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
William Hopkins
1793 - 1866 (73 years)
William Hopkins FRS was an English mathematician and geologist. He is famous as a private tutor of aspiring undergraduate Cambridge mathematicians, earning him the sobriquet the "senior-wrangler maker."
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Theodor Reye
1838 - 1919 (81 years)
Karl Theodor Reye was a German mathematician. He contributed to geometry, particularly projective geometry and synthetic geometry. He is best known for his introduction of configurations in the second edition of his book, Geometrie der Lage . The Reye configuration of 12 points, 12 planes, and 16 lines is named after him.
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Alfred Pringsheim
1850 - 1941 (91 years)
Alfred Pringsheim was a German mathematician and patron of the arts. He was born in Ohlau, Prussian Silesia and died in Zürich, Switzerland. Family and academic career Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy Silesian merchant family with Jewish roots. He was the first-born child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann . He had a younger sister, Martha.
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Jacob Lüroth
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Jacob Lüroth was a German mathematician who proved Lüroth's theorem and introduced Lüroth quartics. His name is sometimes written Lueroth, following the common printing convention for umlauted characters. He began his studies in astronomy at the University of Bonn, but switched to mathematics when his poor eyesight made taking astronomical observations impossible. He received his doctorate in 1865 from Heidelberg University, for a thesis on Pascal's theorem.
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Henry Burchard Fine
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Henry Burchard Fine was an American university dean and mathematician. Life and career Henry Burchard Fine played a critical role in modernizing the American university and raising American mathematics “from a state of approximate nullity to one verging on parity with the European nations”. This tribute in Oswald Veblen’s obituary [see in "Obituary" below] accurately recognized Fine’s role both in training American mathematicians to provide international leadership to this field and in building Princeton University’s reputation in mathematics and science. Fine’s efforts contributed greatly...
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Robert of Chester
1200 - 1200 (0 years)
Robert of Chester was an English Arabist of the 12th century. He translated several historically important books from Arabic to Latin, such as:Book on the Composition of Alchemy : translated in 1144, this was the first book on alchemy to become available in EuropeCompendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing : al-Khwārizmī's book about algebra, translated in 1145In the 1140s Robert worked in Spain, where the division of the country between Muslim and Christian rulers resulted in opportunities for interchange between the different cultures. However, by the end of the decade he had returned to England.
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Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut was a German mathematician. He was the younger brother of the famous jurist Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut. He studied at the University of Göttingen along with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Beckmann, and Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. In 1797 he became lecturer in Göttingen. In 1802 he became extraodinary and in 1805 ordinary professor of philosophy. Mathematics were his favourite field of lessons, and he was well-known as a brilliant lecturer, in contrast to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was professor for astronomy in Göttingen since 1807 and disliked giving lessons.
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Nicolas Chuquet
1445 - 1488 (43 years)
Nicolas Chuquet was a French mathematician. He invented his own notation for algebraic concepts and exponentiation. He may have been the first mathematician to recognize zero and negative numbers as exponents.
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Ludwig Burmester
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
Ludwig Ernst Hans Burmester was a German kinematician and geometer. His doctoral thesis concerned lines on a surface defined by light direction. After a period as a teacher in Łódź he became professor of synthetic geometry at Dresden where his growing interest in kinematics culminated in his of 1888, developing the approach to the theory of linkagess introduced by Franz Reuleaux, whereby a planar mechanism was understood as a collection of Euclidean planes in relative motion with one degree of freedom. Burmester considered both the theory of planar kinematics and practically all actual mechanisms known in his time.
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Augustus Edward Hough Love
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Augustus Edward Hough Love FRS , often known as A. E. H. Love, was a mathematician famous for his work on the mathematical theory of elasticity. He also worked on wave propagation and his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics won for him the Adams prize in 1911 when he developed a mathematical model of surface waves known as Love waves. Love also contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced the parameters known as Love numbers, used in problems related to Earth tides, the tidal deformation of the solid Earth due to the gravitational attraction of the ...
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Callippus
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Callippus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician. Biography Callippus was born at Cyzicus, and studied under Eudoxus of Cnidus at the Academy of Plato. He also worked with Aristotle at the Lyceum, which means that he was active in Athens prior to Aristotle's death in 322 BC. He observed the movements of the planets and attempted to use Eudoxus' scheme of connected spheres to account for their movements. However, he found that 27 spheres were insufficient to account for the planetary movements, and so he added seven more for a total of 34. According to the description in Aristotle's Metaphys...
