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
Geminus
Geminus of Rhodes , was a Greek astronomer and mathematician, who flourished in the 1st century BC. An astronomy work of his, the Introduction to the Phenomena, still survives; it was intended as an introductory astronomy book for students. He also wrote a work on mathematics, of which only fragments quoted by later authors survive.
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Gaspare Mainardi
1800 - 1879 (79 years)
Gaspare Mainardi was an Italian mathematician active in differential geometry. He is remembered for the Gauss–Codazzi–Mainardi equations.
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Al-Khwarizmi
750 - 846 (96 years)
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī , or al-Khwarizmi, was a polymath from Khwarazm, who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 CE, he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
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Felix Berezin
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Felix Alexandrovich Berezin was a Soviet Russian mathematician and physicist known for his contributions to the theory of supersymmetry and supermanifolds as well as to the path integral formulation of quantum field theory.
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Philip Kelland
1808 - 1879 (71 years)
Philip Kelland PRSE FRS was an English mathematician. He was known mainly for his great influence on the development of education in Scotland. Life Kelland was born in 1808 the son of Philip Kelland , curate in Dunster, Somerset, England. He was educated at Sherborne, and was an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was tutored privately by English mathematician William Hopkins and graduated in 1834 as senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. He was ordained in the Church of England. From 1834 to 1838, he was a fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge.
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Albrecht Dürer
1471 - 1528 (57 years)
Albrecht Dürer , sometimes spelled in English as Durer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
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Georg Alexander Pick
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
Georg Alexander Pick was an Austrian Jewish mathematician who was murdered during The Holocaust. He was born in Vienna to Josefa Schleisinger and Adolf Josef Pick and died at Theresienstadt concentration camp. Today he is best known for Pick's theorem for determining the area of lattice polygons. He published it in an article in 1899; it was popularized when Hugo Dyonizy Steinhaus included it in the 1969 edition of Mathematical Snapshots.
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Baudhayana
800 BC - 800 BC (0 years)
#9709
Leopold Gegenbauer
1849 - 1903 (54 years)
Leopold Bernhard Gegenbauer was an Austrian mathematician remembered best as an algebraist. Gegenbauer polynomials are named after him. Leopold Gegenbauer was the son of a doctor. He studied at the University of Vienna from 1869 until 1873. He then went to Berlin where he studied from 1873 to 1875 working under Weierstrass and Kronecker.
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Filip Lundberg
1876 - 1965 (89 years)
Ernst Filip Oskar Lundberg Swedish actuary, and mathematician. Lundberg is one of the founders of mathematical risk theory and worked as managing director of several insurance companies. According to Harald Cramér, "Filip Lundberg's works on risk theory were all written at a time when no general theory of stochastic processes existed, and when collective reinsurance methods, in the present sense of the word, were entirely unknown to insurance companies. In both respects his ideas were far ahead of their time, and his works deserve to be generally recognized as pioneering works of fundamental ...
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Louis Couturat
1868 - 1914 (46 years)
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist. Couturat was a pioneer of the constructed language Ido. Life and education Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France. In 1887 he entered École Normale Supérieure to study philosophy and mathematics. In 1895 he lectured in philosophy at the University of Toulouse and 1897 lectured in philosophy of mathematics at the University of Caen Normandy, taking a stand in favor of transfinite numbers. After a time in Hanover studying the writings of Leibniz, he became an assistant to Henri-Louis Bergson at the Collège de France i...
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Otto Stolz
1842 - 1905 (63 years)
Otto Stolz was an Austrian mathematician noted for his work on mathematical analysis and infinitesimals. Born in Hall in Tirol, he studied in Innsbruck from 1860 and in Vienna from 1863, receiving his habilitation there in 1867. Two years later he studied in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass, Ernst Kummer and Leopold Kronecker, and in 1871 heard lectures in Göttingen by Alfred Clebsch and Felix Klein , before returning to Innsbruck permanently as a professor of mathematics.
