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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9751
Anthony M. Ralston
#9752
Luigi Poletti
1864 - 1967 (103 years)
Luigi Poletti was an Italian mathematician and poet. He was born in Pontremoli, where he also died, age 102. He attended the episcopal seminary in Potremoli, then the high school of Parma, graduated in Turin and started to study mathematics there. He did not finish and took a job in a bank. 1911 he accidentally found the book of prime number tables written by Lehmer, a mathematician from the United States in the house of professor Gino Loria, a friend of his family, when he visited Genoa. Since then he spent many years to extend the first table in order to simplify "Eratosthenes Crivello" , a method from ancient Greece to find prime numbers.
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Kazimierz Cwojdziński
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Kazimierz Cwojdziński was a Polish mathematician and professor of the School of Engineering in Poznań. Cwojdziński published his works regarding secondary school curriculum and school mathematics in the journals Wiadomości Matematyczne, Muzeum, Parametr, and Matematyka as well as the German journal Archiv der Mathematik und Physik. He was among the first year-group to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Adam Mickiewicz University.
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Johannes Knoblauch
1855 - 1915 (60 years)
Johannes Knoblauch was a German mathematician. Biography Johannes Knoblauch, whose father was the physics professor Karl Hermann Knoblauch, studied law, mathematics and physics from 1872 in Halle, Heidelberg and Berlin. At the Friedrich Wilhelm University he studied from 1874 to 1878 and from 1880 to 1883 and received his Promotion in 1882 and his Habilitation in 1883. His doctoral dissertation "Ueber die Allgemeine Wellenfläche" was supervised by Karl Weierstrass. Knoblauch was a teacher for the academic year 1878–1879 at the state Gymnasium in Halle and from 1879 to 1880 at Berlin's Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.
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John Caswell
1650 - 1712 (62 years)
John Caswell was an English mathematician who served as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1709 until his death. Life and career John Caswell , was from Crewkerne, Somerset, and he matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, in March 1671 when he was 16 years old. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1674 and his Master of Arts in 1677. He was a pupil of John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1649 until his death in 1703. He worked with the cartographer John Adams on the survey of England and Wales that Adams began in the late 17th century. In 1709, he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and also served as vice-principal of Hart Hall, Oxford.
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John Farrar
1779 - 1853 (74 years)
John Farrar was an American scholar. He first coined the concept of hurricanes as “a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere”, after the Great September Gale of 1815. Farrar remained Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University between 1807 and 1836. During this time, he introduced modern mathematics into the curriculum. He was also a regular contributor to the scientific journals.
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Johann Hommel
1518 - 1562 (44 years)
Johann Hommel was a German astronomer and mathematician. Work Hommel was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig in 1551. In 1552 or 1553, Richard Cantzlar introduced transversal dot lines in graduations. It was a variant of the zigzag line system introduced by Hommel. Tycho Brahe obtained the zigzag line system from Hommel.
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Christian Wiener
1826 - 1896 (70 years)
Ludwig Christian Wiener was a German mathematician who specialized in descriptive geometry. Wiener was also a physicist and philosopher. In 1863, he was the first person to identify qualitatively the internal molecular cause of Brownian motion.
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Elling Holst
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
Elling Bolt Holst was a Norwegian mathematician, biographer and children's writer. Early and personal life Holst was born in Drammen, Norway. He was a son of bookseller Adolph Theodor Holst and Amalie Fredrikke Bergh. He was a grandson of merchant and politician, member of the Storting, Elling Mathias Holst .
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Lorna Swain
1891 - 1936 (45 years)
Lorna Mary Swain was a British mathematician and college lecturer, known for being one of few female mathematicians to contribute their talents to the war effort in World War I, and for being one of few early female lecturers at University of Cambridge. Academically, she is known for her work in fluid dynamics as well as her deep desire to see more women pursue higher education and teaching in the field of mathematics.
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Arthur Hirsch
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Arthur Hirsch was a German mathematician. Life and work Hirsch completed his schooling in Königsberg in 1882 and then studied mathematics and physics in the universities of Berlin and Königsberg. Among his teachers at Königsberg were David Hilbert and Adolf Hurwitz. In 1892 he received a doctorate from Königsberg for a thesis about linear differential equations.
