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,
#9701
John Hilton Grace
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
John Hilton Grace FRS was a British mathematician. The Grace–Walsh–Szegő theorem is named in part after him. Early life He was born in Halewood, near Liverpool, the eldest of the six children of farmer William Grace and Elizabeth Hilton. He was educated at the village school and the Liverpool Institute. From there in 1892 he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge to study mathematics. His nephew, his younger sister's son, was the animal geneticist, Alan Robertson FRS.
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François Peyrard
1759 - 1822 (63 years)
François Peyrard was a French mathematician, educator and librarian. During the French Revolution, he was involved in the committee that reformed the French educational system. He was one of the founders of the École Polytechnique and its first librarian.
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Hector Munro Macdonald
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
Prof Hector Munro Macdonald FRAS FRSE LLD was a Scottish mathematician, born in Edinburgh in 1865. He researched pure mathematics at Cambridge University after graduating from Aberdeen University with an honours degree.
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Franz Harress
1885 - Present (140 years)
Franz Harress was a mathematician and contemporary of Albert Einstein and is best known for his experiment on the propagation of light in a rotating glass device. This experiment sparked an argument between Albert Einstein and Paul Harzer related to the theory of Special Relativity. Harress was a student of Professor Otto Julius Heinrich Knopf at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in 1912. His dissertation was "Die Geschwindigkeit des Lichtes in bewegten Körpern" . His work on the Sagnac effect was analyzed by Max von Laue in his 1920 paper "On the Experiment of F. Harress."
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Edwin Bailey Elliott
1851 - 1937 (86 years)
Edwin Bailey Elliott FRS was a mathematician who worked on invariant theory. In 1892 he was appointed Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Oxford. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1891. He wrote the book An introduction to the algebra of quantics, on invariant theory .
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Marguerite Lehr
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Marguerite Lehr was an American mathematician who studied algebraic geometry, humanism in mathematics, and mathematics education. Early life and education Born on October 22, 1898, to Margaret Kreuter and George Lehr in Baltimore, Marguerite Lehr attended Goucher College for her undergraduate education and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1919. After her undergraduate education, Lehr moved to Rome to study at the University of Rome for the 1923–1924 academic year, funded by the American Association of University Women and the M. Carey Thomas University Fellowship. In 1925, Lehr earned her Ph.D.
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Alfred Klose
1895 - 1953 (58 years)
Wilhelm Rudolf Alfred Klose was a German applied mathematician and astronomer. Education and career Klose studied at University of Breslau and University of Göttingen from 1916 and was an assistant at the observatory in Breslau from 1917. He received his doctorate in astronomy in 1921 in Breslau under Alexander Wilkens . After that he was at the University of Greifswald and its observatory, where he habilitated in 1922 and became a privatdozent. In 1923 he habilitated at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1924 he became an associate professor of mechanics and theoretical astronomy at University of Latvia in Riga.
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Emanuel Lodewijk Elte
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Emanuel Lodewijk Elte was a Dutch mathematician. He is noted for discovering and classifying semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher. Elte's father Hartog Elte was headmaster of a school in Amsterdam. Emanuel Elte married Rebecca Stork in 1912 in Amsterdam, when he was a teacher at a high school in that city. By 1943 the family lived in Haarlem. When on January 30 of that year a German officer was shot in that town, in reprisal a hundred inhabitants of Haarlem were transported to the Camp Vught, including Elte and his family. As Jews, he and his wife were further deported to Sobib...
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Adolf Krazer
1858 - 1926 (68 years)
Adolf Carl Josef Krazer was a German mathematician. Publications
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Albrecht von Wallenstein
1583 - 1634 (51 years)
Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein , also von Waldstein , was a Bohemian military leader and statesman who fought on the Catholic side during the Thirty Years' War . His successful martial career made him one of the richest and most influential men in the Holy Roman Empire by the time of his death. Wallenstein became the supreme commander of the armies of the Imperial Army of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and was a major figure of the Thirty Years' War.