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Piero della Francesca
1415 - 1492 (77 years)
Piero della Francesca was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting is characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
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Lester S. Hill
1891 - 1961 (70 years)
Lester S. Hill was an American mathematician and educator who was interested in applications of mathematics to communications. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Columbia College and a Ph.D. from Yale University . He taught at the University of Montana, Princeton University, the University of Maine, Yale University, and Hunter College. Among his notable contributions was the Hill cipher. He also developed methods for detecting errors in telegraphed code numbers and wrote two books.
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Martin Kutta
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Martin Wilhelm Kutta was a German mathematician. Kutta was born in Pitschen, Upper Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia . He attended the University of Breslau from 1885 to 1890, and continued his studies in Munich until 1894, where he became the assistant of Walther Franz Anton von Dyck. From 1898, he spent half a year at the University of Cambridge. From 1899 to 1909, he worked again as an assistant of von Dyck in Munich; from 1909 to 1910, he was adjunct professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He was professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1910 to 1912. Kutta became professor at the Univers...
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Albert Girard
1595 - 1632 (37 years)
Albert Girard was a French-born mathematician. He studied at the University of Leiden. He "had early thoughts on the fundamental theorem of algebra" and gave the inductive definition for the Fibonacci numbers. He was the first to use the abbreviations 'sin', 'cos' and 'tan' for the trigonometric functions in a treatise. Girard was the first to state, in 1625, that each prime of the form 1 mod 4 is the sum of two squares. It was said that he was quiet-natured and, unlike most mathematicians, did not keep a journal for his personal life.
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Isidor Natanson
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Isidor Pavlovich Natanson was a Swiss-born Soviet mathematician known for contributions to real analysis and constructive function theory, in particular, for his textbooks on these subjects. His son, Garal'd Natanson , was also a known mathematician.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Levi
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Daniel Levi was a German mathematician known for his work in abstract algebra, especially torsion-free abelian groups. He also worked in geometry, topology, set theory, and analysis.
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Nicolas Fuss
1755 - 1826 (71 years)
Nicolas Fuss , also known as Nikolai Fuss, was a Swiss mathematician, living most of his life in Imperial Russia. Biography Fuss was born in Basel, Switzerland. He moved to Saint Petersburg to serve as a mathematical assistant to Leonhard Euler from 1773–1783, and remained there until his death. He contributed to spherical trigonometry, differential equations, the optics of microscopes and telescopes, differential geometry, and actuarial science. He also contributed to Euclidean geometry, including the problem of Apollonius.
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Robert Alfred Herman
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Robert Alfred Herman was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who coached many students to a high wrangler rank in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Herman was senior wrangler in 1882. In the early days of Tripos, coaches were in private business in rooms off-campus. In the 1880s and 1890s instruction at college improved to the point that coaches merely supervised their students’ progress. Under these conditions the tradition of private coaching fell away, and fellows such as Herman coached students.
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Hugo Hadwiger
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Hugo Hadwiger was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work in geometry, combinatorics, and cryptography. Biography Although born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hadwiger grew up in Bern, Switzerland. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bern, where he majored in mathematics but also studied physics and actuarial science. He continued at Bern for his graduate studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Willy Scherrer. He was for more than forty years a professor of mathematics at Bern.
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Carlo Emilio Bonferroni
1892 - 1960 (68 years)
Carlo Emilio Bonferroni was an Italian mathematician who worked on probability theory. Biography Bonferroni studied piano and conducting in Turin Conservatory and at University of Turin under Giuseppe Peano and Corrado Segre, where he obtained his laurea. During this time he also studied at University of Vienna and ETH Zurich. During World War I, he was an officer among the engineers. Bonferroni held a position as assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and in 1923 took up the chair of financial mathematics at the Economics Institute of the University of Bari. In 1933 he t...
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Theaetetus
416 BC - 369 BC (47 years)
Theaetetus of Athens , possibly the son of Euphronius of the Athenian deme Sunium, was a Greek mathematician. His principal contributions were on irrational lengths, which was included in Book X of Euclid's Elements and proving that there are precisely five regular convex polyhedra. A friend of Socrates and Plato, he is the central character in Plato's eponymous Socratic dialogue.
