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,
#9551
Frances Cope
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Frances Cope, also known as Frances Thorndike , was an American mathematician who published on irregular differential equations. The Thorndike nomogram, a two-dimensional diagram of the Poisson distribution, is named for her.
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Ivan Ivanov
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian-Soviet mathematician who worked in the field of number theory. Together with Georgy Voronoy he continued Pafnuty Chebyshev's work on the subject. Life and work Ivanov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He finished his studies in mathematics at Saint Petersburg University with his candidate thesis, "About prime numbers". In 1891 there followed his master thesis "integral complex numbers", and in 1901 his doctoral thesis, "About some questions in connection with the number of prime numbers".
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Evelyn Fix
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Evelyn Fix was a statistician. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned at M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965.
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Willem Abraham Wythoff
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
Willem Abraham Wythoff, born Wijthoff , was a Dutch mathematician. Biography Wythoff was born in Amsterdam to Anna C. F. Kerkhoven and Abraham Willem Wijthoff, who worked in a sugar refinery. He studied at the University of Amsterdam, and earned his Ph.D. in 1898 under the supervision of Diederik Korteweg.
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Franz Woepcke
1826 - 1864 (38 years)
Franz Woepcke was a German historian, Orientalist and mathematician. He is remembered for publishing editions and translations of medieval Arabic mathematical manuscripts and for his research on the propagation of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in the medieval era.
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Daniel Edwin Rutherford
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Daniel Edwin Rutherford FRSE was a Scottish mathematician, known for his work on the representation theory of symmetric groups. Biography Rutherford completed his secondary education at Perth Academy in 1924 and then, with the aid of a bursary, he went to the University of St Andrews, where he received his B.Sc. in 1927 and his M.A. in 1928 in mathematics. Upon the advice of Herbert Turnbull, Rutherford did his graduate work at the University of Amsterdam, where he wrote a doctorandus thesis under Roland Weitzenböck. Rutherford's dissertation was published in 1932 as Modular Invariants in the Cambridge Tracts.
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John Macnaghten Whittaker
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
John Macnaghten Whittaker FRS FRSE LLD was a British mathematician and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield from 1953 to 1965. Life Whittaker was born 7 March 1905 in Cambridge, the son of mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker and his wife, Mary Ferguson Macnaghten Boyd .
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André Tacquet
1612 - 1660 (48 years)
André Tacquet was a Brabantian mathematician and Jesuit priest. Tacquet adhered to the methods of the geometry of Euclid and the philosophy of Aristotle and opposed the method of indivisibles. Life André Tacquet was born in Antwerp, and entered the Jesuit Order in 1629. From 1631 to 1635, he studied mathematics, physics and logic at Leuven. Two of his teachers were Grégoire de Saint-Vincent and Francois d'Aguilon.
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Louis Couffignal
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Louis Pierre Couffignal was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer, born in Monflanquin. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School.
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Jean Prestet
1648 - 1690 (42 years)
Jean Prestet was a French Oratorian priest and mathematician who contributed to the fields of combinatorics and number theory. Prestet grew up poor. As a teenager, he worked as a servant of the Oratory of Jesus in Paris. He was promoted to scribe for Nicolas Malebranche, who taught him mathematics.
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Robert Tucker
1832 - 1905 (73 years)
Robert Tucker was an English mathematician, who was secretary of the London Mathematical Society for more than 30 years. Life and work Son of a soldier who fought in the Peninsular War, Tucker studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was 35th wrangler in 1855. He mastered mathematics at University College London from 1865 to 1899.
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Claude Mylon
1618 - 1660 (42 years)
Claude Mylon was a French mathematician and member of the Académie Parisienne and the Académie des Sciences.
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Gemma Frisius
1508 - 1555 (47 years)
Gemma Frisius was a Dutch physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker. He created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation. Gemma's rings, an astronomical instrument, are named after him. Along with Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, Frisius is often considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography, and significantly helped lay the foundations for the school's golden age .
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Marília Chaves Peixoto
1921 - 1961 (40 years)
Marília Chaves Peixoto was a Brazilian mathematician and engineer who worked in dynamical systems. Peixoto was the first Brazilian woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
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Emilio Baiada
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Emilio Baiada was an Italian mathematician. Education and career He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he graduated with highest honors in June 1937 along with Leonida Tonelli, with whom he worked as an assistant from 1938 to 1941, when he left for the war. In 1945 he began to teach analysis, theory of functions, calculus and rational mechanics at the Scuola Normale. In 1948 he obtained a degree in Analysis; his Ph.D. thesis was written under the direction of Tonelli and Marston Morse.
