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,
#9451
Frank Heath
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
Sir Henry Frank Heath was a British educationist and civil servant. He was the eldest son of Henry Charles Heath, miniature pointer to Queen Victoria. He was educated at Westminster School and University College, London, after which he spent a year at the University of Strasbourg. When he came back to England he was appointed Professor of English at Bedford College, London , and lecturer in English language and literature at King's College, London.
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William Dawson
1704 - 1752 (48 years)
William Dawson was an Anglican clergyman, poet and member of the Governor's Council of Virginia who became the second president of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia . Early life and education Dawson was born in Cumberland, England in 1704. He began studies at Queen's College of Oxford University when he was 15 years old, graduated with a M.A. in 1728, and was admitted as a fellow of the college in 1733 . His younger brother Thomas Dawson also emigrated to the colony to become rector of Bruton Parish in Williamburg by 1743, and would become the fourth president of Willia...
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Hassan al-Jabarti
1698 - 1774 (76 years)
Hassan al-Jabarti was a Somali mathematician, theologian, astronomer and philosopher who lived in Cairo, Egypt during the 18th century. Biography Al-Jabarti was the father of the historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, and originated from the Somali city of Zeila. Hassan is considered one of the great scholars of the 18th century. He frequently conducted experiments in his own house, which was visited and observed by Western students.
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William Greenfield
1755 - 1827 (72 years)
William Greenfield FRSE was a Scottish minister, professor of rhetoric and belles lettres, literary critic, reviewer, and author whose clerical career ended in scandal, resulting in him being excommunicated from the Church of Scotland, having his university degrees withdrawn, and his family assuming his wife's patronymic Rutherfurd.
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N. C. Wyeth
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Newell Convers Wyeth , known as N. C. Wyeth, was an American painter and illustrator. He was a student of Howard Pyle and became one of America's most well-known illustrators. Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books — 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the body of work for which he is best known. The first of these, Treasure Island, was one of his masterpieces and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly.
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Lucy Toulmin Smith
1838 - 1911 (73 years)
Lucy Toulmin Smith was an Anglo-American antiquarian and librarian, known for her first publication of the York Mystery Plays and other early works. Life Toulmin Smith was born at Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on 21 November 1838, of English parents, Joshua Toulmin Smith and his wife Martha. She was the eldest child of a family of three daughters and two sons. In 1842 the Toulmin Smiths returned to England and settled in Highgate, Middlesex. She was educated at home, and went on to assist her father in editing his journal the Parliamentary Remembrancer . After his death she completed his volume...
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Joseph-Alfred Serret
1819 - 1885 (66 years)
Joseph-Alfred Serret was a French mathematician who was born in Paris, France, and died in Versailles, France. See also Frenet–Serret formulas Books by J.-A. Serret Traité de trigonométrie Cours de calcul differentiel et integral t. 1 Cours de calcul differentiel et integral t. 2 Cours d'algèbre supérieure. Tome I Cours d'algèbre supérieure. Tome II
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Ethel Hurlbatt
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Ethel Hurlbatt was Principal of Bedford College, University of London, and later Warden of Royal Victoria College, the women's college of McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which had opened in 1899.
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Howard Lindsay
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Howard Lindsay, born Herman Nelke, was an American playwright, librettist, director, actor and theatrical producer. He is best known for his writing work as part of the collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, and for his performance, with his wife Dorothy Stickney, in the long-running play Life with Father.
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Henry Erle Richards
1861 - 1922 (61 years)
Sir Henry Erle Richards, , also Erle Richards or H. Erle Richards, was the Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford University, the Legal Member of Council in British India. He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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Mary Annette Anderson
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Mary Annette Anderson was an American professor of grammar and history and the first African American woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Anderson was born in Shoreham, Vermont, to William and Philomine Anderson. Her father, a farmer, was a freed slave originally from Virginia, and her mother was a Canadian immigrant of French and Native American ancestry. Her younger brother, William John Anderson Jr., became the second African American to serve in the Vermont General Assembly. Anderson attended the Northfield School for Young Ladies in Northfield, Massachusetts, and entered Middlebury College in 1895.