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Georg Scheffers
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Georg Scheffers was a German mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Life Scheffers was born on 21 November 1866 in the village of Altendorf near Holzminden . Scheffers began his university career at the University of Leipzig where he studied with Felix Klein and Sophus Lie. Scheffers was a coauthor with Lie for three of the earliest expressions of Lie theory:Lectures on Differential equations with known Infinitesimal transformations ,Lectures on Continuous groups , andGeometry of Contact Transformations .All three are now available online through archive.org.
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Marcel J. E. Golay
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Marcel Jules Edouard Golay was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, and information theorist, who applied mathematics to real-world military and industrial problems. He was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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Michel Rolle
1652 - 1719 (67 years)
Michel Rolle was a French mathematician. He is best known for Rolle's theorem . He is also the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination . Life Rolle was born in Ambert, Basse-Auvergne. Rolle, the son of a shopkeeper, received only an elementary education. He married early and as a young man struggled to support his family on the meager wages of a transcriber for notaries and attorney. In spite of his financial problems and minimal education, Rolle studied algebra and Diophantine analysis on his own. He moved from Ambert to Paris in 1675.
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Karl Rohn
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Rohn was a German mathematician, who studied geometry. Life and work Rohn studied in Darmstadt, Leipzig and Munich, initially engineering but then mathematics by the influence of Alexander von Brill, among the others. In 1878 he received a doctorate under the supervision of Felix Klein in Munich, and in 1879 he habilitated at Leipzig. The subject of his doctoral thesis and habilitation was the Kummer surfaces of order 4 and their relationship with hyperelliptic functions . In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Leipzig and a year later at the Dresden University of Technology, where in 1887 he was a professor of descriptive geometry.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich
1711 - 1787 (76 years)
Roger Joseph Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. He studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works.
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Aleksey Krylov
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov was a Russian naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist. Biography Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr, Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov , was the local landlord and vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the zemskaya uprava in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family .
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Otakar Borůvka
1899 - 1995 (96 years)
Otakar Borůvka was a Czech mathematician best known today for his work in graph theory. Education and career Borůvka was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia , the son of a school headmaster. He attended the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště beginning in 1910. In 1916, influenced by the ongoing World War I, he moved to the military school in Hranice, and later he enrolled into the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling near Vienna.
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George William Hill
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
George William Hill was an American astronomer and mathematician. Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal, "on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy". Today, he is chiefly remembered for the Hill differential equation.
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Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich
1875 - 1929 (54 years)
Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was an English mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Life Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was born on 8 February 1875, in Wolverhampton, England. He was descended from Bryan I'Anson, of Ashby St Ledgers, Sheriff of London and father of the 17th century 1st Baronet Sir Bryan I'Anson of Bassetsbury.
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Thomas Harriot
1560 - 1621 (61 years)
Thomas Harriot , also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his contributions in navigational techniques, working closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics and navigation, he remains obscure because he published little of it, namely only The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia . This book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Arthur Moritz Schoenflies
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Arthur Moritz Schoenflies , sometimes written as Schönflies, was a German mathematician, known for his contributions to the application of group theory to crystallography, and for work in topology. Schoenflies was born in Landsberg an der Warthe . Arthur Schoenflies married Emma Levin in 1896. He studied under Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, and was influenced by Felix Klein.
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Jan Mikusiński
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Jan Mikusiński was a Polish mathematician based at the University of Wrocław known for his pioneering work in mathematical analysis. Mikusiński developed an operational calculus – known as the Calculus of Mikusiński , which is relevant for solving differential equations. His operational calculus is based upon an algebra of the convolution of functions with respect to the Fourier transform. From the convolution product he goes on to define what in other contexts is called the field of fractions or a quotient field. These ordered pairs of functions Mikusiński calls "operators", the "Mikusiński ...
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Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647 (39 years)
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
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Paul du Bois-Reymond
1831 - 1889 (58 years)
Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond. His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent. His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost eve...