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Wilhelm Ahrens
1872 - 1927 (55 years)
Wilhelm Ahrens was a German mathematician and writer on recreational mathematics. Biography Ahrens was born in Lübz at the Elde in Mecklenburg and studied from 1890 to 1897 at the University of Rostock, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Freiburg. In 1895 at the University of Rostock he received his Promotion , summa cum laude, under the supervision of Otto Staude with dissertation entitled Über eine Gattung n-fach periodischer Functionen von n reellen Veränderlichen. From 1895 to 1896 he taught at the German school in Antwerp and then studied another semester under Sophus Lie in Leipzig.
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Carl Fabian Björling
1839 - 1910 (71 years)
Carl Fabian Emanuel Björling was a Swedish mathematician and meteorologist. Life He was born on 30 November 1839 in Västerås, Sweden, and died on 6 May 1910. He was the son of mathematician Emanuel Björling and father of lawyer Carl Georg Björling.
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Luca Valerio
1553 - 1618 (65 years)
Luca Valerio was an Italian mathematician. He developed ways to find volumes and centers of gravity of solid bodies using the methods of Archimedes. He corresponded with Galileo Galilei and was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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Charles de Bovelles
1479 - 1567 (88 years)
Charles de Bovelles was a French mathematician and philosopher, and canon of Noyon. His Géométrie en françoys was the first scientific work to be printed in French. Bovelles authored a number of philological, theological and mystical treatises, and has been reckoned to be "perhaps the most remarkable French thinker of the 16th century."
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Arima Yoriyuki
1714 - 1783 (69 years)
Arima Yoriyuki was a Japanese mathematician of the Edo period. He was the lord of Kurume Domain. He approximated the value of and its square, correct to 29 digits: Further reading
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Thomas Bartholin
1616 - 1680 (64 years)
Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.
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Moritz Allé
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Moritz Allé was an Austrian astronomer and mathematician, one of the teachers of Nikola Tesla. Scientific career After his university graduation, Allé startet his professional career as an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1856. He was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Kraków in 1859. In 1860 he completed his PhD at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. In 1862 he was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Prague. It was there where he completed his habilitation in mathematics in 1863. In 1867, Allé was appointed professor of mathematics at the Joanneum in Graz and was elected as its rector in 1875/76.
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George Adam Pfeiffer
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
George Adam Pfeiffer was an American mathematician. Pfeiffer received in 1910 his master's degree in engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and then his A.M. in 1911 and in 1914 his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University. He spent the academic year 1914–1915 as a Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University and then in 1915 became an instructor at Princeton University. During WW I, he was in the U.S. army and at Princeton University taught meteorology to army aviation students. After the war he taught, starting as an instructor in February 1919, at Columbia University. Th...
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Hettie Belle Ege
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Hettie Belle Ege was an American professor of mathematics. From 1914 to 1916, she was the acting president of Mills College. Early life Ege was born in Erie, Illinois on March 31, 1861, the daughter of Joseph Arthur Ege and his second wife, Catherine Rebecca Reisch Ege. Her parents were both from Pennsylvania; her father died the year she was born, and her mother remarried in 1869. She attended Western College in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 1886; she later graduated from Mills College in 1903, with further studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Munich, and the University of C...
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Cataldo Agostinelli
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Cataldo Agostinelli was an Italian mathematician who wrote 218 papers and several treatises in various disciplines which include dynamics of rigid systems, celestial mechanics, dynamics of non-holonomic systems and magnetohydrodynamics about which he wrote , commissioned by C.N.R., a broad monograph in which also the magnetohydrodynamics waves, the vortexes and the plasma theory are dealt with. He was member of the Accademia dei Lincei, President of the Accademia delle Scienze of Turin and member of several other local Academies.
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Roy Chapman Andrews
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He led a series of expeditions through the politically disturbed China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. Chapman's popular writing about his adventures made him famous.
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Wilhelm Fuhrmann
1833 - 1904 (71 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Fuhrmann was a German mathematician. The Fuhrmann circle and the Fuhrmann triangle are named after him. Biography Fuhrmann was born on 28 February 1833 in Burg bei Magdeburg. Fuhrmann had shortly worked as sailor before he returned to school and attended the Altstadt Gymnasium in Königsberg, where his teachers noticed his interest and talent in mathematics and geography. He graduated in 1853 and went on to study mathematics and physics at the University of Königsberg. One of his peers later remembered him as the most talented and diligent student of his class. Fuhrmann howev...