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Olive Wheeler
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Dame Olive Annie Wheeler, DBE was a Welsh educationist and psychologist, and Professor of Education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff University. Early life Born at the High Street in Brecon, Olive Wheeler was the younger daughter of Annie Wheeler, Poole, and her husband, Henry Burford Wheeler. Henry Wheeler was a master printer and publisher. She attended Brecon County School for Girls. She received an Honours Central Welsh Board Certificate in 1904. She attended University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and graduated with a BSc in Chemistry in 1907, and a MSc in 1911.
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Stanley Anderson
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Alfred Charles Stanley Anderson was a British engraver, etcher and watercolour painter. Anderson was principally known for the series of highly detailed engravings of traditional British crafts that he completed over a twenty-year period beginning in 1933.
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Frederic Leighton
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, , known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.
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Con Conrad
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Con Conrad was an American songwriter and producer. Biography Conrad was born in Manhattan, New York, and published his first song, "Down in Dear Old New Orleans", in 1912. Conrad produced the Broadway show The Honeymoon Express, starring Al Jolson, in 1913. By 1918, Conrad was writing and publishing with Henry Waterson . He co-composed "Margie" in 1920 with J. Russel Robinson and lyricist Benny Davis, which became his first major hit. He went on to compose hits that became standards, including:"Palesteena" with co-composer and co-lyricist J. Russel Robinson "Singin' the Blues" with co-composer J.
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Jean Piveteau
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Jean Piveteau was a distinguished French vertebrate paleontologist. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1956 and served as the institute's president in 1973. Legacy Two genera of Triassic fish, the actinopterygian Piveteaunotus and the actinistian Piveteauia, and a genus of Middle Jurassic theropod dinosaur, Piveteausaurus, are named in his honor.
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Johann Nepomuk Schaller
1777 - 1842 (65 years)
Johann Nepomuk Schaller was an Austrian sculptor. His most famous work is a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven at age 55, created at the request of the composer's secretary Karl Holz in 1825. It was later presented to the Royal Philharmonic Society, London, on the occasion of the Beethoven Centennial.
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Gottfried Baist
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Gottfried Baist was a German Hispanist and Romance studies scholar. Selected works Die spanische Sprache, in: Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, ed. by Gustav Gröber vol. 1, Strassburg 1888, S. 689–714, 2. Aufl. 1904, S. 878 - 915Die spanische Literatur, in: Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, ed. by Gustav Gröber, 1. volume, 2. Abt., Strassburg 1897, S. 383–466, 2nd edition, Strassburg 1904-06Grammatik der Spanischen Sprache, 2nd edition, Strassburg 1906 Juan Manuel, El libro de la caza, Halle a.S. 1880, Hildesheim 1984 Antonio Muñoz, Aventuras en verso y prossa, Halle a.S. 1907
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Ella Eaton Kellogg
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Ella Eaton Kellogg was an American dietitian known for her work on home economics and vegetarian cooking. She was educated at Alfred University ; and the American School Household Economics . In 1875, Kellogg visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became interested in the subjects of sanitation and hygiene, and a year later enrolled in the Sanitarium School of Hygiene. Later on, she joined the editorial staff of Good Health magazine, and in 1879, married Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
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František Josef Studnička
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
František Josef Studnička was a Czech mathematician and popular pedagogue at Charles University in Prague. He was also an active contributor to astronomy and meteorology. He was known as the author of several textbooks and popular articles.
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Robert Smirke
1753 - 1845 (92 years)
Robert Smirke was an English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings showing subjects taken from literature. He was a member of the Royal Academy. Life Smirke was born at Wigton near Carlisle, the son of a travelling artist. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a heraldic painter in London, and at the age of twenty began to study at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1775 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, with which he began to exhibit by sending five works; he showed works there again in 1777 and 1778. In 1786 he exhibited Narcissus and The Lady and...
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W. R. Scott
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
William Robert Scott was a political economist who was Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow from 1915 to 1940. Career Born in Omagh, County Tyrone, on 31 August 1868, William Robert Scott was the son of Charles Scott, JP, of Lisnamallard in Omagh. He attended Trinity College, Dublin; graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889, Scott won the Wray Prize and was First Senior Moderator in Logics and Ethics. He proceeded to a Master of Arts degree two years later, and joined the University of St Andrews in 1896 as assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy .
