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
Sophus Lie
1842 - 1899 (57 years)
Marius Sophus Lie was a Norwegian mathematician. He largely created the theory of continuous symmetry and applied it to the study of geometry and differential equations. He also made substantial contributions to the development of algebra.
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Bertrand Russell
1872 - 1970 (98 years)
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
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Georg Cantor
1845 - 1918 (73 years)
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a mathematician. He played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers. Cantor's method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an infinity of infinities. He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers and their arithmetic. Cantor's work is of great philosophical interest, a fact ...
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Felix Klein
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Christian Felix Klein was a German mathematician and mathematics educator, known for his work with group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the associations between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen program, classifying geometries by their basic symmetry groups, was an influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the time.
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Joseph Fourier
1768 - 1830 (62 years)
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
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Évariste Galois
1811 - 1832 (21 years)
Évariste Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.
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Richard Dedekind
1831 - 1916 (85 years)
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind was a German mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, abstract algebra , and the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic. His best known contribution is the definition of real numbers through the notion of Dedekind cut. He is also considered a pioneer in the development of modern set theory and of the philosophy of mathematics known as Logicism.
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Karl Weierstrass
1815 - 1897 (82 years)
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician often cited as the "father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school teacher, eventually teaching mathematics, physics, botany and gymnastics. He later received an honorary doctorate and became professor of mathematics in Berlin.
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René Descartes
1596 - 1650 (54 years)
René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
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Arthur Cayley
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Arthur Cayley was a prolific British mathematician who worked mostly on algebra. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics. As a child, Cayley enjoyed solving complex maths problems for amusement. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years.
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Ernst Zermelo
1871 - 1953 (82 years)
Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic set theory and his proof of the well-ordering theorem. Furthermore, his 1929 work on ranking chess players is the first description of a model for pairwise comparison that continues to have a profound impact on various applied fields utilizing this method.
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Augustin-Louis Cauchy
1789 - 1857 (68 years)
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He single-handedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 - 1716 (70 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physic...
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Pierre de Fermat
1601 - 1665 (64 years)
Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
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Gottlob Frege
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano , Bertrand Russell , and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ev...
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Giuseppe Peano
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione , which is a simplified version of Classical Latin.
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William Rowan Hamilton
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA, FRAS was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory.
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James Clerk Maxwell
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist with broad interests who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" where the first one had been realised by Isaac Newton.
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Diophantus
201 - 300 (99 years)
Diophantus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantus is considered "the father of algebra" by many mathematicians because of his contributions to number theory, mathematical equations, and the earliest known use of algebraic notation and symbolism in his works. In modern use, Diophantine equations are algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
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Leopold Kronecker
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory, algebra and logic. He criticized Georg Cantor's work on set theory, and was quoted by as having said, "" . Kronecker was a student and life-long friend of Ernst Kummer.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749 - 1827 (78 years)
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste . This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.
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Joseph Liouville
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Joseph Liouville was a French mathematician and engineer. Life and work He was born in Saint-Omer in France on 24 March 1809. His parents were Claude-Joseph Liouville and Thérèse Liouville . Liouville gained admission to the École Polytechnique in 1825 and graduated in 1827. Just like Augustin-Louis Cauchy before him, Liouville studied engineering at École des Ponts et Chaussées after graduating from the Polytechnique, but opted instead for a career in mathematics. After some years as an assistant at various institutions including the École Centrale Paris, he was appointed as professor at the École Polytechnique in 1838.
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Hermann Minkowski
1864 - 1909 (45 years)
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736 - 1813 (77 years)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
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Adolf Kneser
1862 - 1930 (68 years)
Adolf Kneser was a German mathematician. He was born in Grüssow, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and died in Breslau, Germany. He is the father of the mathematician Hellmuth Kneser and the grandfather of the mathematician Martin Kneser.
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Edmund Berkeley
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Edmund Callis Berkeley was an American computer scientist who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. His 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think popularized cognitive images of early computers. He was also a social activist who worked to achieve conditions that might minimize the threat of nuclear war.
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Jost Bürgi
1552 - 1632 (80 years)
Jost Bürgi , active primarily at the courts in Kassel and Prague, was a Swiss clockmaker, a maker of astronomical instruments and a mathematician. Life Bürgi was born in 1552 Lichtensteig, Toggenburg, at the time a subject territory of the Abbey of St. Gall . Not much is known about his life or education before his employment as astronomer and clockmaker at the court of William IV in Kassel in 1579; it has been theorized that he acquired his mathematical knowledge at Strasbourg, among others from Swiss mathematician Conrad Dasypodius, but there are no facts to support this.
