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,
#9501
Joshua King
1798 - 1857 (59 years)
Joshua King was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1839 to 1849. He was also the President of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1832 until his death and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1833–4.
Go to Profile#9502
Eugenio Bertini
1846 - 1933 (87 years)
Eugenio Bertini was an Italian mathematician who introduced Bertini's theorem. He was born at Forlì and died at Pisa. Selected works
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Carl Størmer
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Fredrik Carl Mülertz Størmer was a Norwegian mathematician and astrophysicist. In mathematics, he is known for his work in number theory, including the calculation of and Størmer's theorem on consecutive smooth numbers. In physics, he is known for studying the movement of charged particles in the magnetosphere and the formation of aurorae, and for his book on these subjects, From the Depths of Space to the Heart of the Atom. He worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Oslo in Norway. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
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James G. Oldroyd
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
James Gardner Oldroyd was a British mathematician and noted rheologist. He formulated the Oldroyd-B model to describe the viscoelastic behaviour of non-Newtonian fluids. Life Oldroyd was born in 1921 and educated at Bradford Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge. On graduation, during the Second World War, he worked for the Ministry of Supply. After the war he joined the Research Laboratory of Courtaulds. In 1946 he married Marged Katryn Evans. In 1953 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Wales, Swansea until 1965 and head of the Applied Mathematics department from 1957.
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Aldo Andreotti
1924 - 1980 (56 years)
Aldo Andreotti was an Italian mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, on the theory of functions of several complex variables and on partial differential operators. Notably he proved the Andreotti–Frankel theorem, the Andreotti–Grauert theorem, the Andreotti–Vesentini theorem and introduced, jointly with François Norguet, the Andreotti–Norguet integral representation for functions of several complex variables.
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Eustachy Żyliński
1889 - 1954 (65 years)
Eustachy Karol Żyliński was a Polish mathematician and university professor known for his work on number theory, algebra, and logic. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Biography Early life and career Żyliński was born in to a landless noble family. In 1907 he graduated with a gold medal from the gymnasium in Kiev, and in 1911 with a first-degree diploma from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Imperial Saint Vladimir University in Kiev, where he then worked from 1912to 1914, while doing internships in Göttingen, Cambridge and Marburg. In 1914 he obtai...
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Gaston Tarry
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Gaston Tarry was a French mathematician. Born in Villefranche de Rouergue, Aveyron, he studied mathematics at high school before joining the civil service in Algeria. He pursued mathematics as an amateur.
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Herbert William Richmond
1863 - 1948 (85 years)
Herbert William Richmond was a mathematician who studied the Cremona–Richmond configuration. One of his most popular works is an exact construction of the regular heptadecagon in 1893 . Herbert was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1911. On the 22 April 1948, Herbert died in Cambridge, England.
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Philipp von Jolly
1809 - 1884 (75 years)
Johann Philipp Gustav von Jolly was a German physicist and mathematician. Born in Mannheim as the son of merchant Louis Jolly and Marie Eleonore Jolly, he studied science in Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin. After his studies, he was appointed professor of mathematics in Heidelberg in 1839 and physics in 1846. He moved to Munich in 1854, where he took the position once held by Georg Simon Ohm. In 1854, he was knighted .
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Giuseppe Battaglini
1826 - 1894 (68 years)
Giuseppe Battaglini was an Italian mathematician. He studied mathematics at the Scuola d'Applicazione di Ponti e Strade of Naples. In 1860 he was appointed professor of Geometria superiore at the University of Naples. Alfredo Capelli and Giovanni Frattini were his Laurea students.
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Boleslav Mlodzeevskii
1858 - 1923 (65 years)
Boleslav Kornelievich Mlodzeevskii, also Mlodzievskii was a Russian mathematician, a former president of the Moscow Mathematical Society. He was working in differential and algebraic geometry. Biography Mlodzeevskii was born in Moscow July 10, 1858. His father was a doctor, a professor at Moscow University; he died when Boleslav was seven. After finishing Moscow gymnasium with a gold medal, he studied at Moscow University, where he received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1886, in differential geometry. In his dissertation he studied the problem of deformation of surfaces; his advisor was Vasily Zinger.
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Philippa Fawcett
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Philippa Garrett Fawcett was an English mathematician and educationalist. She was the first woman to obtain the top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams. She taught at Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the normal school in Johannesburg, and she became an administrator for the London County Council.
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Jacques Touchard
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Jacques Touchard was a French mathematician. In 1953, he proved that an odd perfect number must be of the form 12k + 1 or 36k + 9. In combinatorics and probability theory, he introduced the Touchard polynomials. He is also known for his solution to the ménage problem of counting seating arrangements in which men and women alternate and are not seated next to their spouses.