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Johannes Bjerg
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Johannes Clausen Bjerg was a Danish sculptor who worked primarily in the El Greco-style. Early life Born in Ødis near Kolding, Bjerg attended the Latin School in Kolding before serving an apprenticeship with A.L. Johansen & Son in 1907 during which he created an oak bust of his father. Thereafter he spent an extended period in Copenhagen during which he created a silver medal for a bronze bust of his father. In 1911, he went to Paris to associate with progressive artists of the times such as Picasso, leading to his Cubic bronze bust of the Finnish sculptor Bertil Nilsson .
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Niels Simonsen
1807 - 1885 (78 years)
Niels Simonsen was a Danish painter, lithographer and sculptor. Biography Simonsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Simnon Rasmusson and Bolette Nielsdatter. His parents were shopkeepers. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a master decorative painter and began to take drawing lessons at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he took private lessons from Johan Ludwig Lund.
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Moritz Schröter
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Maximilian Moritz Schröter was a German industrial engineer and university professor of thermodynamics and the theory of machines. Life and career Moritz Schröter was the son of Moritz Schröter, who himself was a university professor. After his father′s death in 1867, Gustav Zeuner became the guardian of 16-year-old Schröter. After finishing the Gymnasium in Zürich, Schröter studied at the Polytechnikum Zürich, where he was awarded a diploma in engineering. From 1873 to 1876 he worked in the locomotive factory Georg Sigl in Wiener Neustadt. He then returned to Zürich, to become the university assistant of Georg Veith.
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Walter Georgi
1871 - 1924 (53 years)
Walter Georgi was a German painter and illustrator; known for his female portraits. Life and work His father, the jurist , was elected Mayor of Leipzig when Walter was five years old. From 1882 to 1888, he attended the . In 1890, he took lessons at the local Academy of Fine Arts, then transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Leon Pohle. Finally, in 1893, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His primary instructor there was Paul Hoecker.
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Hans Hartmann-McLean
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Hans Hartmann-McLean was a German sculptor. He studied from 1879 to 1885 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his tutors included Johannes Schilling.
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Caspar Scheuren
1810 - 1887 (77 years)
Caspar Johann Nepomuk Scheuren was a German painter and illustrator. Biography His father, was also an artist. After receiving his initial training at home, he studied landscape painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, from 1829 to 1835. His Romantic tendencies were encouraged by his admiration for the works of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Carl Friedrich Lessing. He was also inspired by the writings of Sir Walter Scott.
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Vladimir Markov
1871 - 1897 (26 years)
Vladimir Andreyevich Markov was a mathematician, known for proving the Markov brothers' inequality with his older brother Andrey Markov. He was from the Russian Empire. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
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Felix Hausdorff
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Felix Hausdorff was a German mathematician, pseudonym Paul Mongré, who is considered to be one of the founders of modern topology and who contributed significantly to set theory, descriptive set theory, measure theory, and functional analysis.
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Franciszek Leja
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Franciszek Leja was a Polish mathematician. He was born to a poor peasant family in the southeastern Poland. After graduating from the University of Lwów he was a teacher of mathematics and physics in high schools from 1910 until 1923, among others in Kraków. From 1924 until 1936 he was a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and Warsaw University, from 1936 until 1960 in the Jagiellonian University.
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Stanisław Ruziewicz
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Stanisław Ruziewicz was a Polish mathematician and one of the founders of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was a former student of Wacław Sierpiński, earning his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Lwów; his thesis concerned continuous functions that are not differentiable. He became a professor at the same university and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. During the Second World War, Ruziewicz's home city of Lwów was annexed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but then taken over by the General Government of German-occupied Poland in July 1941; Ruziewicz was arr...
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Carl Anton Bretschneider
1808 - 1878 (70 years)
Carl Anton Bretschneider was a mathematician from Gotha, Germany. Bretschneider worked in geometry, number theory, and history of geometry. He also worked on logarithmic integrals and mathematical tables for Euler's constant when he published his 1837 paper. He is best known for his discovery of Bretschneider's formula for the area of a general quadrilateral on a plane,
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Otto Haupt
1887 - 1988 (101 years)
Otto Haupt was a German mathematician. Biography Haupt obtained his PhD in 1911 under the supervision of Georg Rost and Emil Hilb at the University of Würzburg, and became a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He retired from teaching in 1953, but continued his mathematical research for many subsequent years.
