The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9651
Nicholas Mercator
1620 - 1687 (67 years)
Nicholas Mercator , also known by his German name Kauffmann, was a 17th-century mathematician. He was born in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and educated at Rostock and Leyden after which he lived from 1642 to 1648 in the Netherlands. He lectured at the University of Copenhagen during 1648–1654 and lived in Paris from 1655 to 1657. He was mathematics tutor to Joscelyne Percy, son of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, at Petworth, Sussex . He taught mathematics in London . On 3 May 1661 he observed a transit of Mercury with Christiaan Huygens and Thomas Streete from Long Acre, London. On 14 November 1666 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#9652
Narayana Pandita
Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita was an Indian mathematician. Plofker writes that his texts were the most significant Sanskrit mathematics treatises after those of Bhaskara II, other than the Kerala school. He wrote the Ganita Kaumudi in 1356 about mathematical operations. The work anticipated many developments in combinatorics.
Go to Profile#9653
Joseph Wolstenholme
1829 - 1891 (62 years)
Joseph Wolstenholme was an English mathematician. Wolstenholme was born in Eccles near Salford, Lancashire, England, the son of a Methodist minister, Joseph Wolstenholme, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Clarke. He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge as Third Wrangler in 1850 and was elected a fellow of Christ's College in 1852. Collaborating with Percival Frost, a Treatise on Solid Geometry was published in 1863.
Go to Profile#9654
Grégoire de Saint-Vincent
1584 - 1667 (83 years)
Grégoire de Saint-Vincent - in Latin : Gregorius a Sancto Vincentio, in Dutch : Gregorius van St-Vincent - was a Flemish Jesuit and mathematician. He is remembered for his work on quadrature of the hyperbola.
Go to Profile#9655
Denis Papin
1647 - 1713 (66 years)
Denis Papin FRS was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine. Early life and education Born in Chitenay , Papin attended a Jesuit school there. In 1661, he attended the University of Angers, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1669.
Go to Profile#9656
Ibrahim ibn Sinan
908 - 946 (38 years)
Ibrahim ibn Sinan was a mathematician and astronomer who belonged to a family of scholars originally from Harran in northern Mesopotamia. He was the son of Sinan ibn Thabit and the grandson of Thābit ibn Qurra . Like his grandfather, he belonged to a religious sect of star worshippers known as the Sabians of Harran.
Go to Profile#9657
Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai
1901 - 1950 (49 years)
Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai was an Indian mathematician specialising in number theory. His contribution to Waring's problem was described in 1950 by K. S. Chandrasekharan as "almost certainly his best piece of work and one of the very best achievements in Indian Mathematics since Ramanujan".
Go to Profile#9658
Vincenzo Viviani
1622 - 1703 (81 years)
Vincenzo Viviani was an Italian mathematician and scientist. He was a pupil of Torricelli and a disciple of Galileo. Biography Vincenzo Viviani was born in Florence to the nobles Jacopo di Michelangelo Viviani and Maria Alamanno del Nente. While attending a Jesuit school Viviani studied the humanities. Following the study of humanities, Viviani turned to mathematics. He studied geometry under the instruction of Galilean follower Clemente Settimi. It was through Clemente that Viviani would gain recognition and meet Clemente's instructor, Tuscan Court mathematician Famiano Michelini. In 1638,...
Go to Profile#9659
Aleksandr Kurosh
1908 - 1971 (63 years)
Aleksandr Gennadyevich Kurosh was a Soviet mathematician, known for his work in abstract algebra. He is credited with writing The Theory of Groups, the first modern and high-level text on group theory, published in 1944.
Go to Profile#9660
Hugh MacColl
1837 - 1909 (72 years)
Hugh MacColl was a Scottish mathematician, logician and novelist. Life MacColl was the youngest son of a poor Highland family that was at least partly Gaelic-speaking. Hugh's father died when he was still an infant, and Hugh was educated largely thanks to the efforts of his elder brother Malcolm MacColl, an Episcopalian clergyman and friend and political ally of William Ewart Gladstone. Early in his acquaintanceship with Gladstone, Malcolm MacColl persuaded the Liberal politician to provide funds for Hugh's education at Oxford. It was proposed to send him to Oxford University's St. Edmund Hal...