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Marie Litzinger
1899 - 1952 (53 years)
Marie Litzinger was an American mathematician known for her research in number theory, homogeneous polynomials, and modular arithmetic. Early life and education Marie Litzinger was born in Bedford, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Rush Litzinger and Katherine O'Connell Litzinger. Her father owned a marble works, and was an accountant for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
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Mary Shore Walker
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Mary Shore Walker was the first woman faculty member at the University of Missouri, and taught in the department of Mathematics. She was born in 1882. She earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Missouri in 1903 and 1904, respectively. The thesis she wrote for her M.A. was titled, "On finite groups with special reference to Klein’s ikosaeder.” While at the University of Missouri, she studied with Earle Hedrick, Oliver Dimon Kellogg, and W. D. A. Westfall.
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Charles S. Venable
1827 - 1900 (73 years)
Charles Scott Venable was a mathematician, astronomer, and military officer. In mathematics, he is noted for authoring a series of publications as a University of Virginia professor. Early life He was born at Longwood House in Farmville, Virginia and graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, founded by his Patriot ancestor Nathaniel Venable, at the age of 15. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity while at Hampden-Sydney College.
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Lowell Reed
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Lowell Jacob Reed was 7th president of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, the son of Jason Reed, a millwright and farmer, and Louella Coffin Reed.
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Marcel Bayard
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Marcel Bayard was a French mathematician and telecommunications engineer. He made pioneering contributions to the telecommunications theory in the 1930s. As Chief Engineer of French telecommunications after World War II, he supervised and modernized the French telecommunications system.
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Gabriele Manfredi
1681 - 1761 (80 years)
Gabriele Manfredi was an Italian mathematician who undertook important work in the field of calculus. Early years Gabriele Manfredi was born in Bologna, then in the Papal States, on 25 March 1681. He was the son of Alfonso Manfredi, a notary from Lugo, Emilia-Romagna, and Anna Maria Fiorini. His elder brother Eustachio studied law, then turned to science. Gabriele and his brother Eraclito studied medicine, while his fourth brother Emilio became a Jesuit preacher. His two sisters Maddalena and Teresa were also well educated, and later collaborated with their brothers in their work. Gabr...
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Alexander Buchstab
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Aleksandr Adol'fovich Buchstab was a Soviet mathematician who worked in number theory and was "known for his work in sieve methods". He is the namesake of the Buchstab function, which he wrote about in 1937.
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Aurel Voss
1845 - 1931 (86 years)
Aurel Voss was a German mathematician, best known today for his contributions to geometry and mechanics. He served as president of the German Mathematical Society for the 1898 term. He was a professor at the University of Munich during 1902–1923. He became Emeritus in 1923.
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K. C. Sreedharan Pillai
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
K C Sreedharan Pillai was an Indian statistician who was known for his works on multivariate analysis and probability distributions. Pillai studied at the University of Travancore in Trivandrum. He graduated in 1941 and obtained his master's degree in 1945. He was appointed a lecturer at the University of Kerala in 1945 and worked there for six years until he went to the United States in 1951. After studying for one year at Princeton University, he went to the University of North Carolina where he was awarded a doctorate in statistics in 1954.
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Thomas Postlethwaite
1731 - 1798 (67 years)
Thomas Postlethwaite was an English clergyman and Cambridge fellow, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1789 to 1798. Biography Thomas Postlethwaite was the son of Richard Postlethwaite of Crooklands, near Milnthorpe, Westmorland. He attended St Bees School before entering Trinity College, Cambridge as a sizar in 1749. Graduating BA in 1753, he became a fellow of Trinity in 1755. He was Barnaby lecturer in mathematics in 1758. Ordained in 1756, he was from 1774 until his death Rector of Hamerton. He was appointed Master of Trinity in 1789, and in 1791 served as university Vice-Chancellor.
