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,
#9801
Ernst Kolman
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Ernst Kolman or Arnošt Yaromirovich Kolman was a Marxist philosopher, who renounced his former activities as an ideological enforcer in Soviet science. At the age of 84 he sought asylum in Sweden and published a retraction of his previous activity.
Go to Profile#9802
Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen was a Danish mathematician. He is known for work on the enumerative geometry of conic sections, algebraic surfaces, and history of mathematics. Biography Zeuthen was born in Grimstrup near Varde where his father was a minister. In 1849, his father moved to a church in Sorø where Zeuthen began his secondary schooling. In 1857 he entered the University of Copenhagen to study mathematics and graduated with a master's degree in 1862. Following this he earned a scholarship to study abroad, and decided to visit Paris where he studied geometry with Michel Chasles.
Go to Profile#9803
Anders Johan Lexell
1740 - 1784 (44 years)
Anders Johan Lexell was a Finnish-Swedish astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who spent most of his life in Imperial Russia, where he was known as Andrei Ivanovich Leksel . Lexell made important discoveries in polygonometry and celestial mechanics; the latter led to a comet named in his honour. La Grande Encyclopédie states that he was the prominent mathematician of his time who contributed to spherical trigonometry with new and interesting solutions, which he took as a basis for his research of comet and planet motion. His name was given to a theorem of spherical triangles.
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Heinrich Scherk
1798 - 1885 (87 years)
Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk was a German mathematician notable for his work on minimal surfaces and the distribution of prime numbers. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Ernst Kummer. External links Biography of ScherkMacTutor biography of Scherk
Go to Profile#9805
Gilles de Roberval
1602 - 1675 (73 years)
Gilles Personne de Roberval , French mathematician, was born at Roberval near Beauvais, France. His name was originally Gilles Personne or Gilles Personier, with Roberval the place of his birth. Biography Like René Descartes, he was present at the siege of La Rochelle in 1627. In the same year he went to Paris, and in 1631 he was appointed the philosophy chair at Gervais College, Paris. Two years after that, in 1633, he was also made the chair of mathematics at the Royal College of France. A condition of tenure attached to this particular chair was that the holder would propose mathematical q...
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Carl Wilhelm Borchardt
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Carl Wilhelm Borchardt was a German mathematician. Borchardt was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father, Moritz, was a respected merchant, and his mother was Emma Heilborn. Borchardt studied under a number of tutors, including Julius Plücker and Jakob Steiner. He studied at the University of Berlin under Lejeune Dirichlet in 1836 and at the University of Königsberg in 1839. In 1848 he began teaching at the University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#9807
Theon of Smyrna
70 - 135 (65 years)
Theon of Smyrna was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose works were strongly influenced by the Pythagorean school of thought. His surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics.
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Waloddi Weibull
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull was a Swedish civil engineer, materials scientist, and applied mathematician. The Weibull distribution is named after him. Education and career Weibull joined the Swedish Coast Guard in 1905 as a midshipman. He moved up the ranks with promotion to sublieutenant in 1907, Captain in 1916 and Major in 1940. While in the coast guard he took courses at the Royal Institute of Technology. In 1924 he graduated and became a full professor. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1932. He was employed in Swedish and German industry as a consulting engin...
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Theodor Schönemann
1812 - 1868 (56 years)
Theodor Schönemann, also written Schoenemann , was a German mathematician who obtained several important results in number theory concerning the theory of congruences, which can be found in several publications in Crelle's journal, volumes 17 to 40. Notably, he obtained Hensel's lemma before Hensel, Scholz's reciprocity law before Scholz, and formulated Eisenstein's criterion before Eisenstein. He also studied, under the form of integer polynomials modulo both a prime number and an irreducible polynomial , what can nowadays be recognized as finite fields .
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Bhāskara I
600 - 680 (80 years)
Bhāskara was a 7th-century Indian mathematician and astronomer who was the first to write numbers in the Hindu–Arabic decimal system with a circle for the zero, and who gave a unique and remarkable rational approximation of the sine function in his commentary on Aryabhata's work. This commentary, Āryabhaṭīyabhāṣya, written in 629 CE, is among the oldest known prose works in Sanskrit on mathematics and astronomy. He also wrote two astronomical works in the line of Aryabhata's school: the Mahābhāskarīya and the Laghubhāskarīya .