Go to Profile#9661
William Wallace
1768 - 1843 (75 years)
William Wallace LLD was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer who invented the eidograph . Life Wallace was born at Dysart in Fife, the son of Alexander Wallace, a leather manufacturer, and his wife, Janet Simson. He received his school education in Dysart and Kirkcaldy.
Go to Profile#9662
Euphemia Haynes
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was an American mathematician and educator. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from the Catholic University of America in 1943.
Go to Profile#9663
Micaiah John Muller Hill
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Micaiah John Muller Hill FRS was an English mathematician, known for Hill's spherical vortex and Hill's tetrahedra. He was born on 22 February 1856 in Berhampore, Bengal, India, the son of Revd. Samuel John Hill and Leonora Josephina Muller .
Go to Profile#9664
Abraham Plessner
1900 - 1961 (61 years)
Abraham Plessner was a Russian mathematician. He was born on February 13, 1900, to a Jewish family in Łódź, which is now in Poland. He studied at secondary school where he was taught in Russian, German, and Polish. He studied at the University of Giessen where he studied under Ludwig Schlesinger and Friedrich Engel. He also studied at the University of Göttingen and Berlin. He completed his doctorate from the University of Giessen in 1922. Jointly with Kurt Hensel he edited Kronecker's collected works.
Go to Profile#9665
Ernest Julius Wilczynski
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Ernest Julius Wilczynski was an American mathematician considered the founder of projective differential geometry. Born in Hamburg, Germany, Wilczynski's family emigrated to America and settled in Chicago, Illinois when he was very young. He attended public school in the US but went to college in Germany and received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1897. He taught at the University of California until 1907, the University of Illinois from 1907 to 1910, and the University of Chicago from 1910 until illness forced his absence from the classroom in 1923. His doctoral students include A...
Go to Profile#9666
Friedrich Julius Richelot
1808 - 1875 (67 years)
Friedrich Julius Richelot was a German mathematician, born in Königsberg. He was a student of Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He was promoted in 1831 at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Königsberg with a dissertation on the division of the circle into 257 equal parts and was a professor there.
Go to Profile#9667
Christopher Clavius
1538 - 1612 (74 years)
Christopher Clavius, SJ was a Jesuit German mathematician, head of mathematicians at the , and astronomer who was a member of the Vatican commission that accepted the proposed calendar invented by Aloysius Lilius, that is known as the Gregorian calendar. Clavius would later write defences and an explanation of the reformed calendar, including an emphatic acknowledgement of Lilius' work. In his last years he was probably the most respected astronomer in Europe and his textbooks were used for astronomical education for over fifty years in and even out of Europe.
Go to Profile#9668
Wesley Clair Mitchell
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Wesley Clair Mitchell was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades. Mitchell was referred to as Thorstein Veblen's "star student."
Go to Profile#9669
Udny Yule
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
George Udny Yule FRS , usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, particularly known for the Yule distribution and proposing the preferential attachment model for random graphs. Personal life Yule was born at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland and died in Cambridge, England. He came from an established Scottish family composed of army officers, civil servants, scholars, and administrators. His father, Sir George Udny Yule was a brother of the noted orientalist Sir Henry Yule . His great uncle was the botanist John Yule.
Go to Profile#9670
Włodzimierz Stożek
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Włodzimierz Stożek was a Polish mathematician of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Head of the Mathematics Faculty on the Lwów University of Technology. He was arrested and murdered together with his two sons: the 29-year-old engineer Eustachy and 24-year-old Emanuel, graduate of the Institute of Technology by Nazis during the Second World War on 3 or 4 July in Lviv, during the Massacre of Lviv professors.
Go to Profile#9671
Johann Christian Martin Bartels
1769 - 1836 (67 years)
Johann Christian Martin Bartels was a German mathematician. He was the tutor of Carl Friedrich Gauss in Brunswick and the educator of Lobachevsky at the University of Kazan. Biography Bartels was born in Brunswick, in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg , the son of pewterer Heinrich Elias Friedrich Bartels and his wife Johanna Christine Margarethe Köhler. In his childhood he showed a great interest in mathematics. In 1783 he was employed as an assistant to the teacher Büttner in the Katherinenschule in Brunswick. He became acquainted with Carl Friedrich Gauss there and encouraged his talent and...
