The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9451
Beatrice Worsley
1921 - 1972 (51 years)
Beatrice Helen Worsley was the first female Canadian computer scientist. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge with Maurice Wilkes as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as computer science. She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
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David Milman
1912 - 1982 (70 years)
David Pinhusovich Milman was a Soviet and later Israeli mathematician specializing in functional analysis. He was one of the major figures of the Soviet school of functional analysis. In the 70s he emigrated to Israel and was on the faculty of Tel Aviv University.
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Caleb Andrew Stewart
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Caleb Andrew Stewart FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician. He is noted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life He was born on 16 September 1888 in Glasgow the son of John Stewart, a patternmaker. He attended Barrowfield Primary School then John Street Higher Grade School, completing his education at the High School of Glasgow. He then studied Mathematics and Physics at Glasgow University graduating MA in 1909, BSc in 1910. Winning a Ferguson Scholarship he attended Cambridge University gaining a further BA in 1912. He then began lecturing at the City and Guilds College i...
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Bronisław Knaster
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Bronisław Knaster was a Polish mathematician; from 1939 a university professor in Lwów and from 1945 in Wrocław. He is known for his work in point-set topology and in particular for his discoveries in 1922 of the hereditarily indecomposable continuum or pseudo-arc and of the Knaster continuum, or buckethandle continuum. Together with his teacher Hugo Steinhaus and his colleague Stefan Banach, he also developed the last diminisher procedure for fair cake cutting.
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Otto M. Nikodym
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Otto Marcin Nikodym was a Polish mathematician. Education and career Nikodym studied mathematics at the University of Lemberg . Immediately after his graduation in 1911, he started his teaching job at a high school in Kraków where he remained until 1924. He eventually obtained his doctorate in 1925 from the University of Warsaw; he also spent an academic year in Sorbonne. Nikodym taught at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and University of Warsaw and at the Akademia Górnicza in Kraków in the years that followed. He moved to the United States in 1948 and joined the faculty of Kenyon College.
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Pavel Korovkin
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Pavel Petrovich Korovkin was a Soviet mathematician whose main fields of research were orthogonal polynomials, approximation theory and potential theory. In 1947 he proved a generalization of Egorov's theorem: from the early 1950s on, his research interests turned to functional analysis and he examined the stability of the exterior Dirichlet problem and the convergence and approximation properties of linear positive operators on spaces of continuous functions. The set of terms and Korovkin approximation are named after him.
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Charles Henry Rowe
1893 - 1943 (50 years)
Charles Henry Rowe was an Irish mathematician, specializing in geometry. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin . Career Rowe received his bachelor's degree from University College Cork in 1914 and his M.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin in 1917. He was a close friend of the mathematical physicist J. L. Synge. By winning a competitive examination in 1920, Rowe became a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and retained the fellowship until his death. He spent the academic year 1920–1921 in Paris, where he studied under Hadamard, Lebesgu...
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Adele Goldstine
1920 - 1964 (44 years)
Adele Goldstine was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.
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Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler was an American mathematician. She is best known for early work on linear algebra in infinite dimensions, which has later become a part of functional analysis. Biography Anna Johnson was born on May 5, 1883, to Swedish immigrant parents in Calliope, Iowa in the United States. Her father, Andrew Gustav Johnson, was a furniture dealer and undertaker. Her mother, Amelia , was a homemaker. Both of Johnson's parents came from the parish of Lyrestad, in Västergötland, Sweden. Johnson had two older siblings, Esther and Elmer. At the age of nine her family moved to Akron, Iowa and she was enrolled in a private school.
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Leonid Kantorovich
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich was a Soviet mathematician and economist, known for his theory and development of techniques for the optimal allocation of resources. He is regarded as the founder of linear programming. He was the winner of the Stalin Prize in 1949 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975.
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Richard Cockburn Maclaurin
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
Richard Cockburn Maclaurin was a Scottish-born U.S. educator and mathematical physicist. He was made president of MIT in 1909, and held the position until his death in 1920. During his tenure as president of MIT, the Institute moved across the Charles River from Boston to its present campus in Cambridge. In Maclaurin's honor, the buildings that surround Killian Court on the oldest part of the campus are sometimes called the Maclaurin Buildings.