Go to Profile#9811
Pieter Hendrik Schoute
1846 - 1913 (67 years)
Pieter Hendrik Schoute was a Dutch mathematician known for his work on regular polytopes and Euclidean geometry. He started his career as a civil engineer, but became a professor of mathematics at Groningen and published some thirty papers on polytopes between 1878 and his death in 1913. He collaborated with Alicia Boole Stott on describing the sections of the regular 4-polytopes.
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Callimachus
320 BC - 243 BC (77 years)
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works in a wide variety of genres, most of which did not survive. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature.
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Harry Vandiver
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Harry Schultz Vandiver was an American mathematician, known for work in number theory. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to John Lyon and Ida Frances Vandiver. He did not complete a formal education, choosing instead to leave school at an early age to work for his father's firm, although he did attend some graduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904–5.
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Felice Casorati
1835 - 1890 (55 years)
Felice Casorati was an Italian mathematician who studied at the University of Pavia. He was born in Pavia and died in Casteggio. He is best known for the Casorati–Weierstrass theorem in complex analysis. The theorem, named for Casorati and Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass, describes the remarkable behaviour of holomorphic functions near essential singularities, which is that every holomorphic function gets values from any complex neighbourhood, in any neighbourhood of the singularity.
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Karl F. Sundman
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Karl Frithiof Sundman was a Finnish mathematician who used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in two papers published in 1907 and 1909. His results gained fame when they were reproduced in Acta Mathematica in 1912. He also published a paper on regularization methods in mechanics in 1912.
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Giordano Bruno
1548 - 1600 (52 years)
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets , and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
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François Arago
1786 - 1853 (67 years)
Dominique François Jean Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician. Early life and work Arago was born at Estagel, a small village of 3,000 near Perpignan, in the of Pyrénées-Orientales, France, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. His parents were François Bonaventure Arago and Marie Arago .
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Étienne-Louis Malus
1775 - 1812 (37 years)
Étienne-Louis Malus was a French officer, engineer, physicist, and mathematician. Malus was born in Paris, France. He participated in Napoleon's expedition into Egypt and was a member of the mathematics section of the Institut d'Égypte. Malus became a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1810. In 1810 the Royal Society of London awarded him the Rumford Medal.
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Antoni Łomnicki
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Antoni Marian Łomnicki was a Polish mathematician. He contributed to applied mathematics and cartography. He was the author of several textbooks of mathematics and was an influential mathematics teacher at the University of Lwów.
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James R. Newman
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
James Roy Newman was an American mathematician and mathematical historian. He was also a lawyer, practicing in the state of New York from 1929 to 1941. During and after World War II, he held several positions in the United States government, including Chief Intelligence Officer at the US Embassy in London, Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of War, and Counsel to the US Senate Committee on Atomic Energy. In the latter capacity, he helped to draft the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. He became a member of the board of editors for Scientific American beginning in 1948. He is also credited for co...
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Elbert Frank Cox
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Elbert Frank Cox was an American mathematician. He was the first Black person in history to receive a PhD in mathematics, which he earned at Cornell University in 1925. Early life Cox was born in Evansville, Indiana to Johnson D. Cox, a Kentucky-born teacher active in the church, and Eugenia Talbot Cox. He grew up with his parents, maternal grandmother and two brothers in a racially mixed neighborhood; in 1900, in his block, there were three Black and five white families.
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Paul Painlevé
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Paul Painlevé was a French mathematician and statesman. He served twice as Prime Minister of the Third Republic: 12 September – 13 November 1917 and 17 April – 22 November 1925. His entry into politics came in 1906 after a professorship at the Sorbonne that began in 1892.
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Charles Hutton
1737 - 1823 (86 years)
Charles Hutton FRS FRSE LLD was an English mathematician and surveyor. He was professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich from 1773 to 1807. He is remembered for his calculation of the density of the earth from Nevil Maskelyne's measurements collected during the Schiehallion experiment.
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Julius Weingarten
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Julius Weingarten was a German mathematician. He received his doctorate in 1864 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, such as the Weingarten equations.