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Gustavo Sannia
1875 - 1930 (55 years)
Gustavo Sannia was an Italian mathematician working in differential geometry, projective geometry, and summation of series. He was the son of Achille Sannia, mathematician and senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Henrik Petrini
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henrik Petrini was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are mainly connected with the theory of partial differential equations, in particular potential theory. He was born in Falun and received his PhD in 1890 from Uppsala University in mechanics, where he subsequently held a position as professor. In 1901 he moved to Växjö, where he worked as a lektor for mathematics and physics at the gymnasium. In 1914 he finally moved to Stockholm. He is best known for his counterexample of a continuous function for which the Newton potential is not twice differentiable. He was also int...
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Emanuels Grīnbergs
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Emanuels Donats Frīdrihs Jānis Grinbergs was a Latvian mathematician, known for Grinberg's theorem on the Hamiltonicity of planar graphs. Biography Grinbergs was born on January 25, 1911, in St. Petersburg, the son of a Lutheran bishop from Latvia. Latvia became independent from Russia in 1917, and on the death of his father in 1923, Grinbergs' family returned to Riga, taking Grinbergs with them.
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Johann Friedrich Weidler
1691 - 1755 (64 years)
Johann Friedrich Weidler was a German jurist and mathematician. Biography At the age of fifteen Weidler moved to the University of Jena, enrolled on June 10, 1712 at the University of Wittenberg, obtained the academic degree of Magister on April 30, 1712 and became an adjunct at the philosophical faculty of the Wittenberg Academy on April 19, 1715. After he had been given the professorship of lower mathematics in 1715, he took over the professorship of higher mathematics in 1719.
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Abraham bar Hiyya
1070 - 1136 (66 years)
Abraham bar Ḥiyya ha-Nasi , also known as Abraham Savasorda, Abraham Albargeloni, and Abraham Judaeus, was a Catalan Jewishish mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who resided in Barcelona. Bar Ḥiyya was active in translating the works of Islamic science into Latin, and was likely the earliest to introduce Arabic algebra into Christian Europe. He also wrote several original works on mathematics, astronomy, Jewish philosophy, chronology, and land surveying. His most influential work is his Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret, translated in 1145 into Latin as Liber embadorum. A Hebrew treati...
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Florimond de Beaune
1601 - 1652 (51 years)
Florimond de Beaune was a French jurist and mathematician, and an early follower of René Descartes. R. Taton calls him "a typical example of the erudite amateurs" active in 17th-century science. In a 1638 letter to Descartes, de Beaune posed the problem of solving the differential equationnow seen as the first example of the inverse tangent method of deducing properties of a curve from its tangents.
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Lysander
401 BC - 395 BC (6 years)
Lysander was a Spartan military and political leader. He destroyed the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, forcing Athens to capitulate and bringing the Peloponnesian War to an end. He then played a key role in Sparta's domination of Greece for the next decade until his death at the Battle of Haliartus.
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John Torrence Tate Sr.
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
John Torrence Tate Sr. was an American physicist noted for his editorship of Physical Review between 1926 and 1950. He is the father of mathematician John Torrence Tate Jr. Biography Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He attended the University of Nebraska, studying electrical engineering, earning a BS in 1910. He continued at the University of Nebraska, shifting his focus to physics and earning an MA in 1912. Like many American students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in physics, he departed for Germany to further his studies, earning a PhD under James Franck in 1914, with...
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Margarethe Kahn
1880 - 1942 (62 years)
Margarethe Kahn was a German mathematician and Holocaust victim. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Margarethe Kahn was the daughter of Eschwege merchant and flannel factory owner Albert Kahn and his wife Johanne . She had an older brother Otto . Five years after the untimely death of his wife Johanne, their father married her younger sister Julie , with whom he had a daughter, Margaret's half-sister Martha .
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H. W. Lloyd Tanner
1851 - 1915 (64 years)
Henry William Lloyd Tanner was Professor of Mathematics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire from 1883 to 1909. Life Tanner was born on 17 January 1851 at Burham, Kent and was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he was taught by John Griffiths. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in 1883, and held the post until 1909. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Tanner published various papers on differential equatio...
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Ivan Privalov
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Privalov was a Russian mathematician best known for his work on analytic functions. Biography Privalov graduated from Moscow State University in 1913 studying under Dimitri Egorov and Nikolai Lusin. He obtained his master's degree from MSU in 1916 and became professor at Imperial Saratov University . In 1922 he was appointed as Professor at MSU and worked there for the rest of his life.