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Jean-Pierre Sydler
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Jean-Pierre Sydler was a Swiss mathematician and a librarian, well known for his work in geometry, most notably on Hilbert's third problem. Biography Sydler was born in 1921 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He graduated from ETH Zürich in 1943 and received a doctorate in 1947. In 1950 he became a librarian at the ETH while continuing to publish mathematical papers in his spare time. In 1960 he received a prize of the Danish Academy of Sciences for his work on scissors congruence. In 1963 he became a director of the ETH library and pioneered the use of automatisation. He continued serving as a director until the retirement in 1986.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887 - 1920 (33 years)
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
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Viggo Brun
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Viggo Brun was a Norwegian professor, mathematician and number theorist. Contributions In 1915, he introduced a new method, based on Legendre's version of the sieve of Eratosthenes, now known as the Brun sieve, which addresses additive problems such as Goldbach's conjecture and the twin prime conjecture. He used it to prove that there exist infinitely many integers n such that n and n+2 have at most nine prime factors, and that all large even integers are the sum of two numbers with at most nine prime factors.
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Hector Hetherington
1888 - 1965 (77 years)
Sir Hector James Wright Hetherington was a Scottish philosopher, who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1927 to 1936, and Principal of the University of Glasgow until 1961. Early life Hetherington was born in Cowdenbeath, Fife, and educated at Dollar Academy where he was school dux 1904 and 1905.
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Kwan-ichi Terazawa
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
was a Japanese mathematician and administrator. Terazawa was born in Yonezawa, graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1908 following the study of physics, and earned his D.Sc. degree in 1917. His career at the Imperial University of Tokyo lasted from 1918 to his retirement in 1949 where he was professor of physics, while having served as professor at the Aeronautical Research Institute for nineteen of those years. He served as the director of that institution in 1942-1943 and as professor at the Earthquake Research Institute from 1936 to 1942 . For the period 1938-1943 he was emplo...
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Albert Lautman
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
Albert Lautman was a French philosopher of mathematics, born in Paris. An escaped prisoner of war, he was shot by the Nazi authorities in Toulouse on 1 August 1944. Family His father was a Jewish emigrant from Vienna who became a medical doctor after he was seriously wounded in the First World War.
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Rudolf Inzinger
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Rudolf Inzinger was an Austrian mathematician who made contributions to differential geometry, the theory of convex bodies, and inverse problems for sound waves. Biography Born in Vienna, he was a student at the Technische Hochschule in the same city. In 1933 he defended his PhD Die Liesche Abbildung and in 1936 he received his habilitation. After the Anschluss he had to leave. After his return from war captivity he started again working at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in 1945 where he was appointed associated professor in 1946 and promoted to full professor one year later.
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Aleksandr Kronrod
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Aleksandr Semyonovich Kronrod was a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula which he published in 1964. Earlier, he worked on computational solutions of problems emerging in theoretical physics. He is also known for his contributions to economics, specifically for proposing corrections and calculating price formation for the USSR. Later, Kronrod gave his fortune and life to medicine to care for terminal cancer patients. Kronrod is remembered for his captivating personality and was admired as a student, teacher and leader.
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Lev Schnirelmann
1905 - 1938 (33 years)
Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelmann was a Soviet mathematician who worked on number theory, topology and differential geometry. Work Schnirelmann sought to prove Goldbach's conjecture. In 1930, using the Brun sieve, he proved that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than C prime numbers, where C is an effectively computable constant.
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Raymond Woodard Brink
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Raymond Woodard Brink was an American mathematician. His Ph.D. advisor at Harvard was George David Birkhoff. Brink entered Kansas State College at age 14 and by age 19 had two bachelor's degrees and was employed as an instructor of mathematics in Moscow, Idaho; he taught at the state preparatory school of the University of Idaho. He returned to school at Harvard and earned a doctorate in 1916 and was a longtime professor at the University of Minnesota, and also authored numerous math textbooks. He served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1941–42.
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Jan Łukasiewicz
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Jan Łukasiewicz was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic. His work centred on philosophical logic, mathematical logic and history of logic. He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, offering one of the earliest systems of many-valued logic. Contemporary research on Aristotelian logic also builds on innovative works by Łukasiewicz, which applied methods from modern logic to the formalization of Aristotle's syllogistic.
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Martin R. Gainsbrugh
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Martin Reuben Gainsbrugh was an American economist, practicing statistician, writer, and educator, He was vice-president and chief economist of The Conference Board, Adjunct Professor at the New York University, and president of the American Statistical Association in 1961.