Go to Profile#9672
Paul Stäckel
1862 - 1919 (57 years)
Paul Gustav Samuel Stäckel was a German mathematician, active in the areas of differential geometry, number theory, and non-Euclidean geometry. In the area of prime number theory, he used the term twin prime for the first time.
Go to Profile#9673
Samuel Dickstein
1851 - 1939 (88 years)
Samuel Dickstein was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin. He was one of the founders of the Jewish party Zjednoczenie , which advocated the assimilation of Polish Jews. He was born in Warsaw and was killed there by a German bomb at the beginning of World War II. All the members of his family were murdered during the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#9674
Nicolas Minorsky
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Nicolas Minorsky was a Russian American control theory mathematician, engineer and applied scientist. He is best known for his theoretical analysis and first proposed application of PID controllers in the automatic steering systems for U.S. Navy ships.
Go to Profile#9675
Christian Zeller
1822 - 1899 (77 years)
Julius Christian Johannes Zeller was a German mathematician. He was born to Gottlob Zeller and Christiana Friedrike Moser. Originally trained in mathematics, geography and theology, in 1874 Zeller became Director of the Seminary in Markgröningen and a girls' orphanage. In 1882 he became a member of the Société Mathématique de France. The following year, on 16 March 1883, he delivered a short account of his congruence relation , which was published in the society's journal.
Go to Profile#9676
Konstantin Posse
1847 - 1928 (81 years)
Konstantin Alexandrovich Posse was a Russian mathematician known for contributions to analysis and in particular approximation theory. Veniamin Kagan and D. D. Morduhai-Boltovskoi were among his students.
Go to Profile#9677
Ludolph van Ceulen
1540 - 1610 (70 years)
Ludolph van Ceulen was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands. Biography Van Ceulen moved to Delft most likely in 1576 to teach fencing and mathematics and in 1594 opened a fencing school in Leiden. In 1600 he was appointed the first professor of mathematics at the Engineering School, Duytsche Mathematique, established by Maurice, Prince of Orange, at the relatively new Leiden University. He shared this professorial level at the school with the surveyor and cartographer, , which shows that the intention was to promote practical, rather than theoretical...
Go to Profile#9678
Luigi Guido Grandi
1671 - 1742 (71 years)
Dom Guido Grandi, O.S.B. Cam. was an Italian monk, priest, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and engineer. Life Grandi was born on 1 October 1671 in Cremona, Italy and christened Luigi Francesco Lodovico. When he was of age, he was educated at the Jesuit college there. After he completed his studies there in 1687, he entered the novitiate of the Camaldolese monks at Ferrara and took the name of Guido. In 1693 he was sent to the Monastery of St. Gregory the Great, the Camaldolese house in Rome, to complete his studies in philosophy and theology in preparation for Holy Orders. A year later, Grandi was assigned as professor of both fields at the Camaldolese Monastery of St.
Go to Profile#9679
Karel Petr
1868 - 1950 (82 years)
Karel Petr was a Czech mathematician. He was one of the most renowned Czech mathematicians of the first half of the 20th century. Biography Petr is known for the Petr–Douglas–Neumann theorem in plane geometry, which he proved in 1908, and was independently rediscovered by Jesse Douglas in 1940 and Bernhard Neumann in 1941.
Go to Profile#9680
James Pierpont
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
James P. Pierpont was a Connecticut-born American mathematician. His father Cornelius Pierpont was a wealthy New Haven businessman. He did undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, initially in mechanical engineering, but turned to mathematics. He went to Europe after graduating in 1886. He studied in Berlin, and later in Vienna. He prepared his PhD at the University of Vienna under Leopold Gegenbauer and Gustav Ritter von Escherich. His thesis, defended in 1894, is entitled Zur Geschichte der Gleichung fünften Grades bis zum Jahre 1858. After his defense, he returned to New Haven and was appointed as a lecturer at Yale University, where he spent most of his career.