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William Fleetwood Sheppard
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
William Fleetwood Sheppard FRSE LLM Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.
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Giacomo Candido
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Giacomo Candido was an Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career In 1897 Candido received his Laurea from the University of Pisa and started to teach mathematics: first, at the Liceo of Galatina, then at the Liceo of Campobasso and from 1927 at the Liceo of Brindisi.
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Christoph Rudolff
1499 - 1546 (47 years)
Christoph Rudolff was a German mathematician, the author of the first German textbook on algebra. From 1517 to 1521, Rudolff was a student of Henricus Grammateus at the University of Vienna and was the author of a book computing, under the title: .
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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F. H. Jackson
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
The Reverend Frank Hilton Jackson was an English clergyman and mathematician who worked on basic hypergeometric series. He introduced several q-analogs such as the Jackson–Bessel functions, the Jackson-Hahn-Cigler q-addition, the Jackson derivative, and the Jackson integral.
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Ernst Fiedler
1861 - 1954 (93 years)
Ernst Fiedler was a Swiss mathematician. Life and work Fiedler was the son of Wilhelm Fiedler, mathematics professor at ETH Zurich from 1867. From 1879 to 1882 he studied mathematics at ETH Zurich; in 1882 he moved to Berlin where he studied under Weierstrass, Frobenius and other outstanding mathematicians. In 1885 he moved to Leipzig, where he was awarded a doctorate under Felix Klein in 1885.
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Alexander G. Burgess
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
Alexander G. Burgess was a Scottish mathematician. He served as president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. He is noted for his work on Tripolar Co-ordinates. Biography He was born in Wishaw, Lanarkshire in southern Scotland in 1872.
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Julius Wolff
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Julius Wolff was a Dutch-Jewish mathematician, known for the Denjoy–Wolff theorem and for his boundary version of the Schwarz lemma. With his family he was arrested in Utrecht by the Nazi occupation forces of the Netherlands on 8 March 1943 and transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 13 September 1944, where he died of epidemic typhus on 8 February 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated.
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Jedediah Smith
1799 - 1831 (32 years)
Jedediah Strong Smith was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, mountain man and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the Western United States, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the -wide South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
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Kurushima Kinai
1650 - 1757 (107 years)
Kurushima Kinai, also known as Kurushima Yoshita and Kurushima Yoshihiro, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. The Japanese board game of shogi attracted Kurushima's interest; and he was recognized in his own time as a master player. Among shogi players, he continues today to be well known for seven "puzzle ring" gambits with subsequent sequenced maneuvers—including the "silver puzzle ring."
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John James Walker
1825 - 1900 (75 years)
John James Walker FRS was an English mathematician. He was the president of the London Mathematical Society from 1888 to 1890. Life and work His father was headmaster in the schools where he studied: London High School and Plymouth New Grammar School. As his family was of Irish descent, he went to study mathematics and physics to Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1846 and mastered in 1857.
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Ralph Lent Jeffery
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Ralph Lent Jeffery was a Canadian mathematician working on analysis. He taught at several institutions including Acadia University, the University of Saskatchewan and Queen's University. Jeffery Hall at Queen's was named for him. In 1937 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Annie MacKinnon
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Annie Louise MacKinnon Fitch was a Canadian-born American mathematician who worked with Felix Klein and became a professor of mathematics at Wells College. She was the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate at an American university.
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Gu Deng
1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Gu Deng was a mathematician and politician at the end of Qing Dynasty and in the early Republic of China. His courtesy name was Yangwu . Biography Gu Deng was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu. In the end of Qing Dynasty He graduated the department of mathematics, the Gezhi Academy . In 1909 Gu translated the book about quaternions, this is the first introduction about quaternions in Chinese history.
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Georgii Polozii
1914 - 1968 (54 years)
Georgii Nikolaevich Polozii was a Soviet mathematician who mostly worked in pure mathematics such as complex analysis, approximation theory and numerical analysis. He also worked on elasticity theory, which is used in applied math and physics. He was Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , Head of the Department of Computational Mathematics of the Kyiv Cybernetics Faculty University .
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William Guy
1810 - 1885 (75 years)
William Augustus Guy was a British physician and medical statistician. Life He was born in Chichester and educated at Christ's Hospital and Guy's Hospital; he then studied at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Paris before getting a Bachelor of Medicine degree from the University of Cambridge, 1837.
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