The Most Influential People Across History
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9401
Richard Dedekind
1831 - 1916 (85 years)
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind was a German mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, abstract algebra , and the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic. His best known contribution is the definition of real numbers through the notion of Dedekind cut. He is also considered a pioneer in the development of modern set theory and of the philosophy of mathematics known as Logicism.
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Karl Weierstrass
1815 - 1897 (82 years)
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician often cited as the "father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school teacher, eventually teaching mathematics, physics, botany and gymnastics. He later received an honorary doctorate and became professor of mathematics in Berlin.
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René Descartes
1596 - 1650 (54 years)
René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
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Arthur Cayley
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Arthur Cayley was a prolific British mathematician who worked mostly on algebra. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics. As a child, Cayley enjoyed solving complex maths problems for amusement. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years.
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Ernst Zermelo
1871 - 1953 (82 years)
Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic set theory and his proof of the well-ordering theorem. Furthermore, his 1929 work on ranking chess players is the first description of a model for pairwise comparison that continues to have a profound impact on various applied fields utilizing this method.
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Augustin-Louis Cauchy
1789 - 1857 (68 years)
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He single-handedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 - 1716 (70 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physic...
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Pierre de Fermat
1601 - 1665 (64 years)
Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
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Gottlob Frege
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano , Bertrand Russell , and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ev...
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Giuseppe Peano
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione , which is a simplified version of Classical Latin.
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William Rowan Hamilton
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA, FRAS was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory.
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James Clerk Maxwell
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist with broad interests who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" where the first one had been realised by Isaac Newton.
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Diophantus
201 - 300 (99 years)
Diophantus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantus is considered "the father of algebra" by many mathematicians because of his contributions to number theory, mathematical equations, and the earliest known use of algebraic notation and symbolism in his works. In modern use, Diophantine equations are algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
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Leopold Kronecker
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory, algebra and logic. He criticized Georg Cantor's work on set theory, and was quoted by as having said, "" . Kronecker was a student and life-long friend of Ernst Kummer.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749 - 1827 (78 years)
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste . This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.
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Joseph Liouville
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Joseph Liouville was a French mathematician and engineer. Life and work He was born in Saint-Omer in France on 24 March 1809. His parents were Claude-Joseph Liouville and Thérèse Liouville . Liouville gained admission to the École Polytechnique in 1825 and graduated in 1827. Just like Augustin-Louis Cauchy before him, Liouville studied engineering at École des Ponts et Chaussées after graduating from the Polytechnique, but opted instead for a career in mathematics. After some years as an assistant at various institutions including the École Centrale Paris, he was appointed as professor at the École Polytechnique in 1838.
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Hermann Minkowski
1864 - 1909 (45 years)
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736 - 1813 (77 years)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
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Ernst Kummer
1810 - 1893 (83 years)
Ernst Eduard Kummer was a German mathematician. Skilled in applied mathematics, Kummer trained German army officers in ballistics; afterwards, he taught for 10 years in a gymnasium, the German equivalent of high school, where he inspired the mathematical career of Leopold Kronecker.
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Adrien-Marie Legendre
1752 - 1833 (81 years)
Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him. He is also known for his contributions to the method of least squares, and was the first to officially publish on it, though Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered it before him.
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Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet
1805 - 1859 (54 years)
Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was a German mathematician who made contributions to number theory , and to the theory of Fourier series and other topics in mathematical analysis; he is credited with being one of the first mathematicians to give the modern formal definition of a function.
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William Kingdon Clifford
1845 - 1879 (34 years)
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
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Jacob Bernoulli
1655 - 1705 (50 years)
Jacob Bernoulli was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Swiss Bernoulli family. He sided with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy and was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus, which he made numerous contributions to; along with his brother Johann, he was one of the founders of the calculus of variations. He also discovered the fundamental mathematical constant . However, his most important contribution was in the field of probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi.
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Niels Henrik Abel
1802 - 1829 (27 years)
Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
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Apollonius of Perga
262 BC - 190 BC (72 years)
Apollonius of Perga was an ancient Greek geometer and astronomer known for his work on conic sections. Beginning from the earlier contributions of Euclid and Archimedes on the topic, he brought them to the state prior to the invention of analytic geometry. His definitions of the terms ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are the ones in use today. With his predecessors Euclid and Archimedes, Apollonius is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity.