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Semyon Aranovich Gershgorin
1901 - 1933 (32 years)
Semyon Aronovich Gershgorin was a Soviet mathematician. He began as a student at the Petrograd Technological Institute in 1923, became a Professor in 1930, and was given an appointment at the Leningrad Mechanical Engineering Institute in the same year. His contributions include the Gershgorin circle theorem.
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James Mills Peirce
1834 - 1906 (72 years)
James Mills Peirce was an American mathematician and educator. He taught at Harvard University for almost 50 years. Early life and family Peirce was born May 1, 1834, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son of Sarah Hunt Peirce and Benjamin Peirce , a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. The family was considered part of the Boston Brahmin elite class. The surname is pronounced to rhyme with "". Benjamin Peirce's father, also named Benjamin, was librarian at Harvard. James had four younger siblings; one brother was philosopher, logician and professor Charles Sanders Peirce .
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Galina Tyurina
1938 - 1970 (32 years)
Galina Nikolaevna Tyurina was a Soviet mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Despite dying young, she was known for "a series of brilliant papers" on the classification of complex or algebraic structures on topological spaces, on K3 surfaces, on singular points of algebraic varieties, and on the rigidity of complex structures. She was the only woman among a group of "exceptionally brilliant" Soviet mathematicians who became active in the 1960s and "quickly became the leaders and the driving forces of Soviet mathematics".
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John Dougall
1867 - 1960 (93 years)
Dr John Dougall FRSE was "one of Scotland's leading mathematicians". Two formulas are named Dougall's formula after him: one for the sum of a 7F6 hypergeometric series, and another for the sum of a bilateral hypergeometric series.
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John Wesley Young
1879 - 1932 (53 years)
John Wesley Young was an American mathematician who, with Oswald Veblen, introduced the axioms of projective geometry, coauthored a 2-volume work on them, and proved the Veblen–Young theorem. He was a proponent of Euclidean geometry and held it to be substantially "more convenient to employ" than non-Euclidean geometry. His lectures on algebra and geometry were compiled in 1911 and released as Lectures on Fundamental Concepts of Algebra and Geometry.
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Henri Delannoy
1833 - 1915 (82 years)
Henri–Auguste Delannoy was a French army officer and amateur mathematician, after whom the Delannoy numbers are named. Delannoy grew up in Guéret, France, the son of a military accountant. After taking the baccalaureate in 1849, he studied mathematics in Bourges, near where his family lived, and after continuing his studies in Paris entered the École Polytechnique in 1853. He served as a lieutenant in the French artillery in the Second Italian War of Independence, in 1859, and became a captain in 1863. He continued to serve in the military, but shifted from the artillery to the supply corps; ...
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Werner Weber
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Werner Weber was a German mathematician. He was one of the Noether boys, the doctoral students of Emmy Noether. Considered scientifically gifted but a modest mathematician, he was also an extreme Nazi, who would later take part in driving Jewish mathematicians out of the University of Göttingen.
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Jacques Charles
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Jacques Alexandre César Charles was a French inventor, scientist, mathematician, and balloonist. Charles wrote almost nothing about mathematics, and most of what has been credited to him was due to mistaking him with another Jacques Charles, also a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, entering on 12 May 1785. He was sometimes called Charles the Geometer.
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Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja
1803 - 1869 (66 years)
Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was an Italian count and mathematician, who became known for his love and subsequent theft of ancient and precious manuscripts. After being appointed the Inspector of Libraries in France, Libri began stealing the books he was responsible for. He fled to England when the theft was discovered, along with 30,000 books and manuscripts inside 18 trunks. In France, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail in absentia; some of the stolen works were returned when he died, but many remained missing.
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Georges Giraud
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Georges Julien Giraud was a French mathematician, working in potential theory, partial differential equations, singular integrals and singular integral equations: he is mainly known for his solution of the regular oblique derivative problem and also for his extension to –dimensional singular integral equations of the concept of symbol of a singular integral, previously introduced by Solomon Mikhlin.
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John Pell
1611 - 1685 (74 years)
John Pell was an English mathematician and political agent abroad. Early life He was born at Southwick in Sussex. His father, also named John Pell, was from Southwick, and his mother was Mary Holland, from Halden in Kent. The second of two sons, Pell's older brother was Thomas Pell. By the time he was six, they were orphans, their father dying in 1616 and their mother the following year. John Pell the elder had a fine library, which proved valuable to the young Pell as he grew up. He was educated at Steyning Grammar School and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 13. During his university career he became an accomplished linguist; even before taking a B.A.
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Julian Coolidge
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Julian Lowell Coolidge was an American mathematician, historian, a professor and chairman of the Harvard University Mathematics Department. Biography Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University.