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Stepan Rumovsky
1734 - 1812 (78 years)
Stepan Yakovlevich Rumovsky was a Russian astronomer and mathematician, considered to be the first Russian astronomer of renown. Biography Rumovsky studied in Berlin under Leonhard Euler. He taught mathematics and astronomy at the University of St. Petersburg from 1756 to 1812 and held numerous important positions in the St. Petersburg Academy, including director of the geography department from 1766 to 1786 and director of the observatory and professor of astronomy from 1763 until his death. At some point, he became a vice-president of the Academy of Sciences. He was appointed an honorary fo...
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Christian Gustav Adolph Mayer
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Christian Gustav Adolph Mayer was a German mathematician. Mayer was born on February 15, 1839, in Leipzig, Germany. His father was a businessman from Leipzig. He studied at the University of Leipzig, University of Göttingen, University of Heidelberg and University of Königsberg. He completed his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1861.
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John Machin
1680 - 1751 (71 years)
John Machin was a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London. He is best known for developing a quickly converging series for pi in 1706 and using it to compute pi to 100 decimal places. History John Machin served as secretary of the Royal Society from 1718 to 1747. He was also a member of the commission which decided the Calculus priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton in 1712.
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Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre
1749 - 1822 (73 years)
Jean Baptiste Joseph, chevalier Delambre was a French mathematician, astronomer, historian of astronomy, and geodesist. He was also director of the Paris Observatory, and author of well-known books on the history of astronomy from ancient times to the 18th century.
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Poul Heegaard
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Poul Heegaard was a Danish mathematician active in the field of topology. His 1898 thesis introduced a concept now called the Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold. Heegaard's ideas allowed him to make a careful critique of work of Henri Poincaré. Poincaré had overlooked the possibility of the appearance of torsion in the homology groups of a space.
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Alfred Kempe
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Sir Alfred Bray Kempe FRS was a mathematician best known for his work on linkages and the four colour theorem. Biography Kempe was the son of the Rector of St James's Church, Piccadilly, the Rev. John Edward Kempe. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Arthur Cayley was one of his teachers. He graduated BA in 1872. Despite his interest in mathematics he became a barrister, specialising in the ecclesiastical law. He was knighted in 1913, the same year he became the Chancellor for the Diocese of London. He was also Chancellor of the dioceses of Newcastle, Southwell, St Albans, Peterborough, Chichester, and Chelmsford.
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Carl Hindenburg
1741 - 1808 (67 years)
Carl Friedrich Hindenburg was a German mathematician born in Dresden. His work centered mostly on combinatorics and probability. Education Hindenburg did not attend school but was educated at home by a private tutor as arranged by his merchant father. He went to the University of Leipzig in 1757 and took courses in medicine, philosophy, Latin, Greek, physics, mathematics, and aesthetics. Hindenburg later published on philology in 1763 and 1769.
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Sylvestre François Lacroix
1765 - 1843 (78 years)
Sylvestre François Lacroix was a French mathematician. Life He was born in Paris, and was raised in a poor family who still managed to obtain a good education for their son. Lacroix's path to mathematics started with the novel Robinson Crusoe. That gave him an interest in sailing and thus navigation too. At that point geometry captured his interest and the rest of mathematics followed. He had courses with Antoine-René Mauduit at College Royale de France and Joseph-Francois Marie at Collége Mazaine of University of Paris. In 1779 he obtained some lunar observations of Pierre Charles Le Monnier and began to calculate the variables of lunar theory.
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Oskar Bolza
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Oskar Bolza was a German mathematician, and student of Felix Klein. He was born in Bad Bergzabern, Palatinate, then a district of Bavaria, known for his research in the calculus of variations, particularly influenced by Karl Weierstrass' 1879 lectures on the subject.
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William Jones
1675 - 1749 (74 years)
William Jones, FRS was a Welsh mathematician, most noted for his use of the symbol to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. He was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley. In November 1711, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was later its vice-president.
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Nathaniel Bowditch
1773 - 1838 (65 years)
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel. In 2001, an elementary and middle school in Salem was named in his honor.
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William Spottiswoode
1825 - 1883 (58 years)
William H. Spottiswoode HFRSE LLD was an English mathematician, physicist and partner in the printing and publishing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode. He was president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883.
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Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev
1847 - 1878 (31 years)
Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev was a Russian mathematician. Biography Yegor was born as a son of Agafya Izotovna Zolotareva and the merchant Ivan Vasilevich Zolotarev in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia. In 1857 he began to study at the fifth St Petersburg gymnasium, a school which centred on mathematics and natural science. He finished it with the silver medal in 1863. In the same year he was allowed to be an auditor at the physico-mathematical faculty of St Petersburg university.
