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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#951
Gerald B. Whitham
#17360
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Gerald Beresford Whitham FRS was a British–born American applied mathematician and the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied Mathematics of Applied & Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1953 under the direction of Sir James Lighthill. He is known for his work in fluid dynamics and waves.
Go to Profile#952
Kiiti Morita
#22458
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Kiiti Morita was a Japanese mathematician working in algebra and topology. Morita was born in 1915 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture and graduated from the Tokyo Higher Normal School in 1936. Three years later he was appointed assistant at the Tokyo University of Science. He received his Ph.D. from Osaka University in 1950, with a thesis in topology. After teaching at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, he became professor at the University of Tsukuba in 1951. He held this position until 1978, after which he taught at Sophia University. Morita died of heart failure in 1995 at the Sakakibara Heart ...
Go to Profile#953
Aryeh Dvoretzky
#10687
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Aryeh Dvoretzky was a Ukrainian-born Israeli mathematician, the winner of the 1973 Israel Prize in Mathematics. He is best known for his work in functional analysis, statistics and probability. He was the eighth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#954
Rafael E. Núñez
#5151
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Rafael E. Núñez is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and a proponent of embodied cognition. He co-authored Where Mathematics Comes From with George Lakoff.
Go to Profile#955
Nils Dencker
#21376
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nils Jonas Dencker is a Swedish mathematician. Dencker earned his doctorate from Lund University in 1981 under supervision of Lars Hörmander, and is a professor of mathematics at Lund University. From 1981 until 1983, he was the C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#956
Lucien Szpiro
#20261
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Lucien Serge Szpiro was a French mathematician known for his work in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and commutative algebra. He formulated Szpiro's conjecture and was a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and an emeritus at the CNRS.
Go to Profile#957
Chandrashekhar Khare
#14614
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Chandrashekhar B. Khare is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the full conjecture with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. He has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2015, serving as Jury Chair from 2020.
Go to Profile#958
Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande
#15639
Overall Influence
1917 - 2020 (103 years)
Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande was an Indian mathematician with notable achievements in combinatorial mathematics. He was notable for his breakthrough work along with R. C. Bose and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal latin squares of order 4n + 2 for any n. Shrikhande's specialties were combinatorics and statistical designs. The Shrikhande graph is used in statistical design.
Go to Profile#959
Ronald G. Douglas
#19602
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Ronald George Douglas was an American mathematician, best known for his work on operator theory and operator algebras. Education and career Douglas was born in Osgood, Indiana. He was an undergraduate at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. in 1962 from Louisiana State University as a student of Pasquale Porcelli. He was at the University of Michigan until 1969, when he moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Beginning in 1986 he moved into university administration, eventually becoming Vice Provost at Stony Brook in 1990, and Provost at Texas A&M University from 1996 until 2002.
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Emmanuel Breuillard
#21632
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Emmanuel Breuillard is a French mathematician. He was the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, and is now Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford as of January 1, 2022. He had previously been professor at Paris-Sud 11 University.
Go to Profile#961
Robert W. Brooks
#20285
Overall Influence
1952 - 2002 (50 years)
Robert Wolfe Brooks was a mathematician known for his work in spectral geometry, Riemann surfaces, circle packings, and differential geometry. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977; his thesis, The smooth cohomology of groups of diffeomorphisms, was written under the supervision of Raoul Bott. He worked at the University of Maryland , then at the University of Southern California, and then, from 1995, at the Technion in Haifa.
Go to Profile#962
Samit Dasgupta
#19924
Overall Influence
Samit Dasgupta is a professor of mathematics at Duke University working in algebraic number theory. Biography Dasgupta graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1995 and placed fourth in the 1995 Westinghouse Science Talent Search with a project on Schinzel's hypothesis H. He then attended Harvard University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1999. In 2004, Dasgupta received a PhD in mathematics from University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Ken Ribet and Henri Darmon.
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Emma Lehmer
#18279
Overall Influence
1906 - 2007 (101 years)
Emma Markovna Lehmer was a mathematician known for her work on reciprocity laws in algebraic number theory. She preferred to deal with complex number fields and integers, rather than the more abstract aspects of the theory.