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Johann Georg Büsch
1728 - 1800 (72 years)
Johann Georg Büsch was a German mathematics teacher and writer on statistics and commerce. Biography He was educated at Hamburg and Göttingen, and in 1756 was made professor of mathematics in the Hamburg gymnasium, which post he held until his death. Besides suggesting many theoretical improvements in the carrying on of trade by the city, he brought about the establishment of an association for the promotion of art and industry , and the foundation of a school of trade, instituted in 1767, which became under his direction one of the most noted establishments of its class in the world. For som...
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William Schieffelin Claytor
1908 - 1967 (59 years)
William Schieffelin Claytor was an American mathematician specializing in topology. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, where his father was a dentist. He was the third African-American to get a Ph.D. in mathematics, and the first to publish in a mathematical research journal.
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Valery Glivenko
1896 - 1940 (44 years)
Valery Ivanovich Glivenko was a Soviet mathematician. He worked in foundations of mathematics, real analysis, probability theory, and mathematical statistics. He taught at Moscow Industrial Pedagogical Institute until his death at age 43. Most of Glivenko's work was published in French.
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Georg Helm
1851 - 1923 (72 years)
Georg Ferdinand Helm was a German mathematician. Helm graduated from high school from the Annenschule in Dresden in 1867. Thereafter he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the Dresden Polytechnical School, and then at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin from 1871 to 1873.
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Simon von Stampfer
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Simon Ritter von Stampfer , in Windisch-Mattrai, Archbishopric of Salzburg today called Matrei in Osttirol, Tyrol – 10 November 1864 in Viennathe phenakistiscope Life Youth and education Simon Ritter von Stampfer was born in Matrei in Osttirol, and was the first son of Bartlmä Stampfer, a weaver. From 1801 he attended the local school and in 1804 and moved to the Franciscan Gymnasium in Lienz, where he studied until 1807. From there he went to the Lyceum in Salzburg, to study philosophy, however he was not assessed.
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Hasan Tahsini
1811 - 1881 (70 years)
Hoxhë Hasan Tahsini or simply Hoxha Tahsim was an Albanian alim, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. He was the first rector of Istanbul University and one of the founders of the Central Committee for Defending Albanian Rights. Tahsini is regarded as one of the most prominent scholars of the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
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Ugo Amaldi
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Ugo Amaldi was an Italian mathematician. He contributed to the field of analytic geometry and worked on Lie groups. His son Edoardo was a physicist. Biography He graduated in mathematics at the University of Bologna under the guidance of S. Pincherle. He taught at the University of Cagliari , Modena , Padova , Roma .
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Béla Kerékjártó
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Béla Kerékjártó was a Hungarian mathematician who wrote numerous articles on topology. Kerékjártó earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Budapest in 1920. He taught at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Szeged starting in 1922. In 1921 he introduced his program with a talk "On topological fundamentals of analysis and geometry" where he advocated that "complex analysis should be built with instruments of topology without metric elements such as length and area."
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Thomas Fiske
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Thomas Scott Fiske was an American mathematician. He was born in New York City and graduated in 1885 from Columbia University, where he was a fellow, assistant, tutor, instructor, and adjunct professor until 1897, when he became professor of mathematics. In 1899 he was acting dean of Barnard College. He was president in 1902–04 of the American Mathematical Society, and he also edited the Bulletin and Transactions of this society. In 1902 he became secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board. In 1905–06 he also served as president of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics of the Middle States and Maryland.
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John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
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Ramchundra
1821 - 1880 (59 years)
Ramchundra was a British Indian mathematician. His book, Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima, was promoted by mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Writing in his preface to the treatise, De Morgan states that Ramchundra was born in 1821 in Panipat to Sunder Lal, a Kayasth of Delhi. He came to De Morgan’s attention when, in 1850, a friend sent him Ramchundra’s work on maxima and minima. The 29-year-old self-taught mathematician had published the book at his own expense in Calcutta in that year. De Morgan was so impressed that he arranged for the book to be republished in London under his ...
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Ferdinand Gonseth
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ferdinand Gonseth was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher. He was born on 22 September 1890 at Sonvilier, the son of Ferdinand Gonseth, a clockmaker, and his wife Marie Bourquin. He studied at La Chaux-de-Fonds, and read physics and mathematics at ETH Zurich, from 1910 to 1914.
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Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs was a French mathematician who worked on analysis and geometry. He was elected as Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union after the first world war, and used his position to exclude countries with whom France had been at war from the mathematical congresses.
