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,
#9601
Roger Lyndon
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Roger Conant Lyndon was an American mathematician, for many years a professor at the University of Michigan. He is known for Lyndon words, the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem, Craig–Lyndon interpolation and the Lyndon–Hochschild–Serre spectral sequence.
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William Sealy Gosset
1876 - 1937 (61 years)
William Sealy Gosset was an English statistician, chemist and brewer who served as Head Brewer of Guinness and Head Experimental Brewer of Guinness and was a pioneer of modern statistics. He pioneered small sample experimental design and analysis with an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Gosset published under the pen name Student and developed most famously Student's t-distribution – originally called Student's "z" – and "Student's test of statistical significance".
Go to Profile#9603
Marie Davidian
Marie Davidian is an American biostatistician known for her work in longitudinal data analysis and precision medicine. She is the J. Stuart Hunter Distinguished Professor of Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was president of the American Statistical Association for 2013.
Go to Profile#9604
Wacław Sierpiński
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory , number theory, theory of functionss, and topology. He published over 700 papers and 50 books.
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Konrad Knopp
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Konrad Hermann Theodor Knopp was a German mathematician who worked on generalized limits and complex functions. Family and education Knopp was born in 1882 in Berlin to Paul Knopp , a businessman in manufacturing, and Helene , née Ostertun, whose own father was a butcher. Paul's hometown of Neustettin, then part of Germany, became Polish territory after the Second World War and is now called Szczecinek. In 1910, Konrad married the painter Gertrud Kressner . They had a daughter Ortrud Knopp , with the grandchildren Willfried Spohn , Herbert Spohn und Wolfgang Spohn , and a son Ingolf Knopp ,...
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Truman Lee Kelley
1884 - 1961 (77 years)
Truman Lee Kelley was an American researcher who made seminal contributions to statistics and psychology. Life He was born in Whitehall, Muskegon County, Michigan in 1884. He died in 1961. Career He received his A.M. degree in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1911, where he became one of the four founding students of Kappa Delta Pi. He completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1914 under the supervision of Edward Thorndike. After doing so, he worked as an instructor at the University of Texas and at Teachers College, and then in 1920 became a professor at Stanford University.
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Gilbert Ames Bliss
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Gilbert Ames Bliss, , was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations. Life Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered the University of Chicago in 1893 . Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professional mandolin quartet.
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Shirley Jackson Case
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
Shirley Jackson Case was an historian of early Christianity, and a liberal theologian. He served as dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Biography Case was born on September 28, 1872, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Acadia University. He taught mathematics at the New Hampton Library Institute. In 1904, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1908. He was professor of New Testament literature and interpretation at University of Chicago Divinity School until 1925.
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Elizabeth Scott
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Elizabeth Leonard Scott was an American mathematician specializing in statistics. Scott was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Her family moved to Berkeley, California when she was 4 years old. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she studied astronomy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1949 in astronomy, and received a permanent position in the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley in 1951.
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Edward Linfoot
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Edward Hubert Linfoot was a British mathematician, primarily known for his work on optics, but also noted for his work in pure mathematics. Early life and career Edward Linfoot was born in Sheffield, England, in 1905. He was the eldest child of George Edward Linfoot, a violinist and mathematician, and George's wife Laura, née Clayton. After attending King Edward VII School he won a scholarship to Balliol College at the University of Oxford.
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Selig Brodetsky
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Selig Brodetsky was a Russian-born English mathematician, a member of the World Zionist Executive, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the second president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Edward Vermilye Huntington
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
Edward Vermilye Huntington was an American mathematician. Biography Huntington was awarded the B.A. and the M.A. by Harvard University in 1895 and 1897, respectively. After two years' teaching at Williams College, he began a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg, which was awarded in 1901. He then spent his entire career at Harvard, retiring in 1941. He taught in the engineering school, becoming Professor of Mechanics in 1919. Although Huntington's research was mainly in pure mathematics, he valued teaching mathematics to engineering students. He advocated mechanical calculators and had one in his office.