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Menahem Max Schiffer
#18815
Overall Influence
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Menahem Max Schiffer Biography Schiffer studied physics from 1930 at the University of Bonn and then at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a number of famous physicists and mathematicians including Max von Laue, Erwin Schrödinger, Walter Nernst, Erhard Schmidt, Issai Schur and Ludwig Bieberbach. In Berlin he worked closely with Issai Schur. In 1934 Schiffer had his first mathematical publication. After the National Socialist regime removed Schur and many others from their academic posts, Schiffer, as a Jew, immigrated to British-controlled Palestine. On the basis of his 1934 mathematical publication, Schiffer received from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem his master's degree in 1934.
Go to Profile#965
John Lennox
#2098
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Carson Lennox is an Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian philosopher. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God , and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Go to Profile#966
Frank Spitzer
#18410
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
Frank Ludvig Spitzer was an Austrian-born American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, including the theory of random walks, fluctuation theory, percolation theory, the Wiener sausage, and especially the theory of interacting particle systems. Rare among mathematicians, he chose to focus broadly on "phenomena", rather than any one of the many specific theorems that might help to articulate a given phenomenon. His book Principles of Random Walk, first published in 1964, remains a well-cited classic.
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Mario Szegedy
#7152
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mario Szegedy is a Hungarian-American computer scientist, professor of computer science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Chicago. He held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , a postdoc at the University of Chicago, 1991–92, and a postdoc at Bell Laboratories .
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Igor Rivin
#16299
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Igor Rivin is a Russian-Canadian mathematician, working in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, and materials science. He was the Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews from 2015 to 2017, and was the chief research officer at Cryptos Fund until 2019. He is doing research for Edgestream LP, in addition to his academic work.
Go to Profile#969
Bhargav Bhatt
#22927
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Bhargav Bhatt is a mathematician who is the Fernholz Joint Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University and works in arithmetic geometry and commutative algebra. Early life and education Bhatt graduated with an B.S. in Applied Mathematics, summa cum laude from Columbia University under the supervision of Shou-Wu Zhang. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2010 under the supervision of Aise Johan de Jong.
Go to Profile#970
John Wermer
#21216
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
John Wermer is a mathematician specializing in Complex analysis. Wermer received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1951 under the supervision of George Whitelaw Mackey. In 1962 Wermer was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm.
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John M. Sullivan
#24419
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
John Matthew Sullivan is an American mathematician who works in Germany as a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. His research includes work on knot theory, constant-mean-curvature surfaces, mathematical foams, scientific visualization, and mesh generation.
Go to Profile#972
Holly Krieger
#19234
Overall Influence
Holly Krieger is a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where she is also the Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College. Her current research interests are in arithmetic and algebraic aspects of families of complex dynamical systems. She is well known for her appearances in the popular mathematics YouTube video series Numberphile.
Go to Profile#973
Boris Trakhtenbrot
#10950
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Boris Abramovich Trakhtenbrot was a Russian-Israeli mathematician in logic, algorithms, theory of computation, and cybernetics. Biography Trakhtenbrot was born into a Jewish family in Brichevo, northern Bessarabia . He studied at the Moldovan State Pedagogical Institute in Kishinev, Chernivtsi University, and the Ukrainian Academy of Science's Mathematical Institute, completing a Ph.D. at the latter institution in 1950.
Go to Profile#974
Jonathan Pila
#17936
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jonathan Solomon Pila FRS is an Australian mathematician at the University of Oxford. Education Pila earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Melbourne in 1984. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford University in 1988, for research supervised by Peter Sarnak. His dissertation was entitled "Frobenius Maps of Abelian Varieties and Finding Roots of Unity in Finite Fields". In 2010 he received an MA from Oxford.
Go to Profile#975
Krassimir Atanassov
#9928
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Krassimir Todorov Atanassov is a Bulgarian mathematician, Corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences . He is best known for introducing the concepts of Generalized nets and Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, which are extensions of the concepts of Petri nets and Fuzzy sets, respectively.
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Penelope Maddy
#6554
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Penelope Maddy is UCI Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. Maddy specializes and is known for her influential work in the philosophy of mathematics and mathematical realism. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979. Maddy’s early work was largely a defense of the position known as mathematical realism or Platonism, in which mathematical objects (like, say, numbers) are real objects in the universe (though abstract). This position resembles that of famous mathematical realists like the great logician Kurt Gödel, though importantly Maddy also considers sets of objects real, as well.
