Polytechnic , and professor at Poznań University . Enigma Krygowski has become famous in the history of cryptology for having assisted the Polish General Staff in setting up its cryptology course for Poznań University mathematics students that began on 15 January 1929. This led eventually to the General Staff's Cipher Bureau's recruitment of Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, who would jointly break and decrypt the World War II-era German Enigma-machine ciphers, beginning at the end of Dece...
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Zoel García de Galdeano
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Zoel García de Galdeano y Yanguas was a Spanish mathematician. He was considered by Julio Rey Pastor as "The apostle of modern mathematics". Biography His father was a military man, and was killed in war action, so his maternal grandfather, the historian José Yanguas y Miranda , took care of Zoel. To continue his studies, in 1863, Zoel moved to Zaragoza, where he received the title of professor and expert surveyor. In 1869 he graduated as Bachelor. Later he began his studies of Philosophy and Letters, and Sciences at the University of Zaragoza. In 1871, he graduated from these two specialties...
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Gusztáv Rados
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Gusztáv Rados was a Hungarian mathematician. Rados specialized in number theory, linear algebra, algebra, and differential geometry. In 1936, he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Yang Hui
1238 - 1298 (60 years)
Yang Hui , courtesy name Qianguang , was a Chinese mathematician and writer during the Song dynasty. Originally, from Qiantang , Yang worked on magic squares, magic circles and the binomial theorem, and is best known for his contribution of presenting Yang Hui's Triangle. This triangle was the same as Pascal's Triangle, discovered by Yang's predecessor Jia Xian. Yang was also a contemporary to the other famous mathematician Qin Jiushao.
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Cardinal Richelieu
1585 - 1642 (57 years)
Armand Jean du Plessis, 1st Duke of Richelieu , known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French statesman and clergyman. He became known as l'Éminence rouge, or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the title "Eminence" applied to cardinals and from the red robes that they customarily wear.
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Joichi Suetsuna
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Joichi Suetsuna was a Japanese mathematician who worked mainly on number theory. In addition to working in Japan, where he held a chair at Tokyo University and was eventually selected to the Japan Academy, Suetsuna also spent time studying in Europe and introduced to Japan research styles he witnessed there. Later in life, especially after World War II, he studied Buddhist philosophy.
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Gregorio Fontana
1735 - 1803 (68 years)
Gregorio Fontana, born Giovanni Battista Lorenzo Fontana was an Italian mathematician and a religious of the Piarist order. He was chair of mathematics at the university of Pavia succeeding Roger Joseph Boscovich. He has been credited with the introduction of polar coordinates.
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Paul Taunton Matthews
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Paul Taunton Matthews CBE FRS was a British theoretical physicist. Biography Matthews was born in Erode in British India, and was educated at Mill Hill School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he was awarded MA and PhD degrees. He was awarded the Adams Prize in 1958, elected to the Royal Society in 1963, and awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1978. He became head of the Physics Department of Imperial College, London and later vice chancellor of the University of Bath. He was also awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Bath in 1983. He was also chairman of the Nuclear Physic...
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Attilio Palatini
1889 - 1949 (60 years)
Attilio Palatini was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso. Biography Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele and Ilde Furlanetto . In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
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Paul Funk
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Paul Georg Funk was an Austrian mathematician who introduced the Funk transform and who worked on the calculus of variations. Biography Born in Vienna in 1886, Paul Funk was the son of a deputy bank manager and went to high school in Baden and Gmunden. Then, studied mathematics in Tübingen, Vienna, and Göttingen, writing his PhD dissertation under the supervision of David Hilbert.
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Edward Burr Van Vleck
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Edward Burr Van Vleck was an Americann mathematician. Early life Van Vleck was born June 7, 1863, Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1884, attended Johns Hopkins in 1885–87, and studied at Göttingen . He also received 1 July 1914 an honorary doctorate of the University of Groningen . He was assistant professor and professor at Wesleyan , and after 1906 a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the mathematics building is named after him. His doctoral students include H. S. Wall. In 1913 he beca...
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François Le Lionnais
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
François Le Lionnais was a French chemical engineer and writer. He was a co-founder of the literary movement Oulipo. Biography Le Lionnais was born in Paris on 3 October 1901. Trained as a chemical engineer, he directed the Forges d'Aquiny industrial firm during the years 1928–1929. Active in the French resistance group Front National during World War II, he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in October 1944 and spent six months as a prisoner in the Dora concentration camp. His 1946 essay “La Peinture à Dora” describes his experience as a prisoner.
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Adriaan Vlacq
1600 - 1667 (67 years)
Adriaan Vlacq was a Dutch book publisher and author of mathematical tables. Born in Gouda, Vlacq published a table of logarithms from 1 to 100,000 to 10 decimal places in 1628 in his Arithmetica logarithmica. This table extended Henry Briggs' original tables which only covered the values 1-20,000 and 90,001 to 100,000. The new table was computed by Ezechiel de Decker and Vlacq who calculated and added 70,000 further values to complete the tables. This table was further extended by Jurij Vega in 1794, and by Alexander John Thompson in 1952.
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Victor-Amédée Lebesgue
1791 - 1875 (84 years)
Victor-Amédée Lebesgue, sometimes written Le Besgue, was a mathematician working on number theory. He was elected a member of the Académie des sciences in 1847. See also Catalan's conjectureProof of Fermat's Last Theorem for specific exponentsLebesgue–Nagell type equations
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Nikolaus Hofreiter
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Nikolaus Hofreiter was an Austrian mathematician who worked mainly in number theory. Biography Hofreiter went to school in Linz and studied from 1923 in Vienna with Hans Hahn, Wilhelm Wirtinger, Emil Müller at the Technische Universität Wien on descriptive geometry, and Philipp Furtwängler, with whom he obtained his doctorate in 1927 on the reduction theory of quadratic forms . In 1928 he passed the Lehramtsprüfung examination and completed the probationary year as a teacher in Vienna, but then returned to the university where in 1929 he was assistant to Furtwängler and then habilitated in 1933.
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Daniel Harvey Hill
1821 - 1889 (68 years)
Daniel Harvey Hill , commonly known as D. H. Hill, was a Confederate general who commanded infantry in the eastern and western theaters of the American Civil War. Hill was known as an aggressive leader, being severely strict, deeply religious, and having dry, sarcastic humor. He was brother-in-law to Stonewall Jackson and a close friend to both James Longstreet and Joseph E. Johnston, but disagreements with both Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg cost him favor with Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Although his military ability was well respected, Hill was underutilized by the end of the Am...
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Milton Abramowitz
1915 - 1958 (43 years)
Milton Abramowitz was a Jewish American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards who, with Irene Stegun, edited a classic book of mathematical tables called Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun. Abramowitz died of a heart attack in 1958, at which time the book was not yet completed but was well underway. Stegun took over management of the project and was able to finish the work by 1964, working under the direction of the NBS Chief of Numerical Analysis Philip J. Davis, who was also a contributor to the book.
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