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Bernard Lewis Welch
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Bernard Lewis Welch was a British statistician and educator. He is known for creating Welch's t-test. Biography Born in 1911 in Sunderland in County Durham, the youngest of four brothers, Welch was educated at the Bede School. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was captain of the college cricket team for two years. Welch graduated, first class, in mathematics in 1933.
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Pierre Courcelle
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Pierre Paul Courcelle was a French historian who was a specialist of ancient philosophy and of Latin Patristics, especially of St Augustine. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1968.
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Robert Horton Cameron
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Robert Horton Cameron was an American mathematician, who worked on analysis and probability theory. He is known for the Cameron–Martin theorem. Education and career Cameron received his Ph.D. in 1932 from Cornell University under the direction of W. A. Hurwitz. He studied under a National Research Council postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1933 to 1935. Cameron was a faculty member at MIT from 1935 to 1945. He was then a faculty member at the University of Minnesota until his retirement. He spent the academic year 1953–1954 on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Frank Adams
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
John Frank Adams was a British mathematician, one of the major contributors to homotopy theory. Life He was born in Woolwich, a suburb in south-east London, and attended Bedford School. He began his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a student of Abram Besicovitch, but soon switched to algebraic topology. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1956. His thesis, written under the direction of Shaun Wylie, was titled On spectral sequences and self-obstruction invariants. He held the Fielden Chair at the University of Manchester , and became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at the University of Cambridge .
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Morgan Ward
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Henry Morgan Ward was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and career Ward was born in New York City. He studied at University of California, Berkeley, receiving his BA in 1924. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1928, with a dissertation titled The Foundations of General Arithmetic; his advisor was Eric Temple Bell. He became a research fellow at Caltech, and then in 1929 a member of the faculty; he remained at Caltech until his death in 1963. Among his doctoral students was Robert P. Dilworth, who also became a Caltech professor.
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Leon Mirsky
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Leonid Mirsky was a Russian-British mathematician who worked in number theory, linear algebra, and combinatorics. Mirsky's theorem is named after him. Biography Mirsky was born in Russia on 19 December 1918 to a medical family, but his parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, a wool merchant in Germany, when he was eight. His uncle's family moved to Bradford, England in 1933, bringing Mirsky with them. He studied at Herne Bay High School and King's College, London, graduating in 1940. Because of the evacuation of London during the Blitz, students at King's College were moved to Bristol University, where Mirsky earned a master's degree.
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Tracy Yerkes Thomas
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Tracy Yerkes Thomas was an American mathematician. Biography Thomas received his A.B. in 1921 from Rice University and then his A.M. in 1922 and Ph.D. in 1923 from Princeton University. For the academic year 1923–1924 he was a National Research Fellow in Physics at the University of Chicago and in the academic year 1924–1925 a postdoc in Zürich. For the academic year 1925–1926 he was a National Research Fellow in Mathematics at Harvard University and then Princeton University, where he was on the mathematics faculty from 1926 to 1938. From 1938 to 1944 he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Edward Kasner
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Edward Kasner was an American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jewish person appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia University. Subsequently, he became an adjunct professor in 1906, and a full professor in 1910, at the university. Differential geometry was his main field of study. In addition to introducing the term "googol", he is known also for the Kasner metric and the Kasner polygon.
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Maurice Kendall
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Sir Maurice George Kendall, FBA was a prominent British statistician. The Kendall tau rank correlation is named after him. Education and early life Maurice Kendall was born in Kettering, Northamptonshire as the only child of engineering worker John Roughton Kendall and Georgina, née Brewer. His paternal grandfather was a publican, running The Woolpack at Kettering.
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Samuel Newby Curle
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
Samuel Newby Curle FRSE was a British mathematician. He served as Professor of Applied Mathematics at St Andrews University from 1967 until 1989. St Andrews University created the Curle Lecture in his memory.