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Willem van der Woude
1876 - 1974 (98 years)
Willem van der Woude was a Dutch mathematician and rector magnificus of the University of Leiden. Education and career Van der Woude studied at the University of Groningen, and subsequently, from 1901 to 1916, worked as a secondary school teacher in Deventer. In 1908 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen under Pieter Hendrik Schoute with a thesis titled Over elkaar snijdende normalen aan een ellipsoide en een hyperellipsoide . From 1916 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1947 he was professor of mathematics and mechanics at the University of Leiden.
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Guidobaldo del Monte
1545 - 1607 (62 years)
Guidobaldo del Monte , Marquis del Monte, was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and astronomer of the 16th century. Biography Del Monte was born in Pesaro. His father, Ranieri, was from a leading wealthy family in Urbino. Ranieri was noted for his role as a soldier and also as the author of two books on military architecture. The Duke of Urbino, Duke Guidobaldo II, honoured him with the title Marchese del Monte so the family had only become a noble one in the generation before Guidobaldo. On the death of his father Guidobaldo inherited the title of Marchese.
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Hayyim Selig Slonimski
1810 - 1904 (94 years)
Ḥayyim Selig ben Ya'akov Slonimski , also known by his acronym ḤaZaS , was a Hebrew publisher, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, science writer, and rabbi. He was among the first to write books on science for a broad Jewish audience, and was the founder of Ha-Tsfira, the first Hebrew-language newspaper with an emphasis on the sciences.
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Erasmus Reinhold
1511 - 1553 (42 years)
Erasmus Reinhold was a German astronomer and mathematician, considered to be the most influential astronomical pedagogue of his generation. He was born and died in Saalfeld, Saxony. He was educated, under Jacob Milich, at the University of Wittenberg, where he was first elected dean and later became rector. In 1536 he was appointed professor of higher mathematics by Philipp Melanchthon. In contrast to the limited modern definition, "mathematics" at the time also included applied mathematics, especially astronomy. His colleague, Georg Joachim Rheticus, also studied at Wittenberg and was appoin...
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Maurice Audin
1932 - 1957 (25 years)
Maurice Audin was a renowned French mathematics assistant at the University of Algiers, a member of the Algerian Communist Party and an activist in the anticolonialist cause, who died under torture by the French state during the Battle of Algiers.
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Rehuel Lobatto
1797 - 1866 (69 years)
Rehuel Lobatto was a Dutch mathematician. The Gauss-Lobatto quadrature method is named after him, as are his variants on the Runge–Kutta methods for solving ODEs, and the Lobatto polynomials. He was the author of a great number of articles in scientific periodicals, as well as various schoolbooks.
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Vincenzo Brunacci
1768 - 1818 (50 years)
Vincenzo Brunacci was an Italian mathematician born in Florence. He was professor of Matematica sublime in Pavia. He transmitted Lagrange's ideas to his pupils, including Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti, Antonio Bordoni and Gabrio Piola.
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Giovanni Battista Guccia
1855 - 1914 (59 years)
Giovanni Battista Guccia was an Italian mathematician. Biography Guccia was born in Palermo in a rich and aristocratic family. He graduated in mathematics in 1880 at the University of Rome, where he was a student of Luigi Cremona. His doctoral thesis was presented at the Reims scientific congress and then published with the title "On a class of surfaces representable point by point on a plane" in the "Comptes-rendus de l'Association française pour l'avancement des sciences". In 1887 the French journal Comptes Rendus published his article "Theorem on the singular points of an algebraic surface...
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M. C. Chakrabarti
Mukund Chand Chakrabarti a statistician from Bengal of the British India was the founder head of the department of statistics, University of Mumbai India. He nurtured the department from its birth in 1948 until he died in 1972. The department of mathematics at University of Mumbai was established later in 1963 under the guidance of Professor S. S. Shrikhande.
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John Greenleaf Whittier
1807 - 1892 (85 years)
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.
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Ernest Barnes
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Ernest William Barnes was a British mathematician and scientist who later became a liberal theologian and bishop. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Master of the Temple from 1915 to 1919. He was made Bishop of Birmingham in 1924, the only bishop appointed during Ramsay MacDonald's first term in office. His modernist views, in particular objection to Reservation, led to conflict with the Anglo-Catholics in his diocese. A biography by his son, Sir John Barnes, Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, was published in 1979.
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Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt
1807 - 1851 (44 years)
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt was a German astronomer, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Göttingen. He is also known as Benjamin Goldschmidt, C. W. B. Goldschmidt, Carl Goldschmidt, and Karl Goldschmidt.