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Albert Ribaucour
1845 - 1893 (48 years)
Albert Ribaucour was a French Civil Engineer and mathematician. Ribaucour began to study in 1865 at the Ecole Polytechnique and in 1867 at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. In 1870 he started to work as an engineer at the naval base Rochefort, in 1873 in Draguignan, in 1878 in Aix-en-Provence and in 1886 in Algeria.
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Francesco Maurolico
1494 - 1575 (81 years)
Francesco Maurolico was a mathematician and astronomer from Sicily. He made contributions to the fields of geometry, optics, conics, mechanics, music, and astronomy. He edited the works of classical authors including Archimedes, Apollonius, Autolycus, Theodosius and Serenus. He also composed his own unique treatises on mathematics and mathematical science.
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Ettore Bortolotti
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Ettore Bortolotti was an Italian mathematician. Biography Bortolotti was born in Bologna. He studied mathematics under Salvatore Pincherle and Cesare Arzelà in Bologna. He graduated in mathematics in 1889 at the University of Bologna, under Pincherle. He was appointed as lecturer to the Lyceum of Modica in Sicily in 1891, then studied one year in Paris as a post-graduate, before lecturing at the University of Rome in 1893.
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Elisha Scott Loomis
1852 - 1940 (88 years)
Elisha Scott Loomis was an American teacher, mathematician, genealogist, writer and engineer. Ancestry and early life Elisha Scott Loomis, of English–Scottish and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, was born in a log-cabin in Wadsworth, Ohio, which at that time was a village in Medina County. He was the eldest son of Charles W. Loomis, a descendant of the pioneer Joseph Loomis of Windsor, Connecticut.
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C. L. Lehmus
1780 - 1863 (83 years)
Daniel Christian Ludolph Lehmus was a German mathematician, who today is best remembered for the Steiner–Lehmus theorem, that was named after him. Lehmus was the grandson of the German poet Johann Adam Lehmus and the Berlin-based physician Emilie Lehmus was his grandniece. His father Christian Balthasar Lehmus was a science teacher and director of a gymnasium in Soest, as such he took it upon himself to school his son. From 1799 to 1802 Lehmus studied at universities of Erlangen and Jena. In 1803 he went to Berlin, where he was giving private lectures in mathematics and pursued further studies at the university, which awarded him a PhD in 1811.
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Giacinto Morera
1856 - 1909 (53 years)
Giacinto Morera , was an Italian engineer and mathematician. He is known for Morera's theorem in the theory of functions of a complex variable and for his work in the theory of linear elasticity. Biography
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François Châtelet
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
François Châtelet was a mathematician at the Université de Besançon who introduced the Weil–Châtelet group and Châtelet surfaces. His father was the mathematician Albert Châtelet.
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Giuseppe Pompilj
1913 - 1968 (55 years)
Giuseppe Pompilj was an Italian statistician. Biography He graduated in mathematics in 1935 and immediately undertook a university career. In 1942 he was lecturer in geometry . After an interruption for military service and a long period of imprisonment, in 1948 Pompilj won the competition for the chair in geometry. He taught geometry and probability theory at the Faculty of Statistical Sciences, University of Rome. Probability theory became the main topic of his interests and he taught this discipline until his premature death.
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Ernest de Jonquières
1820 - 1901 (81 years)
Ernest Jean Philippe Fauque de Jonquières was a French mathematician and naval officer who made several contributions in geometry. Jonquières attended the naval school at Brest, and later joined the French Navy. in 1841 he became a lieutenant, and from 1849 to 1850 he served on the staff of the Admiral in Paris. During this time, Jonquières became a close associate of Michel Chasles, whose works he had studied. During his subsequent time at sea, he continued his mathematical studies, and won a part of the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences in 1862.
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Friedrich Prym
1841 - 1915 (74 years)
Friedrich Emil Fritz Prym was a German mathematician who introduced Prym varieties and Prym differentials. Prym completed his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in 1863 with a thesis written under the direction of Ernst Kummer and Martin Ohm. In 1867 he started a Professor at the University of Würzburg, where he later became Dean, and then Rector in 1897–98.