Go to Profile#9623
R. H. Bing
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
R. H. Bing was an American mathematician who worked mainly in the areas of geometric topology and continuum theory. His father was named Rupert Henry, but Bing's mother thought that "Rupert Henry" was too British for Texas. She compromised by abbreviating it to R. H. Consequently, R. H. does not stand for a first or middle name.
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Richard E. Bellman
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Richard Ernest Bellman was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He founded the leading biomathematical journal Mathematical Biosciences.
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Theodore William Chaundy
1889 - 1966 (77 years)
Theodore William Chaundy was an English mathematician who introduced Burchnall–Chaundy theory. Chaundy was born to widowed businessman John Chaundy and his second wife Sarah Pates in their shop-cum-home at 49 Broad Street in Oxford. John had eight children, one of whom died as a toddler, with his late first wife and died barely a year after Chaundy was born. The Chaundy home along Broad Street has since been demolished.
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Max Born
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Max Born was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
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William Feller
1906 - 1970 (64 years)
William "Vilim" Feller , born Vilibald Srećko Feller, was a Croatian–American mathematician specializing in probability theory. Early life and education Feller was born in Zagreb to Ida Oemichen-Perc, a Croatian–Austrian Catholic, and Eugen Viktor Feller, son of a Polish–Jewish father and an Austrian mother .
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P. A. P. Moran
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran FRS was an Australian statistician who made significant contributions to probability theory and its application to population and evolutionary genetics. Early years Patrick Moran was born in Sydney and was the only child of Herbert Michael Moran , a prominent surgeon and captain of the first Wallabies, and Eva Mann . Patrick did have five other siblings, but they all died at or shortly after birth. He completed his high school studies in Bathurst, in three and a half years instead of the normal five-year course. At age 16, in 1934, he commenced study at the Univers...
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Emmy Noether
1882 - 1935 (53 years)
Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
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Isaac Jacob Schoenberg
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Isaac Jacob Schoenberg was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his invention of splines. Life and career Schoenberg was born in Galați to a Jewish family, the youngest of four children. He studied at the University of Iași, receiving his M.A. in 1922. From 1922 to 1925 he studied at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen, working on a topic in analytic number theory suggested by Issai Schur. He presented his thesis to the University of Iași, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1926. In Göttingen, he met Edmund Landau, who arranged a visit for Schoenberg to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1928.
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Salomon Bochner
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Salomon Bochner was an Austrian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry. Life He was born into a Jewish family in Podgórze , then Austria-Hungary, now Poland. Fearful of a Russian invasion in Galicia at the beginning of World War I in 1914, his family moved to Germany, seeking greater security. Bochner was educated at a Berlin gymnasium , and then at the University of Berlin. There, he was a student of Erhard Schmidt, writing a dissertation involving what would later be called the Bergman kernel. Shortly after this, he left the academy to help his family during the escalating inflation.
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Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet was a British mathematician who worked in analysis, especially Fourier series. His daughter, Rosamund Caroline Bosanquet was a British cellist, music teacher and composer.
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Hassler Whitney
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Hassler Whitney was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersionss, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.
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Arthur Sard
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Arthur Sard was an American mathematician, famous for his work in differential topology and in spline interpolation. His fame stems primarily from Sard's theorem, which says that the set of critical valuess of a differential function which has sufficiently many derivatives has measure zero.
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John Conrad Jaeger
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
John Conrad Jaeger, FRS was an Australian mathematical physicist. Biography Jaeger was born in Sydney, Australia to Carl Jaeger, a cigar manufacturer of German origin. In 1924 Jaeger entered Sydney University at the age of 16 and studied engineering, mathematics and physics, gaining a B.Sc. in 1928. He then spent a further two years studying mathematics at Cambridge University, completing Part II of the Mathematical Tripos, after which he stayed on to carry out research in theoretical physics.