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Matthew Stewart
1717 - 1785 (68 years)
Matthew Stewart FRS FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and minister of the Church of Scotland. Life He was born in the manse at Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, on 15 January 1717, the son of Rev Dugald Stewart, the local minister, and his wife, Janet Bannantyne.
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Joseph Tilly
1837 - 1906 (69 years)
Joseph Marie de Tilly was a Belgian military man and mathematician. He was born in Ypres, Belgium. In 1858, he became a teacher in mathematics at the regimental school. He began with studying geometry, particularly Euclid's fifth postulate and non-Euclidean geometry. He found similar results as Lobachevsky in 1860, but the Russian mathematician was already dead at that time. Tilly is more known for his work on non-Euclidean mechanics, as he was the one who invented it. He worked thus alone on this topic until a French mathematician, Jules Hoüel, showed interest in that field. Tilly also wrote on military science and history of mathematics.
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Fritz Carlson
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Fritz David Carlson was a Swedish mathematician. After the death of Torsten Carleman, he headed the Mittag-Leffler Institute. Carlson's contributions to analysis include Carlson's theorem, the Polyá–Carlson theorem on rational functions, and Carlson's inequalityIn number theory, his results include Carlson's theorem on Dirichlet series.
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Alfredo Niceforo
1876 - 1960 (84 years)
Alfredo Niceforo was an Italian statistician and scientific racist. Biography Niceforo was born in Castiglione di Sicilia, Catania, Italy, and died March 2, 1960, in Rome. He was an Italian sociologist, criminologist, and statistician who posited the theory that every person has a “deep ego” of antisocial, subconscious impulses that represent a throwback to precivilized existence. Accompanying this ego, and attempting to keep its latent delinquency in check, according to his concept, is a “superior ego” formed by man's social interaction. This theory, which he published in 1902, bears some re...
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Claribel Kendall
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Claribel Kendall was an American mathematician. Education Born in Denver, Colorado, Kendall received her Bachelor and Bachelor of Education from the University of Colorado in 1912. Kendall also went on to receive her master's degree in 1914 with a focus in mathematics. She studied mathematics in an era when women were increasingly seeking a college education and slowly beginning to move into math and science, fields that had traditionally been exclusively male. Her master's thesis was on “Pre Associative Syzygies in Linear Algebra."
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Ludwig Tieck
1773 - 1853 (80 years)
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Early life Tieck was born in Berlin, the son of a rope-maker. His siblings were the sculptor Christian Friedrich Tieck and the poet Sophie Tieck. He was educated at the , where he learned Greek and Latin, as required in most preparatory schools. He also began learning Italian at a very young age, from a grenadier with whom he became acquainted. Through this friendship, Tieck was given a first-hand look at the poor, which could be linked to his work as a Romanticist.
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Olga Tsuberbiller
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Olga Tsuberbiller was a Russian mathematician noted for her creation of the textbook Problems and Exercises in Analytic Geometry. The book has been used as a standard text for high schools since its creation in 1927. Sophia Parnok, noted Russian poet dedicated her verses in the Half-voiced cycle to Tsuberbiller, and the educator cared for Parnok during her final illness, later becoming her literary executor. She later became the partner of the noted opera singer, Concordia Antarova. Tsuberbiller was designated as an Honored Scientist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1955...
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Robert J. T. Bell
1876 - 1963 (87 years)
Robert J. T. Bell RSE FRSE was a Scottish mathematician. He held the positions of Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
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Hendrik Kloosterman
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Hendrik Douwe Kloosterman was a Dutch mathematician, known for his work in number theory and in representation theory. After completing his master's degree at Leiden University from 1918–1922 he studied at the University of Copenhagen with Harald Bohr and the University of Oxford with G. H. Hardy. In 1924 he received his Ph.D. in Leiden under the supervision of J. C. Kluyver. From 1926 to 1928 he studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Hamburg, and he was an assistant at the University of Münster from 1928-1930. Kloosterman was appointed lector at Leiden University in 1930 and full professor in 1947.
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C. V. Durell
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Clement Vavasor Durell was an English schoolmaster who wrote mathematical textbooks. Background and early life A son of John Vavasor Durell , Rector of Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, and his wife Ellen Annie Carlyon, Durell had four older brothers. He was educated at Felsted School and Clare College, Cambridge , where he gained a first class in part two of the mathematics tripos and was seventh wrangler.
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Maurice Janet
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Maurice Janet was a French mathematician. Education and career In 1912, as a student he visited the University of Göttingen. He was a professor at the University of Caen. He was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1924 in Toronto, in 1932 in Zürich, and in 1936 in Oslo.