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John Monroe Van Vleck
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
John Monroe Van Vleck was an American mathematician and astronomer. He taught astronomy and mathematics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut for more than 50 years , and served as acting university president twice. The Van Vleck Observatory and the crater Van Vleck on the Moon are named after him.
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Ctesibius
284 BC - 221 BC (63 years)
Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius was a Greek inventor and mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps . This, in combination with his work On pneumatics on the elasticity of air, earned him the title of "father of pneumatics." None of his written work has survived, including his Memorabilia, a compilation of his research that was cited by Athenaeus. Ctesibius' most commonly known invention today is a pipe organ , a predecessor of the modern church organ.
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Richard Montague
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
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Georg Joachim Rheticus
1514 - 1574 (60 years)
Georg Joachim de Porris, also known as Rheticus , was a mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, navigational-instrument maker, medical practitioner, and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his trigonometric tables and as Nicolaus Copernicus's sole pupil. He facilitated the publication of his master's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium .
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Heinrich August Rothe
1773 - 1842 (69 years)
Heinrich August Rothe was a German mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Erlangen. He was a student of Carl Hindenburg and a member of Hindenburg's school of combinatorics. Biography Rothe was born in 1773 in Dresden, and in 1793 became a docent at the University of Leipzig. He became an extraordinary professor at Leipzig in 1796, and in 1804 he moved to Erlangen as a full professor, taking over the chair formerly held by Karl Christian von Langsdorf. He died in 1842, and his position at Erlangen was in turn taken by Johann Wilhelm Pfaff, the brother of the more famous mathematician Jo...
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Olaus Henrici
1840 - 1918 (78 years)
Olaus Magnus Friedrich Erdmann Henrici, FRS was a German mathematician who became a professor in London. After three years as an apprentice in engineering, Henrici entered Karlsruhe Polytechnium where he came under the influence of Alfred Clebsch who encouraged him in mathematics. He then went to Heidelberg where he studied with Otto Hesse. Henrici attained his Dr. phil. degree on 6 June 1863 at University of Heidelberg. He continued his studies in Berlin with Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. He was briefly docent of mathematics and physics at the University of Kiel, but ran into finan...
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Ibn al-Banna' al-Marrakushi
1256 - 1321 (65 years)
Ibn al‐Bannāʾ al‐Marrākushī , full name: Abu'l-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Azdi al-Marrakushi , was a Maghrebi Muslim polymath who was active as a mathematician, astronomer, Islamic scholar, Sufi and astrologer.
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George Darwin
1845 - 1912 (67 years)
Sir George Howard Darwin, was an English barrister and astronomer, the second son and fifth child of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. Biography George H. Darwin was born at Down House, Kent, the fifth child of biologist Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin.
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Andrey Markov Jr.
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Soviet mathematician, the son of the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov Sr, and one of the key founders of the Russian school of constructive mathematics and logic. He made outstanding contributions to various areas of mathematics, including differential equations, topology, mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics.
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Karl Christian von Langsdorf
1757 - 1834 (77 years)
Karl Christian von Langsdorf, also known as Carl Christian von Langsdorff , was a German mathematician, geologist, natural scientist and engineer. Life Langsdorf was the son of Georg Melchior Langsdorff and Maria Margarethe Koch. His father was saltworks archivist and Hesse-Kassel Rentmeister . He had a twin brother named Daniel Isaak. After finishing Gymnasium in Idstein in 1773, Langsdorf studied, among other things, philosophy, law, and mathematics at University of Göttingen from 1774 until autumn of 1776 with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and then until 1777 at the University of Giessen. He t...
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Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff
1774 - 1835 (61 years)
Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff , was professor of pure and applied mathematics successively at Dorpat, Nuremberg, Würzburg and Erlangen. He was a brother of Johann Friedrich Pfaff, a mathematician; and of Christian Heinrich Pfaff, a physician and physicist.
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Theodor Molien
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Theodor Georg Andreas Molien was a Russian mathematician of Baltic German origin. He was born in Riga, Latvia, which at that time was a part of Russian Empire. Molien studied associative algebras and polynomial invariantss of finite groups.
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E. W. Hobson
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Ernest William Hobson FRS was an English mathematician, now remembered mostly for his books, some of which broke new ground in their coverage in English of topics from mathematical analysis. He was Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1910 to 1931.