Go to Profile#977
Detlef Laugwitz
#19025
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Detlef Laugwitz was a German mathematician and historian, who worked in differential geometry, history of mathematics, functional analysis, and non-standard analysis. Biography He was born on 11 May 1932 in Breslau, Germany. Starting in 1949, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Georg-August-University at Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1954. Until 1956 he worked in the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach. In 1958 he became a lecturer at the Technical University of Munich, where he obtained his Habilitation. In 1958 he moved to the Technical University of Darmstadt, where in 1962 he became a professor, and remained until his retirement.
Go to Profile#978
K. G. Ramanathan
#21429
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Kollagunta Gopalaiyer Ramanathan was an Indian mathematician known for his work in number theory. His contributions are also to the general development of mathematical research, and teaching in India.
Go to Profile#979
James J. Stoker
#14818
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
James Johnston Stoker was an American applied mathematician and engineer. He was director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is considered one of the founders of the institute, Courant and Friedrichs being the others. Stoker is known for his work in differential geometry and theory of water waves. He is also the author of the now classic book Water Waves: The Mathematical Theory with Applications.
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Michael J. D. Powell
#8518
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Michael James David Powell was a British mathematician, who worked in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Education and early life Born in London, Powell was educated at Frensham Heights School and Eastbourne College. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a Doctor of Science degree in 1979 at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#981
Leo Breiman
#5392
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Leo Breiman was a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
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Alessio Figalli
#16745
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Alessio Figalli is an Italian mathematician working primarily on calculus of variations and partial differential equations. He was awarded the Peccot-Vimont Prize and the Peccot Lectures in 2012, the EMS Prize in 2012, the Stampacchia Medal in 2015, the Feltrinelli Prize in 2017, and the Fields Medal in 2018. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014. In 2016 he was awarded a European Research Council grant, and in 2018 he received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Côte d'Azur. In 2019, he received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Polyte...
Go to Profile#983
Micha Perles
#17067
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Micha Asher Perles is an Israeli mathematician working in geometry, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 from the Hebrew University, under the supervision of Branko Grünbaum. His contributions include:The Perles configuration, a set of nine points in the Euclidean plane whose collinearities can be realized only by using irrational numbers as coordinates. Perles used this configuration to prove the existence of irrational polytopes in higher dimensions.The Perles–Sauer–Shelah lemma, a result in extremal set theory whose proof was credited to Perles by Sahar...
Go to Profile#984
James Sethian
#11183
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Albert Sethian is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the head of the Mathematics Group at the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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David Masser
#17724
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
David William Masser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel. He is known for his work in transcendental number theory, Diophantine approximation, and Diophantine geometry. With Joseph Oesterlé in 1985, Masser formulated the abc conjecture, which has been called "the most important unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis".
Go to Profile#986
Leonard Carlitz
#23751
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Leonard Carlitz was an American mathematician. Carlitz supervised 44 doctorates at Duke University and published over 770 papers. Chronology 1907 Born Philadelphia, PA, USA1927 BA, University of Pennsylvania1930 PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1930 under Howard Mitchell, who had studied under Oswald Veblen at Princeton1930–31 at Caltech with E. T. Bell1931 married Clara Skaler1931–32 at Cambridge with G. H. Hardy1932 Joined the faculty of Duke University where he served for 45 years1938 to 1973 Editorial Board Duke Mathematical Journal 1939 Birth of son Michael1940 Supervision of his first doctoral student E.
Go to Profile#987
Artur Avila
#8801
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo is a Brazilian and naturalized French mathematician working primarily in the fields of dynamical systems and spectral theory. He is one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, being the first Latin American and lusophone to win such an award. He has been a researcher at both the IMPA and the CNRS . He has been a professor at the University of Zurich since September 2018.