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James Mercer
1883 - 1932 (49 years)
James Mercer FRS was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England. He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I and, after decades of ill health, died in London.
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Johan Jensen
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen, mostly known as Johan Jensen , was a Danish mathematician and engineer. He was the president of the Danish Mathematical Society from 1892 to 1903. Biography Jensen was born in Nakskov, Denmark, but spent much of his childhood in northern Sweden, because his father obtained a job there as the manager of an estate. Their family returned to Denmark before 1876, when Jensen enrolled to the College of Advanced Technology. Although he studied mathematics among various subjects at college, and even published a research paper in mathematics, he learned advanced math topics later by himself and never held any academic position.
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John Graunt
1620 - 1674 (54 years)
John Graunt has been regarded as the founder of demography. Graunt was one of the first demographers, and perhaps the first epidemiologist, though by profession he was a haberdasher. He was bankrupted later in life by losses suffered during Great Fire of London and the discrimination he faced following his conversion to Catholicism.
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Vladimir Varićak
1865 - 1942 (77 years)
Vladimir Varićak was a Croatian mathematician and theoretical physicist of Serbian origin. Biography Varićak, an ethnic Serb, was born on March 1, 1865, in the village of Švica near Otočac, Austrian Empire . He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Zagreb from 1883 to 1887. He made his PhD in 1889 and got his habilitation in 1895. In 1899 he became professor of mathematics in Zagreb, where he gave lectures until his death in 1942.
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Alexey Lyapunov
1911 - 1973 (62 years)
Alexey Andreyevich Lyapunov was a Soviet mathematician and an early pioneer of computer science. One of the founders of Soviet cybernetics, Lyapunov was member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and a specialist in the fields of real function theory, mathematical problems of cybernetics, set theory, programming theory, mathematical linguistics, and mathematical biology.
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Franciszek Leja
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Franciszek Leja was a Polish mathematician. He was born to a poor peasant family in the southeastern Poland. After graduating from the University of Lwów he was a teacher of mathematics and physics in high schools from 1910 until 1923, among others in Kraków. From 1924 until 1936 he was a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and Warsaw University, from 1936 until 1960 in the Jagiellonian University.
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Stanisław Ruziewicz
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Stanisław Ruziewicz was a Polish mathematician and one of the founders of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was a former student of Wacław Sierpiński, earning his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Lwów; his thesis concerned continuous functions that are not differentiable. He became a professor at the same university and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. During the Second World War, Ruziewicz's home city of Lwów was annexed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but then taken over by the General Government of German-occupied Poland in July 1941; Ruziewicz was arr...
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Carl Anton Bretschneider
1808 - 1878 (70 years)
Carl Anton Bretschneider was a mathematician from Gotha, Germany. Bretschneider worked in geometry, number theory, and history of geometry. He also worked on logarithmic integrals and mathematical tables for Euler's constant when he published his 1837 paper. He is best known for his discovery of Bretschneider's formula for the area of a general quadrilateral on a plane,
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Otto Haupt
1887 - 1988 (101 years)
Otto Haupt was a German mathematician. Biography Haupt obtained his PhD in 1911 under the supervision of Georg Rost and Emil Hilb at the University of Würzburg, and became a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He retired from teaching in 1953, but continued his mathematical research for many subsequent years.
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Sofya Yanovskaya
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Sofya Aleksandrovna Yanovskaya was a Soviet mathematician and historian, specializing in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. She is best known for her efforts in restoring the research of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union and publishing and editing the mathematical works of Karl Marx.
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Lyudmila Keldysh
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology. Biography Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh. Her family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage. Because her father was a construction expert for the military, they moved frequently and she lived in Helsinki between 1905 and 1907, then in Saint Petersburg until 1909, and then moved to Riga, Latvia.
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Orymbek Zhautykov
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Orymbek Akhmetbekovich Zhautykov was a Kazakh mathematician. His mathematical work focussed on stability theory of motion, equations which govern physics and infinite systems of differential equations. Throughout his life he published many different pieces of work including research papers, textbooks and biographies of mathematicians on their birth/death anniversaries.
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Kazimierz Zarankiewicz
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Kazimierz Zarankiewicz was a Polish mathematician and Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who was interested primarily in topology and graph theory. Biography Zarankiewicz was born in Częstochowa to father Stanisław and mother Józefa . He studied at the University of Warsaw, together with Zygmunt Janiszewski, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Stanisław Saks.