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William Prager
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
William Prager, Willy Prager, was a German-born US applied mathematician. In the field of mechanics he is well known for the Drucker–Prager yield criterion. Willy Prager studied civil engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and received his diploma in 1925. He received his doctorate in 1926 and worked as a research assistant in the field of mechanics from 1925 to 1929. From 1927 to 1929 he habilitated. He was a deputy director at University of Göttingen, professor at Karlsruhe, University of Istanbul, the University of California, San Diego and Brown University, where he advised Bernard Budiansky.
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Roman Sikorski
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Roman Sikorski was a Polish mathematician. Biography Sikorski was a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1952 until 1982. Since 1962, he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Sikorski's research interests included: Boolean algebrass, mathematical logic, functional analysis, the theory of distributions, measure theory, general topology, and descriptive set theory.
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Samuel S. Wilks
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Samuel Stanley Wilks was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications. Early life and education Wilks was born in Little Elm, Texas and raised on a farm. He studied Industrial Arts at the North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas, obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1926. He received his master's degree in mathematics in 1928 from the University of Texas. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa under Everett F. Lindquist; his thesis dealt with a problem of st...
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Alfred J. Lotka
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Alfred James Lotka was an American mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics. A biophysicist, Lotka is best known for his proposal of the predator–prey model, developed simultaneously but independently of Vito Volterra. The Lotka–Volterra model is still the basis of many models used in the analysis of population dynamics in ecology.
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John Charles Burkill
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
John Charles Burkill was an English mathematician who worked on analysis and introduced the Burkill integral. He was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Burkill was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1953. In 1948, Burkill won the Adams Prize. He was Master of Peterhouse until 1973. His doctoral students include Frederick Gehring.
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William J. Youden
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
William John Youden was an Australian-born American statistician who formulated new statistical techniques in statistical analysis and in design of experiments. He developed the "Youden square", an incomplete block design developed from a 1937 paper, "Use of Incomplete Block Replications in Estimating Tobacco Mosaic Virus". He also helped to introduce the concept of restricted randomization, which he called constrained randomization. He devised Youden's J statistic as a simple measure summarising the performance of a binary diagnostic test.
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George David Birkhoff
1884 - 1944 (60 years)
George David Birkhoff was an American mathematician best known for what is now called the ergodic theorem. Birkhoff was one of the most important leaders in American mathematics in his generation, and during his time he was considered by many to be the preeminent American mathematician.
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John Edensor Littlewood
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
John Edensor Littlewood was a British mathematician. He worked on topics relating to analysis, number theory, and differential equations and had lengthy collaborations with G. H. Hardy, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Mary Cartwright.
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Richard Rado
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Richard Rado FRS was a German-born British mathematician whose research concerned combinatorics and graph theory. He was Jewish and left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. He earned two PhDs: in 1933 from the University of Berlin, and in 1935 from the University of Cambridge. He was interviewed in Berlin by Lord Cherwell for a scholarship given by the chemist Sir Robert Mond which provided financial support to study at Cambridge. After he was awarded the scholarship, Rado and his wife left for the UK in 1933. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Reading in 1954 and ...
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Harry Bateman
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
Harry Bateman FRS was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in...
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Dirk Jan Struik
1894 - 2000 (106 years)
Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch-born American mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S. Life Dirk Jan Struik was born in 1894 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a teacher's son. He attended the Hogere Burgerschool nl over there. It was in this school that he was first introduced to left-wing politics and socialism by one of his teachers, called Mister van Dam.
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Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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Harald Cramér
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Harald Cramér was a Swedish mathematician, actuary, and statistician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probabilistic number theory. John Kingman described him as "one of the giants of statistical theory".
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George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
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Alexander Doniphan Wallace
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Alexander Doniphan Wallace was an American mathematician who introduced proximity spaces. Wallace received from the University of Virginia B.A. in 1935, M.A. in 1936 and Ph.D. in 1940. He was an instructor at Princeton University in 1940–1941 and became an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 and remained there until 1947. He was a professor and chair of the mathematics department at Tulane University in 1947–1963. From 1963 until his retirement in 1973 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Florida.
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