Go to Profile#9681
Oenopides
490 BC - 420 BC (70 years)
Oenopides of Chios was an ancient Greek geometer, astronomer and mathematician, who lived around 450 BCE. Biography Only limited information are known about the early life of Oenopides except his birthplace which was the island of Chios around 490 BCE. It is believed that Oenopides spent time in Athens but there is only circumstantial evidence to support this. Plato mentions him in Erastae: A Dialogue On Philosophy which places him in Athens. The English translator of the same book reveals one other aspect in Oenopides life which was his travel in Egypt in which he enriched his knowledge in ...
Go to Profile#9682
John Couch Adams
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 Septemb...
Go to Profile#9683
Étienne Bézout
1730 - 1783 (53 years)
Étienne Bézout was a French mathematician who was born in Nemours, Seine-et-Marne, France, and died in Avon , France. Work In 1758 Bézout was elected an adjoint in mechanics of the French Academy of Sciences. Besides numerous minor works, he wrote a Théorie générale des équations algébriques, published at Paris in 1779, which in particular contained much new and valuable matter on the theory of elimination and symmetrical functions of the roots of an equation: he used determinants in a paper in the Histoire de l'académie royale, 1764, but did not treat the general theory.
Go to Profile#9684
Ljubomir Chakaloff
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Ljubomir Chakaloff was a Bulgarian mathematician. He was born in 1886 in Samokov and died in 1963 at the age of 77. He was unmarried at the time of his death. He graduated from Sofia University in June 1908, with an honors degree in mathematics and physics. In 1925, he received a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Naples defending a thesis about Riccati equations, having as advisor Ernesto Pascal.
Go to Profile#9685
Jean-Marie Duhamel
1797 - 1872 (75 years)
Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel was a French mathematician and physicist. His studies were affected by the troubles of the Napoleonic era. He went on to form his own school École Sainte-Barbe. Duhamel's principle, a method of obtaining solutions to inhomogeneous linear evolution equations, is named after him. He was primarily a mathematician but did studies on the mathematics of heat, mechanics, and acoustics. He also did work in calculus using infinitesimals. Duhamel's theorem for infinitesimals says that the sum of a series of infinitesimals is unchanged by replacing the infinitesimal with its...
Go to Profile#9686
Friedrich Schottky
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Friedrich Hermann Schottky was a German mathematician who worked on elliptic, abelian, and theta functions and introduced Schottky groups and Schottky's theorem. He was born in Breslau, Germany and died in Berlin. Schottky was a professor at the University of Zurich from 1882-1892.
Go to Profile#9687
Jacques Ozanam
1640 - 1718 (78 years)
Jacques Ozanam was a French mathematician. Biography Jacques Ozanam was born in Sainte-Olive, Ain, France. In 1670, he published trigonometric and logarithmic tables more accurate than the existing ones of Ulacq, Pitiscus, and Briggs. An act of kindness in lending money to two strangers brought him to the attention of M. d'Aguesseau, father of the chancellor, and he secured an invitation to settle in Paris. There he enjoyed prosperity and contentment for many years. He married, had a large family, and derived an ample income from teaching mathematics to private pupils, chiefly foreigners.
Go to Profile#9688
Ludwig Stickelberger
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Ludwig Stickelberger was a Swiss mathematician who made important contributions to linear algebra and algebraic number theory . Short biography Stickelberger was born in Buch in the canton of Schaffhausen into a family of a pastor. He graduated from a gymnasium in 1867 and studied next in the University of Heidelberg. In 1874 he received a doctorate in Berlin under the direction of Karl Weierstrass for his work on the transformation of quadratic forms to a diagonal form. In the same year, he obtained his Habilitation from Polytechnicum in Zurich . In 1879 he became an extraordinary professor in the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg.
Go to Profile#9689
Hermann Brunn
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Karl Hermann Brunn was a German mathematician, known for his work in convex geometry and in knot theory. Brunnian links are named after him, as his 1892 article "Über Verkettung" included examples of such links.
Go to Profile#9690
Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach
1800 - 1834 (34 years)
Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach was a German geometer and the son of legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, and the brother of philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. After receiving his doctorate at age 22, he became a professor of mathematics at the Gymnasium at Erlangen. In 1822 he wrote a small book on mathematics noted mainly for a theorem on the nine-point circle, which is now known as Feuerbach's theorem. In 1827 he introduced homogeneous coordinates, independently of Möbius.