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Gustave Juvet
1896 - 1936 (40 years)
Gustave Juvet was a Swiss mathematician. Biography Juvet received his licence in mathematical sciences from the University of Neuchâtel in 1917 and then the same degree from the Sorbonne in 1919. He taught astronomy and geodesy from 1920 to 1928 at the University of Neuchâtel. In 1928 he became a professor at the University of Lausanne, where he retained his academic position until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1936. In 1926 he received his doctorate from the Faculté des sciences de Paris.
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Harold Silverstone
1915 - 1974 (59 years)
Harold Silverstone was a New Zealand mathematician and statistician. Early life and education He was born on 20 January 1915 in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. His father Mark Woolf Silverstone was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Harold Silverstone was educated at Otago Boys High School. He later attended the University of Otago where he attained a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1935. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1939.
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Gino Loria
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Gino Benedetto Loria was a Jewish-Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Loria studied mathematics in Mantua, Turin, and Pavia and received his doctorate in 1883 from the University of Turin under the direction of Enrico D'Ovidio. For several years he was D'Ovidio's assistant in Turin. Starting in 1886 he became, as a result of winning a then-customary competition, Professor for Algebra and Analytic Geometry at the University of Genoa, where he stayed for the remainder of his career.
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René de Possel
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Lucien Alexandre Charles René de Possel was a French mathematician, one of the founders of the Bourbaki group, and later a pioneer computer scientist, working in particular on optical character recognition.
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Vyacheslav Stepanov
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
Vyacheslav Vassilievich Stepanov was a mathematician, specializing in analysis. He was from the Soviet Union. Stepanov was the son of teachers and from 1908 to 1912 studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, where in 1912 he received his Candidate of Sciences degree with Dmitri Egorov as thesis supervisor. Stepanov was also strongly influenced by Nikolai Lusin. In 1912 he undertook further study at the University of Göttingen where he attended lectures by Edmund Landau and David Hilbert. In 1915 he returned to Moscow and became a docent at Mosc...
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Hildegarde Kneeland
1889 - 1994 (105 years)
Hildegarde Kneeland was an American home economist and social statistician, known for her time-use research. Education and early career Kneeland was born in Brooklyn, studied at the Packer Collegiate Institute, and graduated from Vassar College in 1911. After graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University, she taught nutrition at the University of Missouri beginning in 1914. In 1917 she returned to graduate study at the University of Chicago, working there with Hazel Kyrk.
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Lev Kaluznin
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Lev Arkad'evich Kaluznin was a Russian mathematician. Other transliterations of his name used by himself include Kalužnin and Kaluzhnin, while he used the transliteration Léo Kaloujnine in publications while he lived in France.
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Grigorii Fikhtengol'ts
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Grigorii Mikhailovich Fikhtengol'ts was a Soviet mathematician working on real analysis and functional analysis. Fikhtengol'ts was one of the founders of the Leningrad school of real analysis. He was born in Odessa, Russian Empire in 1888, graduated Odessa University in 1911.
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Ernest Vessiot
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Ernest Vessiot was a French mathematician. He was born in Marseille, France, and died in La Bauche, Savoie, France. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1884. He was Maître de Conférences at Lille University of Science and Technology in 1892-1893, then moved at Toulouse and Lyon.
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Johannes Mollerup
1872 - 1937 (65 years)
Johannes Mollerup was a Danish mathematician. Mollerup studied at the University of Copenhagen, and received his doctorate in 1903. Together with Harald Bohr, he developed the Bohr–Mollerup theorem which provides an easy characterization of the gamma function.
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Jan Spielrein
1887 - 1938 (51 years)
Jan Nikolaevich Spielrein was a Soviet scientist in the field of Mathematics, professor, Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1887 in the Rostov-on-Don. Spielrein was educated in Rostov-on-Don. In 1907 he graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Sorbonne, in 1911 the Higher Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe. Since 1911 Spielrein was an assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart.
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Thorold Gosset
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
John Herbert de Paz Thorold Gosset was an English lawyer and an amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is noted for discovering and classifying the semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher, and for his generalization of Descartes' theorem on tangent circles to four and higher dimensions.
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Boyd Crumrine Patterson
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Boyd Crumrine Patterson was an American mathematician and the ninth president of Washington & Jefferson College. Patterson was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1902, and graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1923, completing his studies in three years. He was a member of the well-known Crumrine family of Washington County and a third-generation W&J graduate. His father, John P. Patterson, was a member of W&J's class of 1885; his grandfather, Boyd Crumrine, a noted local historian, was in Jefferson College's class of 1860. He was also a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fra...
