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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9851
Jan Spielrein
1887 - 1938 (51 years)
Jan Nikolaevich Spielrein was a Soviet scientist in the field of Mathematics, professor, Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Biography He was born in 1887 in the Rostov-on-Don. Spielrein was educated in Rostov-on-Don. In 1907 he graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Sorbonne, in 1911 the Higher Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe. Since 1911 Spielrein was an assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart.
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Thorold Gosset
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
John Herbert de Paz Thorold Gosset was an English lawyer and an amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is noted for discovering and classifying the semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher, and for his generalization of Descartes' theorem on tangent circles to four and higher dimensions.
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Boyd Crumrine Patterson
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Boyd Crumrine Patterson was an American mathematician and the ninth president of Washington & Jefferson College. Patterson was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1902, and graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1923, completing his studies in three years. He was a member of the well-known Crumrine family of Washington County and a third-generation W&J graduate. His father, John P. Patterson, was a member of W&J's class of 1885; his grandfather, Boyd Crumrine, a noted local historian, was in Jefferson College's class of 1860. He was also a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fra...
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Samuel Lattès
1873 - 1918 (45 years)
Samuel Lattès was a French mathematician. From 1892 to 1895 he studied at the École Normale Superieure. After this he was a teacher in Algiers, Dijon and Nice. After a promotion to Paris in 1906 he moved first to Montpellier in 1908 and then to Besançon, before he took up a professorship at the University of Toulouse in 1911. He died of typhus in 1918.
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Giovanni Boaga
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Giovanni Boaga was an Italian mathematician and geodesy professor. He was born in Trieste and died in Tripoli, Libya. His Gauss-Boaga Projection is the standard projection used in Italian topography by the Istituto Geografico Militare.
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Rollo Davidson
1944 - 1970 (26 years)
Rollo Davidson was a probabilist, alpinist, and Fellow-elect of Churchill College, Cambridge, who died aged 25 on Piz Bernina. He is known for his work on semigroups, stochastic geometry, and stochastic analysis, and for the Rollo Davidson Prize, given in his name to early-career probabilists.
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Charles Coulson
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Charles Alfred Coulson was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist. Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.
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Ernesto Laura
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Ernesto Laura was an Italian mathematician born in Porto Maurizio. Biography He graduated in mathematics in 1901 at the University of Turin, where he was a student of Morera and of Somigliana. He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Pavia and Padua.
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Ebenezer Cunningham
1881 - 1977 (96 years)
Ebenezer Cunningham was a British mathematician who is remembered for his research and exposition at the dawn of special relativity. Biography Cunningham went up to St John's College, Cambridge in 1899 and graduated Senior Wrangler in 1902, winning the Smith's Prize in 1904.
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Benjamin Finkel
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Benjamin Franklin Finkel was a mathematician and educator most remembered today as the founder of the American Mathematical Monthly journal. Born in Fairfield County, Ohio and educated in small country schools, Finkel received both a BS and MA from Ohio Northern University, then known as Ohio Normal University . In 1888 he copyrighted A Mathematical Solution Book. The purpose of the book was to provide mathematics teachers a text utilizing a systematic method of problem solving, "The Step Method", representing a chain of reasoning, in logical order, to arrive at the correct result. The first edition was postponed until 1893, due to financial problems of the original publisher.
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Boris Demidovich
1906 - 1977 (71 years)
Boris Pavlovich Demidovich was a Soviet Belarusian mathematician. Family and early life Demidovich was born in a family of teachers. His father, Pavel , was able to get higher education, graduating in 1897 in Vilna; Pavel Demidovich was a teacher throughout his life, first teaching in different towns in the Minsk and Vilna Governorates, and then in Minsk; he was very attached to his family, and to Belarusian beliefs and rituals. He also recorded some anonymous literary works of the Belarusian tradition. In 1908 Pavel Demidovich was nominated member of the Imperial Officer of the Company Enthusiasts science, Anthropology at Moscow University.