Go to Profile#988
Robert V. Kohn
#20512
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert V. Kohn is an American mathematician working on partial differential equations, calculus of variations, mathematical materials science, and mathematical finance. He is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
Go to Profile#989
Peter Roquette
#23841
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Peter Jaques Roquette was a German mathematician working in algebraic geometry, algebra, and number theory. Biography Roquette was born in Königsberg on 8 October 1927. He studied in Erlangen, Berlin, and Hamburg. In 1951 he defended a dissertation at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse, providing a new proof of the Riemann hypothesis for algebraic function fields over a finite field . In 1951/1952 he was an assistant at the Mathematical Research Institute at Oberwolfach and from 1952 to 1954 at the University of Munich. From 1954 to 1956 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
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K. R. Parthasarathy
#18256
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Kalyanapuram Rangachari Parthasarathy was an Indian statistician who was professor emeritus at the Indian Statistical Institute and a pioneer of quantum stochastic calculus. Parthasarathy was the recipient the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in Mathematical Science in 1977 and the TWAS Prize in 1996.
Go to Profile#991
Yousef Saad
#13574
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Yousef Saad in Algiers, Algeria from Boghni, Tizi Ouzou, Kabylia is an I.T. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He holds the William Norris Chair for Large-Scale Computing since January 2006. He is known for his contributions to the matrix computations, including the iterative methods for solving large sparse linear algebraic systems, eigenvalue problems, and parallel computing. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in mathematics, is the most cited author in the journal Numerical Linear Alg...
Go to Profile#992
Éva Tardos
#6844
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Éva Tardos is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks. She has done some work on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory and simple auctions.
Go to Profile#993
Tasawar Hayat
#18294
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tasawar Hayat is a Pakistani mathematician who has made pioneering research contributions to the area of mathematical fluid mechanics. He is considered one of the leading mathematicians working in Pakistan and currently is a Professor of Mathematics at the Quaid-i-Azam University.
Go to Profile#994
Heini Halberstam
#20120
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Heini Halberstam was a Czech-born British mathematician, working in the field of analytic number theory. He is remembered in part for the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture from 1968. Life and career Halberstam was born in Most, Czechoslovakia and died in Champaign, Illinois, US. His father died when he was very young. After Adolf Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, he and his mother moved to Prague. At the age of twelve, as the Nazi occupation progressed, he was one of the 669 children saved by Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the Kindertransport, a train that allowed those children to leave Nazi-occupied territory.
Go to Profile#995
Irene Fonseca
#20840
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Irene Maria Quintanilha Coelho da Fonseca is a Portuguese-American applied mathematician, the Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center for Nonlinear Analysis.
Go to Profile#996
François Loeser
#19783
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
François Loeser is a French mathematician. He is Professor of Mathematics at the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University in Paris. From 2000 to 2010 he was Professor at École Normale Supérieure. Since 2015, he is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Go to Profile#997
Dominique Bakry
#20719
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Roger-Dominique Bakry , known as Dominique Bakry, is a French mathematician, a professor at the Université Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse, and a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France. Bakry graduated from , and prepared his PhD under the advisory of Paul-André Meyer and Marc Yor. Before coming to Toulouse, he was chargé de recherches at CNRS in Université Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg. His scientific work is at the interface of Analysis, Probability, and Geometry. His most influential works concern Riesz transforms and Markov semigroups. He gave his name to the Bakry-Émery criterion, deve...
Go to Profile#998
Maurício Peixoto
#14112
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Maurício Matos Peixoto, , was a Brazilian engineer and mathematician. He pioneered the studies on structural stability, and was the author of Peixoto's theorem. Biography Maurício Peixoto, born in Fortaleza in 1921 to José Carlos de Matos Peixoto and Violeta Rodrigues Peixoto, pursued a career in mathematics since his adolescence. To fulfill his goal, Peixoto enrolled in engineering at the School of Engineering of the current Federal University of Rio de Janeiro .
Go to Profile#999
John Lane Bell
#11538
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Lane Bell is an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, mathematician and logician. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research includes such topics as set theory, model theory, lattice theory, modal logic, quantum logic, constructive mathematics, type theory, topos theory, infinitesimal analysis, spacetime theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of more than 70 articles and of 13 books. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Peter Duren
#17903
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Peter Larkin Duren was an American mathematician. He specialized in mathematical analysis and was known for the monographs and textbooks he has written. Academic career Duren received in 1956 his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and in 1960 his PhD from MIT under Gian-Carlo Rota with thesis Spectral theory of a class of non-self-adjoint infinite matrix operators. As a postdoc he was an instructor at Stanford University. At the University of Michigan, he became in 1962 an assistant professor, in 1966 an associate professor, in 1969 a professor, and in 2010 a professor emeritus.
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