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment, especially electric motorss for use in industry.
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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
1718 - 1799 (81 years)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.
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Wilhelm Lexis
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Wilhelm Lexis , full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
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G. B. Halsted
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
George Bruce Halsted , usually cited as G. B. Halsted, was an American mathematician who explored foundations of geometry and introduced non-Euclidean geometry into the United States through his translations of works by Bolyai, Lobachevski, Saccheri, and Poincaré. He wrote an elementary geometry text, Rational Geometry, based on Hilbert's axioms, which was translated into French, German, and Japanese. Halsted produced original works in synthetic geometry, first with an elementary text in 1896, and with a text on synthetic projective geometry in 1906.
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Sigekatu Kuroda
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Sigekatu Kuroda was a Japanese mathematician who worked in number theory and mathematical logic. In 1942 he became a professor at the newly founded Nagoya Imperial University, where he stayed for over twenty years. He is responsible for much of the effort in setting up its Department of Mathematics.
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Victor Shestakov
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Victor Ivanovich Shestakov was a Russian/Soviet logician and theoretician of electrical engineering. In 1935 he discovered the possible interpretation of Boolean algebra of logic in electro-mechanical relay circuits. He graduated from Moscow State University and worked there in the General Physics Department almost until his death.
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Ludwig Immanuel Magnus
1790 - 1861 (71 years)
Ludwig Immanuel Magnus was a German Jewish mathematician who, in 1831, published a paper about the inversion transformation, which leads to inversive geometry. His reputation as a mathematician was established by 1834 and an honorary doctorate conferred on him by the University of Bonn. His work appeared in Gergonne's Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées vols. xi and xvi ; in Crelle's Journal, vols. v, vii, viii, and ix ; in the third part of Meier Hirsch's "Sammlung Geometrischer Aufgaben"; and in "Sammlung von Aufgaben und Lehrsätzen aus der Analytischen Geometrie des Raumes" .
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Leon Lichtenstein
1878 - 1933 (55 years)
Leon Lichtenstein was a Polish-German mathematician, who made contributions to the areas of differential equations, conformal mapping, and potential theory. He was also interested in theoretical physics, publishing research in hydrodynamics and astronomy.
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Naum Akhiezer
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Naum Ilyich Akhiezer was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his works in approximation theory and the theory of differential and integral operators. He is also known as the author of classical books on various subjects in analysis, and for his work on the history of mathematics. He is the brother of the theoretical physicist Aleksandr Akhiezer.
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Charles Howard Hinton
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
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Li Shanlan
1811 - 1882 (71 years)
Li Shanlan was a Chinese mathematician of the Qing Dynasty. A native of Haining, Zhejiang, he was fascinated by mathematics since childhood, beginning with the Nine Chapters on Mathematical Art. He eked out a living by being a private tutor for some years before fleeing to Shanghai in 1852 to evade the Taiping Rebellion. There he collaborated with Alexander Wylie, Joseph Edkins , and others to translate many Western mathematical works into Chinese, including Elements of Analytical Geometry and the Differential and Integral Calculus by Elias Loomis, Augustus De Morgan's Elements of Algebra, a...
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Evgraf Fedorov
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov was a Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist. Fedorov was born in the Russian city of Orenburg. His father was a topographical engineer. The family later moved to Saint Petersburg. From the age of fifteen, he was deeply interested in the theory of polytopes, which later became his main research interest. He was a distinguished graduate of the Gorny Institute, which he joined at the age of 26. He was elected the first Director of the Institute in 1905.
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Viktor Wagner
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Viktor Vladimirovich Wagner, also Vagner was a Russian mathematician, best known for his work in differential geometry and on semigroups. Wagner was born in Saratov and studied at Moscow State University, where Veniamin Kagan was his advisor. He became the first geometry chair at Saratov State University. He received the Lobachevsky Medal in 1937.
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Erland Samuel Bring
1736 - 1798 (62 years)
Erland Samuel Bring was a Swedish mathematician. Bring studied at Lund University between 1750 and 1757. In 1762 he obtained a position of a reader in history and was promoted to professor in 1779. At Lund he wrote eight volumes of mathematical work in the fields of algebra, geometry, analysis and astronomy, including Meletemata quaedam mathematica circa transformationem aequationum algebraicarum . This work describes Bring's contribution to the algebraic solution of equations.