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Marino Ghetaldi
1568 - 1626 (58 years)
Marino Ghetaldi was a Ragusan scientist. A mathematician and physicist who studied in Italy, England and Belgium, his best results are mainly in physics, especially optics, and mathematics. He was one of the few students of François Viète and friend of Giovanni Camillo Glorioso.
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Edmund Hess
1843 - 1903 (60 years)
Edmund Hess was a German mathematician who discovered several regular polytopes. See also Schläfli–Hess polychoronHess polytope
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Charles Graves
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Charles Graves was an Irish mathematician, academic, and clergyman. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin , and was president of the Royal Irish Academy . He served as dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, and later as Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. He was the brother of both the jurist and mathematician John Graves, and the writer and clergyman Robert Perceval Graves.
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Johann III Bernoulli
1744 - 1807 (63 years)
Johann III Bernoulli , grandson of Johann Bernoulli and son of Johann II Bernoulli, was a Swiss mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and geographer, known around the world as a child prodigy. Biography He studied at Basel and at Neuchâtel, and when thirteen years of age took the degree of doctor in philosophy. When he was fourteen, he got the degree of master of jurisprudence. At nineteen he was appointed astronomer royal of Berlin. A year later, he reorganized the astronomical observatory at the Berlin Academy. Some years after, he visited Germany, France and England, and subsequently Italy, Courland, Russia and Poland.
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Jean-Charles de Borda
1733 - 1799 (66 years)
Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda was a French mathematician, physicist, and Navy officer. Biography Borda was born in the city of Dax to Jean‐Antoine de Borda and Jeanne‐Marie Thérèse de Lacroix. In 1756, Borda wrote Mémoire sur le mouvement des projectiles, a product of his work as a military engineer. For that, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1764.
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Eugen Jahnke
1863 - 1921 (58 years)
Paul Rudolf Eugen Jahnke was a German mathematician. Jahnke studied mathematics and physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he graduated in 1886. In 1889 he received his doctorate from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg under Albert Wangerin on the integration of first-order ordinary differential equations. After that, he was a teacher at secondary schools in Berlin, where he simultaneously in 1901 taught at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and in 1905 he became a professor at the Mining Academy in Berlin, which merged in 1916 with the Berlin Institute of Technology.
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Ahmad ibn Yusuf
835 - 912 (77 years)
Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Tammam al-Siddiq Al-Baghdadi , known in the West by his Latinized name Hametus, was a Muslim Arab mathematician, like his father Yusuf ibn Ibrahim . Life Ahmad ibn Yusuf was born in Baghdad and moved with his father to Damascus in 839. He later moved to Cairo, but the exact date is unknown: since he was also known as al-Misri, which means the Egyptian, this probably happened at an early age. Eventually, he also died in Cairo. He probably grew up in a strongly intellectual environment: his father worked on Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine, produced astronomical tables and was a member of a group of scholars.
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Alfred Tauber
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Alfred Tauber was an Austrian Empire-born Austrian mathematician, known for his contribution to mathematical analysis and to the theory of functions of a complex variable: he is the eponym of an important class of theorems with applications ranging from mathematical and harmonic analysis to number theory. He was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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Saly Ruth Ramler
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Saly Ruth Ramler , also known as Saly Ruth Struik, was the first woman to receive a mathematics PhD from the German University in Prague, now known as Charles University. Her 1919 dissertation, on the axioms of affine geometry, was supervised by Gerhard Kowalewski and Georg Alexander Pick. She married the Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics Dirk Jan Struik in 1923. Between 1924 and 1926, the pair traveled Europe and met many prominent mathematicians, using Dirk Struik's Rockefeller fellowship. In 1926, they emigrated to the United States, and Dirk Struik accepted a position at MI...
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John Keill
1671 - 1721 (50 years)
John Keill FRS was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher, and cryptographer who was an important defender of Isaac Newton. Biography Keill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 December 1671. His father was Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. His brother, James Keill, became a noted physician.
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Iosif Gikhman
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Iosif Ilyich Gikhman was a Soviet mathematician. Gikhman is well known for a comprehensive treatise on the theory of stochastic processes, co-authored with Skorokhod. In the words of mathematician and probability theorist Daniel W. Stroock "Gikhman and Skorokhod have done an excellent job of presenting the theory in its present state of rich imperfection.”
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Francesco Tricomi
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Francesco Giacomo Tricomi was an Italian mathematician famous for his studies on mixed type partial differential equations. He was also the author of a book on integral equations. Biography Tricomi was born in Naples. He first enrolled in the University of Bologna, where he took chemistry courses. However, Tricomi realized that he preferred physics rather than chemistry; he moved to the University of Naples in 1915. He graduated at the University of Naples in 1918 and later was assistant to Francesco Severi, first in Padua and then in Rome. Later he was professor at Turin, called by Giuseppe...
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