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Margherita Piazzola Beloch
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Margherita Beloch Piazzolla was an Italian mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry. Biography Beloch was the daughter of the German historian Karl Julius Beloch, who taught ancient history for 50 years at Sapienza University of Rome, and American Bella Bailey.
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Andrea Razmadze
1889 - 1929 (40 years)
Andrea Mikhailovich Razmadze was a Georgian mathematician, and one of the founders of Tbilisi State University, whose Mathematics Institute was renamed in his honor in 1944. The department's scientific journal, published continuously since 1937, was also renamed as the Proceedings of A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute in his honor.
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Annette Smith Burgess
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Annette Smith Burgess was an American medical illustrator and instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life Annette Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1899 to Richard Henry Smith and his wife. She attended public schools in Baltimore. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under Max Brödel. She attended Johns Hopkins University from 1923 to 1926.
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Walter Gage
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Walter Henry Gage, was a Canadian professor and educational icon, widely acknowledged to have had a large impact on students during his 50 year career at the University of British Columbia, where he rose from undergraduate student to university president.
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Anna Mullikin
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Anna Margaret Mullikin was a mathematician who was one of the early investigators of point set theory. She received her BA from Goucher College in 1915 and went on to attend University of Pennsylvania for doctoral work. She was Robert Lee Moore's third student, graduating in 1922 with a dissertation titled Certain Theorems Relating to Plane Connected Point Sets. Her dissertation was published that year in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and subsequently became the catalyst for significant advances in the field. She spent most of her subsequent career as a secondary school mathematics teacher.
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Carl Johannes Thomae
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Carl Johannes Thomae was a German mathematician. Biography Thomae, son of Karl August Thomae and Emilie Gutsmuths, grew up in Laucha an der Unstrut and in 1864 attained a doctorate under Ernst Schering at the University of Göttingen. In 1866 Thomae attained the habilitation qualification at the University of Göttingen and one year later also at the University of Halle. In the year 1874, Thomae married Anna Uhde in Balgstädt in the proximity of his native city Laucha an der Unstrut. Their son Walter Thomae was born one year later on 5 November 1875, but Thomae's wife died 5 days after giving ...
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Stefan Cohn-Vossen
1902 - 1936 (34 years)
Stefan Cohn-Vossen was a mathematician, who was responsible for Cohn-Vossen's inequality and the Cohn-Vossen transformation is also named for him. He proved the first version of the splitting theorem.
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Vasily Zubov
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Zubov was a Russian and Soviet philosopher who wrote on architecture, art, and the history of science based on studies of texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He received a posthumous George Sarton medal from the history of science society in 1963.
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José Sebastião e Silva
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
José Sebastião e Silva was a Portuguese mathematician. Silva graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1937, and in 1942 he received a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura allowing him to travel to Rome, where he studied mathematics with several members of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. After writing a thesis on geometric transformations that was rejected by Federigo Enriques, he wrote a second thesis, on functional analysis, and earned his doctorate in 1949 from the University of Lisbon. He became a professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia from 1951 to 1961, and then ...
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Mayme Logsdon
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Mayme Farmer Irwin Logsdon was an American mathematician known for her research in algebraic geometry and mathematics education. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the University of Chicago mathematics department.
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Fernando de Helguero
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Fernando de Helguero was an Italian mathematician, statistician and pioneer of biostatistics. Fernando de Helguero was born near Florence. He studied mathematics at the University of Rome. After receiving his licentiate degree in 1903, he taught mathematics while he studied natural sciences, biology, statistics, and biometry. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Rome in April 1908. However, he died later the same year in the 1908 Messina earthquake.