Go to Profile#9691
Hypsicles
190 BC - 120 BC (70 years)
Hypsicles was an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer known for authoring On Ascensions and the Book XIV of Euclid's Elements. Hypsicles lived in Alexandria. Life and work Although little is known about the life of Hypsicles, it is believed that he authored the astronomical work On Ascensions. The mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria noted on a definition of polygonal numbers, due to Hypsicles:
Go to Profile#9692
Thomas Archer Hirst
1830 - 1892 (62 years)
Thomas Archer Hirst FRS was a 19th-century English mathematician, specialising in geometry. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1883. Life Thomas Hirst was born in Heckmondwike, Yorkshire, England, where both his parents came from families in the wool trade. He was the youngest of four sons. The family moved to Wakefield so that the boys could attend a better school. Thomas attended Wakefield Proprietary School for four years from 1841. Of these days, he said "... I could obtain the most rudimentary and necessary instruction. I remember, however, that here mathematics was my fa...
Go to Profile#9693
Heinrich Brandt
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Heinrich Brandt was a German mathematician who was the first to develop the concept of a groupoid. Brandt studied at the University of Göttingen and, from 1910 to 1913, at the University of Strasbourg. In 1912 he attained his doctorate; he was a student of Heinrich Martin Weber. From 1913 he was assistant at the University of Karlsruhe . He taught geometry and applied mathematics from 1921 at RWTH Aachen. From 1930 he was the chair for mathematics at the University of Halle.
Go to Profile#9694
Frederick S. Woods
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Frederick Shenstone Woods was an American mathematician. He was a part of the mathematics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1934, being head of the department of mathematics from 1930 to 1934 and chairman of the MIT faculty from 1931 to 1933.
Go to Profile#9695
Bogdan Gavrilović
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Bogdan Gavrilović was a Serbian mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and educator. He received his doctorate in sciences mathematiques from the University of Budapest in 1887. He served twice as the Rector of the University of Belgrade and was elected three times as president of the Serbian Royal Academy .
Go to Profile#9696
D. R. Kaprekar
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Dattatreya Ramchandra Kaprekar was an Indian recreational mathematician who described several classes of natural numbers including the Kaprekar, harshad and self numbers and discovered the Kaprekar's constant, named after him. Despite having no formal postgraduate training and working as a schoolteacher, he published extensively and became well known in recreational mathematics circles.
Go to Profile#9697
Aleksey Letnikov
1837 - 1888 (51 years)
Aleksey Vasilyevich Letnikov was a Russian mathematician. After graduating from the Konstantinovsky Land-Surveying Institute in Moscow, Letnikov attended classes at Moscow University and the Sorbonne. In 1860 he became an Instructor of Mathematics at the Konstantinovsky Institute. He obtained the degrees of Master and Ph.D. from Moscow University in 1868 and 1874 respectively.
Go to Profile#9698
Ernst Kötter
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Ernst Kötter was a German mathematician. Education Kötter graduated in 1884 from the University of Berlin under the supervision of Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Career Kötter's treatise "Fundamentals of a purely geometrical theory of algebraic plane curves" gained the 1886 prize of the Berlin Royal Academy.
Go to Profile#9699
Ulugh Beg
1394 - 1449 (55 years)
Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh , better known as Ulugh Beg , was a Timurid sultan, as well as an astronomer and mathematician. Ulugh Beg was notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry, as well as his general interests in the arts and intellectual activities. It is thought that he spoke five languages: Arabic, Persian, Chaghatai Turkic, Mongolian, and a small amount of Chinese. During his rule the Timurid Empire achieved the cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance through his attention and patronage. Samarkand was captured and give...
Go to Profile#9700
Rodolfo Benini
1862 - 1956 (94 years)
Rodolfo Benini was an Italian statistician and demographer. Biography At the beginning of his university career, Rodolfo Benini taught a history of commerce course at the University of Bari . Then he became a professor of economics at the University of Perugia , a professor of statistics at the University of Pavia and at the Bocconi University of Milan . Finally, he moved to the University of Rome, where he was the first professor of statistics and then professor of political economy . Benini held various positions at the national and international levels, including president of the Higher Council of Statistics and of the Commission of Statistics and Law at the Ministry of Justice.
Go to Profile