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Theodor Schneider
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Theodor Schneider was a German mathematician, best known for providing proof of what is now known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Schneider studied from 1929 to 1934 in Frankfurt; he solved Hilbert's 7th problem in his PhD thesis, which then came to be known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Later he became an assistant to Carl Ludwig Siegel in Göttingen, where he stayed until 1953. Then he became a professor in Erlangen and finally until his retirement in Freiburg . During his time in Freiburg he also served as the director of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach from 1959 to 1963.
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Andrey Kiselyov
1852 - 1940 (88 years)
Andrey Petrovich Kiselyov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician. Biography Kiselyov attended the district school in Mtsensk and later enrolled at the Gymnasium in Oryol, the main city in the region. He graduated from the Gymnasium in 1871 with the gold medal and, in the same year, entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St Petersburg University. In 1875, Kiselyov graduated from the university with a degree that allowed him to teach in a Gymnasium. He taught mathematics, mechanics, and drawing. It was at that time when he started writing his own textbooks.
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Jean Delsarte
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Jean Frédéric Auguste Delsarte was a French mathematician known for his work in mathematical analysis, in particular, for introducing mean-periodic functions and generalised shift operators. He was one of the founders of the Bourbaki group. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1932 at Zürich.
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Nilakantha Somayaji
1444 - 1544 (100 years)
Keļallur Nilakantha Somayaji , also referred to as Keļallur Comatiri, was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of his most influential works was the comprehensive astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha completed in 1501. He had also composed an elaborate commentary on Aryabhatiya called the Aryabhatiya Bhasya. In this Bhasya, Nilakantha had discussed infinite series expansions of trigonometric functions and problems of algebra and spherical geometry. Grahapariksakrama is a manual on making observations in astronomy based on instruments of the time.
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V. Ramaswamy Aiyer
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
V. Ramaswamy Aiyer was a civil servant in the Madras Provincial Service. In 1907, along with a group of friends, he founded the Indian Mathematical Society with headquarters in Pune. He was the first Secretary of the Society and acted in that position until 1910. Ramaswamy Aiyer also served the Society as its President from 1926 to 1930.
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Renato Caccioppoli
1904 - 1959 (55 years)
Renato Caccioppoli was an Italian mathematician, known for his contributions to mathematical analysis, including the theory of functions of several complex variables, functional analysis, measure theory.
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Thomas Simpson
1710 - 1761 (51 years)
Thomas Simpson FRS was a British mathematician and inventor known for the eponymous Simpson's rule to approximate definite integrals. The attribution, as often in mathematics, can be debated: this rule had been found 100 years earlier by Johannes Kepler, and in German it is called Keplersche Fassregel.
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Horace Lamb
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Sir Horace Lamb was a British applied mathematician and author of several influential texts on classical physics, among them Hydrodynamics and Dynamical Theory of Sound . Both of these books remain in print. The word vorticity was invented by Lamb in 1916.
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Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann
1837 - 1920 (83 years)
Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann was a German mathematician. Life Bachmann studied mathematics at the university of his native city of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1862 for his thesis on group theory. He then went to Breslau to study for his habilitation, which he received in 1864 for his thesis on Complex Units.
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Christian Doppler
1803 - 1853 (50 years)
Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He formulated the principle – now known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.
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Sofya Kovalevskaya
1850 - 1891 (41 years)
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya , born Korvin-Krukovskaya , was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor. According to historian of science Ann Hibner Koblitz, Kovalevskaya was "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century".
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Christian Kramp
1760 - 1826 (66 years)
Christian Kramp was a French mathematician, who worked primarily with factorials. Christian Kramp's father was his teacher at grammar school in Strasbourg. Kramp studied medicine and graduated; however, his interests certainly ranged outside medicine, for in addition to a number of medical publications he published a work on crystallography in 1793. In 1795, France annexed the Rhineland area in which Kramp was carrying out his work and after this he became a teacher at Cologne , teaching mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Kramp could read and write in German and French.
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