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Sofya Yanovskaya
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Sofya Aleksandrovna Yanovskaya was a Soviet mathematician and historian, specializing in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. She is best known for her efforts in restoring the research of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union and publishing and editing the mathematical works of Karl Marx.
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Lyudmila Keldysh
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology. Biography Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh. Her family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage. Because her father was a construction expert for the military, they moved frequently and she lived in Helsinki between 1905 and 1907, then in Saint Petersburg until 1909, and then moved to Riga, Latvia.
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Orymbek Zhautykov
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Orymbek Akhmetbekovich Zhautykov was a Kazakh mathematician. His mathematical work focussed on stability theory of motion, equations which govern physics and infinite systems of differential equations. Throughout his life he published many different pieces of work including research papers, textbooks and biographies of mathematicians on their birth/death anniversaries.
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Kazimierz Zarankiewicz
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Kazimierz Zarankiewicz was a Polish mathematician and Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who was interested primarily in topology and graph theory. Biography Zarankiewicz was born in Częstochowa to father Stanisław and mother Józefa . He studied at the University of Warsaw, together with Zygmunt Janiszewski, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Stanisław Saks.
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment, especially electric motorss for use in industry.
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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
1718 - 1799 (81 years)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.
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Wilhelm Lexis
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Wilhelm Lexis , full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
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G. B. Halsted
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
George Bruce Halsted , usually cited as G. B. Halsted, was an American mathematician who explored foundations of geometry and introduced non-Euclidean geometry into the United States through his translations of works by Bolyai, Lobachevski, Saccheri, and Poincaré. He wrote an elementary geometry text, Rational Geometry, based on Hilbert's axioms, which was translated into French, German, and Japanese. Halsted produced original works in synthetic geometry, first with an elementary text in 1896, and with a text on synthetic projective geometry in 1906.
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Adolf Kneser
1862 - 1930 (68 years)
Adolf Kneser was a German mathematician. He was born in Grüssow, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and died in Breslau, Germany. He is the father of the mathematician Hellmuth Kneser and the grandfather of the mathematician Martin Kneser.
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Edmund Berkeley
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Edmund Callis Berkeley was an American computer scientist who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. His 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think popularized cognitive images of early computers. He was also a social activist who worked to achieve conditions that might minimize the threat of nuclear war.
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Jost Bürgi
1552 - 1632 (80 years)
Jost Bürgi , active primarily at the courts in Kassel and Prague, was a Swiss clockmaker, a maker of astronomical instruments and a mathematician. Life Bürgi was born in 1552 Lichtensteig, Toggenburg, at the time a subject territory of the Abbey of St. Gall . Not much is known about his life or education before his employment as astronomer and clockmaker at the court of William IV in Kassel in 1579; it has been theorized that he acquired his mathematical knowledge at Strasbourg, among others from Swiss mathematician Conrad Dasypodius, but there are no facts to support this.
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John Monroe Van Vleck
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
John Monroe Van Vleck was an American mathematician and astronomer. He taught astronomy and mathematics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut for more than 50 years , and served as acting university president twice. The Van Vleck Observatory and the crater Van Vleck on the Moon are named after him.
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Ctesibius
284 BC - 221 BC (63 years)
Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius was a Greek inventor and mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps . This, in combination with his work On pneumatics on the elasticity of air, earned him the title of "father of pneumatics." None of his written work has survived, including his Memorabilia, a compilation of his research that was cited by Athenaeus. Ctesibius' most commonly known invention today is a pipe organ , a predecessor of the modern church organ.
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Richard Montague
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
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Georg Joachim Rheticus
1514 - 1574 (60 years)
Georg Joachim de Porris, also known as Rheticus , was a mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, navigational-instrument maker, medical practitioner, and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his trigonometric tables and as Nicolaus Copernicus's sole pupil. He facilitated the publication of his master's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium .
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