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Joseph Petzval
1807 - 1891 (84 years)
Joseph Petzval was a mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics. He was born in the town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary . Petzval studied and later lectured at the Institutum Geometricum in Buda . He headed the Institute of Practical Geometry and Hydrology/Architecture between 1841 and 1848. Later in life, he accepted an appointment to a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna. Petzval became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1873.
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Eugène Rouché
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Eugène Rouché was a French mathematician. Career He was an alumnus of the École Polytechnique, which he entered in 1852. He went on to become professor of mathematics at the Charlemagne lyceum then at the École Centrale, and admissions examiner at his alma mater. He is best known for Rouché's theorem in complex analysis, which he published in his alma mater's institutional journal in 1862, and for the Rouché–Capelli theorem in linear algebra.
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Carl Hierholzer
1840 - 1871 (31 years)
Carl Hierholzer was a German mathematician. Biography Hierholzer studied mathematics in Karlsruhe, and he got his Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1865. His Ph.D. advisor was Ludwig Otto Hesse . In 1870 Hierholzer wrote his habilitation about conic sections in Karlsruhe, where he later became a Privatdozent.
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Sun Guangyuan
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Sun Guangyuan , also known as Sun Tang , was a Chinese mathematician. He studied projective geometry under Ernest Preston Lane at the University of Chicago. Later Sun became a professor in Tsinghua University, Beijing.
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Nicolaus I Bernoulli
1687 - 1759 (72 years)
Nicolaus Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. Biography Nicolaus Bernoulli was born on in Basel. He was the son of Nicolaus Bernoulli, painter and Alderman of Basel. In 1704 he graduated from the University of Basel under Jakob Bernoulli and obtained his PhD five years later with a work on probability theory in law. His thesis was titled Dissertatio Inauguralis Mathematico-Juridica de Usu Artis Conjectandi in Jure.
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Isaac Todhunter
1820 - 1884 (64 years)
Isaac Todhunter FRS , was an English mathematician who is best known today for the books he wrote on mathematics and its history. Life and work The son of George Todhunter, a Nonconformist minister, and Mary née Hume, he was born at Rye, Sussex. He was educated at Hastings, where his mother had opened a school after the death of his father in 1826. He was at first at a school run by Robert Carr, moving then to one opened by John Baptist Austin.
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Hjalmar Mellin
1854 - 1933 (79 years)
Robert Hjalmar Mellin was a Finnish mathematician and function theorist. Biography Mellin studied at the University of Helsinki and later in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass. He is chiefly remembered as the developer of the integral transform known as the Mellin transform. He studied related gamma functions, hypergeometric functions, Dirichlet series and the Riemann ζ function. He was appointed professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Helsinki, which later became Helsinki University of Technology with Mellin as first rector.
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Tibor Szele
1918 - 1955 (37 years)
Tibor Szele Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics and abstract algebra. After graduating at the Debrecen University, he became a researcher at the Szeged University in 1946, then he went back at the Debrecen University in 1948 where he became full professor in 1952. He worked especially in the theory of Abelian groups and ring theory. He generalized Hajós's theorem. He founded the Hungarian school of algebra. Tibor Szele received the Kossuth Prize in 1952.
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G. N. Watson
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
George Neville Watson was an English mathematician, who applied complex analysis to the theory of special functions. His collaboration on the 1915 second edition of E. T. Whittaker's A Course of Modern Analysis produced the classic "Whittaker and Watson" text. In 1918 he proved a significant result known as Watson's lemma, that has many applications in the theory on the asymptotic behaviour of exponential integrals.
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Antoine Arnauld
1612 - 1694 (82 years)
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contemporaries called him le Grand to distinguish him from his father.
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Aurelio Baldor
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Aurelio Ángel Baldor de la Vega was a Cuban mathematician, educator and lawyer. Baldor is the author of a secondary school algebra textbook, titled Álgebra, used throughout the Spanish-speaking world and published for the first time in 1941.
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Seki Takakazu
1642 - 1708 (66 years)
Seki Takakazu, also known as Seki Kōwa, was a Japanese mathematician and author of the Edo period. Seki laid foundations for the subsequent development of Japanese mathematics, known as wasan. He has been described as "Japan's Newton".
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S. R. Ranganathan
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.
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