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Charles Davies
1798 - 1876 (78 years)
Charles Davies was a professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy, notable for writing a series of mathematical textbooks. Biography Davies was born in Washington, Connecticut. His father was a County Sheriff or County Judge. During Davies' early years, the family moved to St Lawrence County, New York, where he was educated in local schools. He entered the US Military Academy at West Point in December 1813, through the influence of General Joseph Swift, who had met Davies' father during the War of 1812. Davies had earned praise for the services rendered to General James Wilkinson's army in the Descent of the St.
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Théodore Olivier
1793 - 1853 (60 years)
Théodore Olivier was a French mathematician. Life and work Olivier studied in the Licée Imperial of Lyon where he obtained in 1811 a degree in mathematics with high honours. After this, he went to the École Polytechnique. Olivier looked like Napoleon, but nobody could prove that Olivier was an illegitimate son of the Emperor.
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Ramiro Rampinelli
1697 - 1759 (62 years)
Ramiro Rampinelli, born Lodovico Rampinelli , was an Italian mathematician and physicist. He was a monk in the Olivetan Order. He had a decisive influence on the spread of mathematical analysis, algebra and mathematical physics in the best universities of Italy. He is one of the best known Italian scholars in the field of infinitesimal mathematics of the first half of the 18th century.
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Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
1486 - 1535 (49 years)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was a German Renaissance polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, knight, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy published in 1533 drew heavily upon Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and neo-Platonism. His book was widely influential among esotericists of the early modern period, and was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne.
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José Augusto Sánchez Pérez
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
José Augusto Sánchez Pérez was a Spanish mathematician and member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He was professor of mathematics at the Instituto Beatriz de Galindo in Madrid. He published in the history of mathematics, in particular on Islamic mathematics in al-Andalus.
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Frederik Zeuthen
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Frederik Ludvig Bang Zeuthen was a Danish economist. He became an internationally recognized economist in the 1930s and published his research in English, French and German, as well as Danish. He was especially known for his theoretical microeconomics work in general equilibrium theory and the theories of market influences and pricing. He was one of the pioneers of the mathematical theory of monopolistic competition. At the same time, he was interested in social policy and distribution of income.
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Nikola Obreshkov
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Nikola Dimitrov Obreshkov was a prominent Bulgarian mathematician, working in complex analysis. See also Obreschkoff–Ostrowski theorem
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Gaspar Schott
1608 - 1666 (58 years)
Gaspar Schott was a German Jesuit and scientist, specializing in the fields of physics, mathematics and natural philosophy, and known for his industry. Biography He was born at Bad Königshofen im Grabfeld. It is probable, but not certain, that his early education was at the Jesuit College at Würzburg. In any case, at the age of 19 he joined the Society of Jesus, entering the novitiate at Trier on 30 October 1627. After two years of novitiate training, he matriculated at the University of Würzburg on 6 November 1629 to begin a three-year study of Philosophy, following the normal academic path prescribed for Jesuit seminarians.
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Aubrey J. Kempner
1880 - 1973 (93 years)
Aubrey John Kempner was an English-born American mathematician, known for the Kempner function and the Kempner series. Aubrey Kempner received in 1911 his PhD with the dissertation Über das Waringsche Problem und einige Verallgemeinerungen under Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. He then went to the US and taught at the University of Illinois and from 1925 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained until 1949 and from 1944 to 1949 was chair of the mathematics department. From 1950 he also taught at the Colorado School of Medicine and at the National Institute of St...
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Edward J. Nanson
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Edward John Nanson was a mathematician known for devising Nanson's method, a Condorcet-compliant variation of the Borda count using successive elimination to find a winner. He was born in England and received his professional education at Trinity College from 1870 to 1874. In 1875, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, Australia where he immigrated. Nanson was an election reformer and office bearer of the Proportional Representation League of Victoria who produced several booklets on election methods. He retired from his lifetime appointment in 1922.