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Nicolaas Hartsoeker
1656 - 1725 (69 years)
Nicolaas Hartsoeker was a Dutch mathematician and physicist who invented the screw-barrel simple microscope . Biography He was the son of Anna van der Meij and Christiaan Hartsoeker , a Remonstrant minister in Moordrecht near Gouda. His father took the family to Alkmaar in 1661 and finally to Rotterdam in 1669. Nicolaas started to make a living as a lens maker in Rotterdam, and was instructed in optics by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. In 1674, he and a fellow student, assisted by Van Leeuwenhoek, were the first to observe semen, a situation that would later lead to a priority dispute between Hart...
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Yurii Shirokov
1925 - 1980 (55 years)
Yurii Shirokov, was a writer, physicist, and professor. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1948. He worked in the same university, then in the Steklov Mathematical Institute . He wrote more than 100 scientific papers and several monographs, among which the textbook "Nuclear Physics" is particularly relevant. .
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Marc Krasner
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Marc Krasner was a Russian Empire-born French mathematician, who worked on algebraic number theory. Krasner emigrated from the Soviet Union to France and received in 1935 his PhD from the University of Paris under Jacques Hadamard with thesis Sur la théorie de la ramification des idéaux de corps non-galoisiens de nombres algébriques. From 1937 to 1960 he was a scientist at CNRS and from 1960 professor at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. From 1965 he was a professor at the University of Paris VI , where he retired in 1980 as professor emeritus.
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Alfred Loewy
1873 - 1935 (62 years)
Alfred Loewy was a German mathematician who worked on representation theory. Loewy rings, Loewy length, Loewy decomposition and Loewy series are named after him. His graduate students included Wolfgang Krull and Friedrich Karl Schmidt.
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Clarence Abiathar Waldo
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
Clarence Abiathar Waldo was an American mathematician, author and educator, most famous, today, for the role he played in the Indiana Pi Bill affair. Life and career Born in Hammond, New York, Waldo married Abby Wright Allen in Stamford, Connecticut in 1881. In 1884 they had a daughter, Alice.
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Emanuel Beke
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Emanuel Beke was a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in differential equations, determinants, and mathematical physics. He is known for reforming the teaching of mathematics in Hungary. Education and career At the University of Budapest he received a mathematics-physics degree in 1883 and a doctorate in 1884.
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Thomas Fincke
1561 - 1656 (95 years)
Thomas Fincke was a Danish mathematician and physicist, and a professor at the University of Copenhagen for more than 60 years. Biography Thomas Jacobsen Fincke was born in Flensburg in Schleswig. Fincke was the son of Councillor Jacob Fincke and Anna Thorsmede. He completed his primary schooling at Flensburg. From 1577, he studied mathematics, rhetoric and other philosophical studies for five years at the University of Strasbourg.
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Pekka Myrberg
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Pekka Juhana Myrberg was a Finnish mathematician known for developing the concept of period-doubling bifurcation in a paper published in the 1950s. The concept was further developed by Mitchell Feigenbaum during the 1970s.
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Emil Weyr
1848 - 1894 (46 years)
Emil Weyr was an Austrian-Czech mathematician, known for his numerous publications on geometry. Born in Prague, Weyr attended the Prague Polytechnic, where he was taught by Heinrich Durège and Otto Wilhelm Fiedler.
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Joseph Diez Gergonne
1771 - 1859 (88 years)
Joseph Diez Gergonne was a French mathematician and logician. Life In 1791, Gergonne enlisted in the French army as a captain. That army was undergoing rapid expansion because the French government feared a foreign invasion intended to undo the French Revolution and restore Louis XVI to the throne of France. He saw action in the major battle of Valmy on 20 September 1792. He then returned to civilian life but soon was called up again and took part in the French invasion of Spain in 1794.
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Ivan Vsevolodovich Meshcherskiy
1859 - 1935 (76 years)
Ivan Vsevolodovich Meshchersky was a Russian Empire and Soviet mathematician who gained fame for his work on mechanics, notably the motion of bodies of variable mass. Biography Ivan Vsevolodovich Meshcherskiy was born in Arkhangelsk. After graduation from Arkhangelsk Gymnasium, Meshcherskiy studied mathematics at the Saint Petersburg Imperial University from 1878 to 1882.
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Marcello Boldrini
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Marcello Boldrini was an Italian statistician. Biography Beginning in 1922, he taught courses in statistics, biometry, and demography at Bocconi University of Milan, and then at the University of Rome as Emeritus Professor. He was also a member of several academies and institutes in Italy and abroad, serving for several years as president of the International Statistical Institute. His scientific research was on both methodological and applied statistics, particularly on demography, anthropometry, and economics. As a statistician, he has been particularly interested in the foundations of the method, and he proposed a view of statistics as an empirical history of all the positive sciences.
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