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Hermann Grassmann
1809 - 1877 (68 years)
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V.
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Oliver Heaviside
1850 - 1925 (75 years)
Oliver Heaviside FRS was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations , independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today. He significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood and applied in the decades following Maxwell's death. His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology. Altho...
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Christiaan Huygens
1629 - 1695 (66 years)
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain the first idealization of a physical problem by a se...
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Siméon Denis Poisson
1781 - 1840 (59 years)
Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, elasticity, and fluid mechanics. Moreover, he predicted the Poisson spot in his attempt to disprove the wave theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, which was later confirmed.
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Andrey Markov
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician best known for his work on stochastic processes. A primary subject of his research later became known as the Markov chain. He was also a strong, close to master-level chess player.
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Johannes Kepler
1571 - 1630 (59 years)
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science.
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Charles Hermite
1822 - 1901 (79 years)
Charles Hermite FRS FRSE MIAS was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra. Hermite polynomials, Hermite interpolation, Hermite normal form, Hermitian operators, and cubic Hermite splines are named in his honor. One of his students was Henri Poincaré.
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Camille Jordan
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan was a French mathematician, known both for his foundational work in group theory and for his influential Cours d'analyse. Biography Jordan was born in Lyon and educated at the École polytechnique. He was an engineer by profession; later in life he taught at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France, where he had a reputation for eccentric choices of notation.
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Brahmagupta
598 - 665 (67 years)
Brahmagupta was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. He is the author of two early works on mathematics and astronomy: the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta , a theoretical treatise, and the Khaṇḍakhādyaka , a more practical text.
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Wilhelm Killing
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing was a German mathematician who made important contributions to the theories of Lie algebras, Lie groups, and non-Euclidean geometry. Life Killing studied at the University of Münster and later wrote his dissertation under Karl Weierstrass and Ernst Kummer at Berlin in 1872. He taught in gymnasia from 1868 to 1872. In 1875, he married Anna Commer, who was the daughter of a music lecturer. He became a professor at the seminary college Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg . He took holy orders in order to take his teaching position. He became rector of the college and chair of the town council.
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Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.
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Karl Pearson
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Karl Pearson was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol.
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Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662 (39 years)
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines , establishing him as one of the first two...
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Augustus De Morgan
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. Biography Childhood Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India in 1806. His father was Lieut.-Colonel John De Morgan , who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth , was the daughter of John Dodson and granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms . Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born.
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George Boole
1815 - 1864 (49 years)
George Boole Jnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age, alongside the work of Claude Shannon.
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Johann Bernoulli
1667 - 1748 (81 years)
Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is known for his contributions to infinitesimal calculus and educating Leonhard Euler in the pupil's youth.
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Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
1804 - 1851 (47 years)
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations, determinants, and number theory. His name is occasionally written as Carolus Gustavus Iacobus Iacobi in his Latin books, and his first name is sometimes given as Karl.
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Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
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Elwin Bruno Christoffel
1829 - 1900 (71 years)
Elwin Bruno Christoffel was a German mathematician and physicist. He introduced fundamental concepts of differential geometry, opening the way for the development of tensor calculus, which would later provide the mathematical basis for general relativity.
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Pafnuty Chebyshev
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician and considered to be the founding father of Russian mathematics. Chebyshev is known for his fundamental contributions to the fields of probability, statistics, mechanics, and number theory. A number of important mathematical concepts are named after him, including the Chebyshev inequality , the Bertrand–Chebyshev theorem, Chebyshev polynomials, Chebyshev linkage, and Chebyshev bias.
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Gerolamo Cardano
1501 - 1576 (75 years)
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.
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August Ferdinand Möbius
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.
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Daniel Bernoulli
1700 - 1782 (82 years)
Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family from Basel. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
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Edmund Landau
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Edmund Georg Hermann Landau was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopold Landau, a gynecologist, and his mother was Johanna Jacoby. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation in 1901. His doctoral thesis was 14 pages long.
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