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Edward Arthur Milne
1896 - 1950 (54 years)
Edward Arthur Milne FRS was a British astrophysicist and mathematician. Biography Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. He attended Hymers College and from there he won an open scholarship in mathematics and natural science to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, gaining the largest number of marks which had ever been awarded in the examination. In 1916 he joined a group of mathematicians led by A. V. Hill for the Ministry of munitions working on the ballistics of anti-aircraft gunnery, they became known as ′Hill's Brigands′. Later Milne became an expert on sound localisation. In 1917 he became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
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Nicolaus II Bernoulli
1695 - 1726 (31 years)
Nicolaus II Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician as were his father Johann Bernoulli and one of his brothers, Daniel Bernoulli. He was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family.
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John R. Womersley
1907 - 1958 (51 years)
John Ronald Womersley was a British mathematician and computer scientist who made important contributions to computer development, and hemodynamics. Nowadays he is principally remembered for his contribution to blood flow, fluid dynamics and the eponymous Womersley number, a dimensionless parameter characterising unsteady flow.
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James Cockle
1819 - 1895 (76 years)
Sir James Cockle FRS FRAS FCPS was an English lawyer and mathematician. Cockle was born on 14 January 1819. He was the second son of James Cockle, a surgeon, of Great Oakley, Essex. Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the Middle Temple in 1838, practising as a special pleader in 1845 and being called in 1846. Joining the midland circuit, he acquired a good practice, and on the recommendation of Chief Justice Sir William Erle he was appointed as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Queensland, Australia on 21 February 1863; he served until his retirement on 24 June 1879.
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Moritz Abraham Stern
1807 - 1894 (87 years)
Moritz Abraham Stern was a German mathematician. Stern became Ordinarius at Göttingen University in 1858, succeeding Carl Friedrich Gauss. Stern was the first Jewish full professor at a German university who attained the position without changing his Jewish religion. Although Carl Gustav Jacobi preceded him as the first Jew to obtain a math professorial chair in Germany, Jacobi's family had converted to Christianity long before then.
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Adriaan van Roomen
1561 - 1615 (54 years)
Adriaan van Roomen , also known as Adrianus Romanus, was a mathematician, professor of medicine and medical astronomer from the Duchy of Brabant in the Habsburg Netherlands who was active throughout Central Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. As a mathematician he worked in algebra, trigonometry and geometry; and on the decimal expansion of π. He solved the Problem of Apollonius using a new method that involved intersecting hyperbolas. He also wrote on the Gregorian calendar reform.
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Giovanni Poleni
1683 - 1761 (78 years)
Giovanni Poleni was a Marquess, physicist, mathematician and antiquarian. Early life He was the son of Marquess Jacopo Poleni and studied the classics, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics at the School of the Somaschi Fathers, Venice.
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Timofei Osipovsky
1765 - 1832 (67 years)
Timofei Fyodorovich Osipovsky was a Russiann Imperial mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. Timofei Osipovsky graduated from the St Petersburg Teachers Seminary. He became a teacher at Imperial Kharkov University, in 1805, the year it was founded. The city of Kharkov, thanks to its educational establishments, became one of the most important cultural and educational centres of Russian Empire. In 1813 he became rector of the university. However, in 1820, Osipovsky was suspended from his post on religious grounds.
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Beppo Levi
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Beppo Levi was an Italian mathematician. He published high-level academic articles and books, not only on mathematics, but also on physics, history, philosophy, and pedagogy. Levi was a member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences and of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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Dorothy Walcott Weeks
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Dorothy Walcott Weeks was an American mathematician and physicist. Weeks was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned degrees from Wellesley College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Simmons College. Weeks was the first woman to receive a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Wilhelm Fiedler
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Otto Wilhelm Fiedler was a German-Swiss mathematician, known for his textbooks of geometry and his contributions to descriptive geometry. Life Fiedler was the son of a shoemaker. He went to the Royal Mercantile College in Chemnitz and in 1849 to the Bergakademie Freiberg as an external student. In 1852 he became a mathematics teacher at the "Werkmeisterschule" in Freiberg and 1853 at the "Gewerbeschule" in Chemnitz. He had to take care of his widowed mother and his siblings, and educated himself without directly attending a university. In 1858 he obtained the doctorate in mathematics at the U...
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