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Mary Martin
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Mary Adela Martin was a British artist best known for geometric abstract painting and for her collaborations with her husband Kenneth Martin. Biography Martin née Balmford was born on 16 November 1907 in Folkestone, United Kingdom. She studied at Goldsmiths' College, London from 1925 to 1929 and at the Royal College of Art from 1929 to 1932 where she met and married Kenneth Martin in 1930. She exhibited at the A.I.A. from 1934, mainly as a still-life and landscape painter, using her maiden name. During the war Mary taught drawing, design and weaving at Chelmsford School of Art from 1941 to 1...
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James Henry Weaver
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
James Henry Weaver was an American mathematician. Weaver received B.A. in 1908 from Otterbein College and M.A. in 1911 from Ohio State University. He was a teaching assistant at Ohio State University from 1910 to 1912. He entered the mathematics doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1912 and graduated there in 1916 with advisor Maurice Babb and thesis Some Extensions of the Work of Pappus and Steiner on Tangent Circles.
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Nikolai Günther
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Nikolai Maximovich Günther was a Russian mathematician known for his work in potential theory and in integral and partial differential equations: later studies have uncovered his contributions to the theory of Gröbner bases.
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François Jacquier
1711 - 1788 (77 years)
François Jacquier was a French Franciscan mathematician and physicist. Life His early education was entrusted to an ecclesiastic, who recognized in him an inclination to science and mathematics. When sixteen years old, François, entered the Order of Friars Minor, and after profession was sent to Rome, to complete his studies in the French convent of the order, Trinità dei Monti. With the permission of his superiors he specialized in mathematics, and at the same time studied the ancient languages. He became proficient in Hebrew, and spoke Greek as though it were his mother-tongue.
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Géza Fodor
1927 - 1977 (50 years)
Géza Fodor was a Hungarian mathematician, working in set theory. He proved Fodor's lemma on stationary sets, one of the most important, and most used results in set theory. He was a professor at the Bolyai Institute of Mathematics at the Szeged University. He was vice-president, then president of the Szeged University. He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Hansraj Gupta
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Hansraj Gupta was an Indian mathematician specialising in number theory, in particular the study of the partition function. Biography Gupta was born 9 October 1902 in Rawalpindi, then part of British India. His father was Gulraj Gupta, an executive engineer with the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway. He studied at the Panjab University in Lahore, where he graduated with a M.A. in 1925. In 1928 he became a lecturer at the Government College in Hoshiarpur. He received his Ph.D. from the Panjab University in 1936. By then he had already published several papers on partitions.
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Leo the Mathematician
790 - 900 (110 years)
Leo the Mathematician, the Grammarian or the Philosopher was a Byzantine philosopher and logician associated with the Macedonian Renaissance and the end of the Second Byzantine Iconoclasm. His only preserved writings are some notes contained in manuscripts of Plato's dialogues. He has been called a "true Renaissance man" and "the cleverest man in Byzantium in the 9th century". He was archbishop of Thessalonica and later became the head of the Magnaura School of philosophy in Constantinople, where he taught Aristotelian logic.
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Yevgenii Vasilevich Zolotov
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Evgeniy Vasiljevich Zolotov was a Soviet mathematician and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . Biography Zolotov was born in Tula on 29 April 1922. He was educated in MSU from 1939–1942 up to conscripted to the F. E. Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, which was completed in 1944 with the engineering degree.
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Göran Dillner
1832 - 1906 (74 years)
Göran Dillner was a Swedish mathematician. He founded the Swedish Tidskrift för matematik och fysik , and was its editor-in-chief in 1868–1871 and 1874. He was a city councilor in Uppsala from 1875 to 1882.
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Georg Faber
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
Georg Faber was a German mathematician who introduced Faber polynomials, Faber series, the Lévy C curve, and Faber–Schauder systems. External links
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