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Giovanni Ceva
1647 - 1734 (87 years)
Giovanni Ceva was an Italian mathematician widely known for proving Ceva's theorem in elementary geometry. His brother, Tommaso Ceva, was also a well-known poet and mathematician. Life Ceva received his education at a Jesuit college in Milan. Later in his life, he studied at the University of Pisa, where he subsequently became a professor. In 1686, however, he was designated as the Professor of Mathematics at the University of Mantua and worked there for the rest of his life.
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Robert Leslie Ellis
1817 - 1859 (42 years)
Robert Leslie Ellis was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of Francis Bacon. Biography Ellis was the youngest of six children of Francis Ellis of Bath and his wife Mary. Educated privately, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1836, graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1840 and elected Fellow of Trinity shortly afterwards. Although he had also entered the Inner Temple in 1838, was called to the bar in 1840, and later helped William Whewell with jurisprudence, Ellis never practised law. He hoped unsuccessfully for the Cambridge chair of ci...
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Boris Bukreev
1859 - 1962 (103 years)
Boris Yakovlevich Bukreev was a Russian and Soviet mathematician who worked in the areas of complex functions and differential equations. He studied Fuchsian functionss of rank zero. He was interested in projective and non-Euclidean geometry. He worked on differential invariants and parameters in the theory of surfaces, and also wrote many papers on the history of mathematics.
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Jørgen Pedersen Gram
1850 - 1916 (66 years)
Jørgen Pedersen Gram was a Danish actuary and mathematician who was born in Nustrup, Duchy of Schleswig, Denmark and died in Copenhagen, Denmark. Important papers of his include On series expansions determined by the methods of least squares, and Investigations of the number of primes less than a given number. The mathematical method that bears his name, the Gram–Schmidt process, was first published in the former paper, in 1883.
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Samuil Shatunovsky
1859 - 1929 (70 years)
Samuil Osipovich Shatunovsky was a Russian Empire and Soviet mathematician. He was born in Velyka Znamianka, Ukraine in a poor Jewish family as the 9th child. He completed secondary education in Kherson, Ukraine; then studied for a year in Rostov, Russia and moved to Saint Petersburg seeking university degree. There he studied in several technical universities. Engineering however did not attract Shatunovsky and he dedicated himself to mathematics, voluntarily attending lectures by Chebyshev. Shatunovsky could not complete any university program due to lack of funds. He later attempted to obtain a university degree in Switzerland, but failed for the same reason.
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Alfredo Capelli
1855 - 1910 (55 years)
Alfredo Capelli was an Italian mathematician who discovered Capelli's identity. Biography Capelli earned his Laurea from the University of Rome in 1877 under Giuseppe Battaglini, and moved to the University of Pavia where he worked as an assistant for Felice Casorati. In 1881 he became the professor of Algebraic Analysis at the University of Palermo, replacing Cesare Arzelà who had recently moved to Bologna. In 1886, he moved again to the University of Naples, where he held the chair in algebra. He remained at Naples until his death in 1910. As well as being professor there, Capelli was edito...
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Léon Autonne
1859 - 1916 (57 years)
Léon César Autonne was a French engineer and mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential equations, and linear algebra. Education and career Autonne studied from 1878 to 1880 at l'École polytechnique and then at the École des ponts et chaussées and became there Ingénieur en chef. He received in 1882 from the Sorbonne his Ph.D. with dissertation Recherches sur les intégrales algébriques des équations differentielles à coefficients rationnels, with Charles Hermite as chair of the thesis committee. The dissertation was based on research initiated by Camille Jordan.
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Pierre Gassendi
1592 - 1655 (63 years)
Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, Catholic priest, astronomer, and mathematician. While he held a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
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Johann Euler
1734 - 1800 (66 years)
Johann Albrecht Euler was a Swiss-Russian astronomer and mathematician. Also known as Johann Albert Euler or John-Albert Euler, he was the first child born to the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler , who had emigrated [for the first time] to Saint-Petersburg on 17 May 1727. His mother was Katharina Gsell whose maternal grandmother was the famous scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian and whose father was the Swiss Baroque painter Georg Gsell who had emigrated to Russia in 1716. Katharina married Leonhard Euler on 7 January 1734 and Johann Albert would be the eldest of their 13 c...
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Patrick du Val
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Patrick du Val was a British mathematician, known for his work on algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and general relativity. The concept of Du Val singularity of an algebraic surface is named after him.
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