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Samuel Lattès
1873 - 1918 (45 years)
Samuel Lattès was a French mathematician. From 1892 to 1895 he studied at the École Normale Superieure. After this he was a teacher in Algiers, Dijon and Nice. After a promotion to Paris in 1906 he moved first to Montpellier in 1908 and then to Besançon, before he took up a professorship at the University of Toulouse in 1911. He died of typhus in 1918.
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Giovanni Boaga
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Giovanni Boaga was an Italian mathematician and geodesy professor. He was born in Trieste and died in Tripoli, Libya. His Gauss-Boaga Projection is the standard projection used in Italian topography by the Istituto Geografico Militare.
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Rollo Davidson
1944 - 1970 (26 years)
Rollo Davidson was a probabilist, alpinist, and Fellow-elect of Churchill College, Cambridge, who died aged 25 on Piz Bernina. He is known for his work on semigroups, stochastic geometry, and stochastic analysis, and for the Rollo Davidson Prize, given in his name to early-career probabilists.
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Charles Coulson
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Charles Alfred Coulson was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist. Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.
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Ernesto Laura
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Ernesto Laura was an Italian mathematician born in Porto Maurizio. Biography He graduated in mathematics in 1901 at the University of Turin, where he was a student of Morera and of Somigliana. He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Pavia and Padua.
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Ebenezer Cunningham
1881 - 1977 (96 years)
Ebenezer Cunningham was a British mathematician who is remembered for his research and exposition at the dawn of special relativity. Biography Cunningham went up to St John's College, Cambridge in 1899 and graduated Senior Wrangler in 1902, winning the Smith's Prize in 1904.
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Benjamin Finkel
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Benjamin Franklin Finkel was a mathematician and educator most remembered today as the founder of the American Mathematical Monthly journal. Born in Fairfield County, Ohio and educated in small country schools, Finkel received both a BS and MA from Ohio Northern University, then known as Ohio Normal University . In 1888 he copyrighted A Mathematical Solution Book. The purpose of the book was to provide mathematics teachers a text utilizing a systematic method of problem solving, "The Step Method", representing a chain of reasoning, in logical order, to arrive at the correct result. The first edition was postponed until 1893, due to financial problems of the original publisher.
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Boris Demidovich
1906 - 1977 (71 years)
Boris Pavlovich Demidovich was a Soviet Belarusian mathematician. Family and early life Demidovich was born in a family of teachers. His father, Pavel , was able to get higher education, graduating in 1897 in Vilna; Pavel Demidovich was a teacher throughout his life, first teaching in different towns in the Minsk and Vilna Governorates, and then in Minsk; he was very attached to his family, and to Belarusian beliefs and rituals. He also recorded some anonymous literary works of the Belarusian tradition. In 1908 Pavel Demidovich was nominated member of the Imperial Officer of the Company Enthusiasts science, Anthropology at Moscow University.
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Margherita Piazzola Beloch
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Margherita Beloch Piazzolla was an Italian mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry. Biography Beloch was the daughter of the German historian Karl Julius Beloch, who taught ancient history for 50 years at Sapienza University of Rome, and American Bella Bailey.
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Andrea Razmadze
1889 - 1929 (40 years)
Andrea Mikhailovich Razmadze was a Georgian mathematician, and one of the founders of Tbilisi State University, whose Mathematics Institute was renamed in his honor in 1944. The department's scientific journal, published continuously since 1937, was also renamed as the Proceedings of A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute in his honor.
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Annette Smith Burgess
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Annette Smith Burgess was an American medical illustrator and instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life Annette Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1899 to Richard Henry Smith and his wife. She attended public schools in Baltimore. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under Max Brödel. She attended Johns Hopkins University from 1923 to 1926.
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Walter Gage
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Walter Henry Gage, was a Canadian professor and educational icon, widely acknowledged to have had a large impact on students during his 50 year career at the University of British Columbia, where he rose from undergraduate student to university president.
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Anna Mullikin
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Anna Margaret Mullikin was a mathematician who was one of the early investigators of point set theory. She received her BA from Goucher College in 1915 and went on to attend University of Pennsylvania for doctoral work. She was Robert Lee Moore's third student, graduating in 1922 with a dissertation titled Certain Theorems Relating to Plane Connected Point Sets. Her dissertation was published that year in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and subsequently became the catalyst for significant advances in the field. She spent most of her subsequent career as a secondary school mathematics teacher.
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