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Giovanni Giambelli
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Giovanni Zeno Giambelli was an Italian mathematician who is best known for Giambelli's formula. External links Giovanni Zeno Giambelli bio
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Teresa Cohen
1892 - 1992 (100 years)
Teresa Cohen was an American mathematician. Early life and education She was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Rebecca Sinsheimer and Benjamin Cohen. She graduated in 1909 from the Friends School of Baltimore whose teachers she credited with her interest in mathematics and teaching. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Goucher College in 1912. Cohen was resident fellow at Goucher from 1912 to 1913. In 1915, she earned a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University where she later earned her PhD in 1918. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Mathematics.
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Helen Popova Alderson
1924 - 1972 (48 years)
Helen Popova Alderson was a Soviet and British mathematician and mathematics translator known for her research on quasigroups and on higher reciprocity laws. Life Alderson was born on 14 May 1924 in Baku, then part of the Soviet Union, to a family of two academics from Moscow. Her father, a neurophysiologist, had been a student of Ivan Pavlov. She began studying mathematics at Moscow University in 1937, when she was only 13. She had to break off her studies because of World War II, moving to Paris as a refugee with her family.
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Edgar Krahn
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Edgar Krahn was an Estonian mathematician. Krahn was born in Sootaga , Governorate of Livonia, as a member of the Baltic German minority. He died in Rockville, Maryland, United States. Krahn studied at the University of Tartu and the University of Göttingen. He graduated at Tartu in 1918, received his doctoral degree at Göttingen in 1926, with Richard Courant as his advisor, and his habilitation took place at Tartu in 1928. He is co-author of the Rayleigh–Faber–Krahn inequality.
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Bibhutibhushan Datta
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Bibhutibhushan Datta was a historian of Indian mathematics. Datta came from a poor Bengali family. He was a student of Ganesh Prasad, studied at University of Calcutta and secured the master's degree in mathematics in 1914 and doctorate degree in 1920 in applied mathematics. He taught at Calcutta University where he was lecturer at University Science College, and from 1924 to 1929 he was Rhashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics. During the 1920s and 1930s he created a reputation as an authority on the history of Indian mathematics. He was also deeply interested in Indian philosophy and religion.
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David K. Rubins
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
David Kresz Rubins was an American sculptor and professor. He taught at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and his various works adorn the Indiana State House, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
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Alfreds Meders
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders was a German-Latvian mathematician, and a student of Leopold Kronecker. He was a professor at the Riga Technical University until his mandatory repatriation to Germany in 1939.
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Danilo Blanuša
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Danilo Blanuša was a Croatian Serb mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb. Biography Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary , into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957–58 school year.
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Arthur Preston Mellish
1905 - 1930 (25 years)
Arthur Preston Mellish was a Canadian mathematician, known for his generalization of Barbier's theorem. Arthur Mellish received in 1928 an M.A. in mathematics from the University of British Columbia with thesis An illustrative example of the ellipsoid pendulum. He died at age 24 and had no mathematical publications during his lifetime. After his death, his colleagues at Brown University examined his notes on mathematics. Jacob Tamarkin prepared a paper based upon the notes and published it in the Annals of Mathematics in 1931.
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Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was an Indian mathematician who introduced the four-vertex theorem and Mukhopadhyaya's theorem in plane geometry. Biography Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was born at Haripal, Hooghly district, in Bengal Presidency, British India. He graduated from Hooghly College, received his M.A. degree from Presidency College in Calcutta, and his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1910. He also took classes from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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N. G. W. H. Beeger
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger was a Dutch mathematician. His 1916 doctorate was on Dirichlet series. He worked for most of his life as a teacher, working on mathematics papers in his spare evenings. After his retirement as a teacher at 65, he began corresponding with many contemporary mathematicians and dedicated himself to his work. Tilburg University still hold biennial lectures entitled the Beeger lectures in his honour.
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Norman Macleod Ferrers
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Norman Macleod Ferrers was a British mathematician and university administrator and editor of a mathematical journal. Career and research Ferrers was educated at Eton College before studying at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1851. He was appointed to a Fellowship at the college in 1852, was called to the bar in 1855 and was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860. In 1880, he was appointed Master of the college, and served as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1884 to 1885.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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Gerald Warner Brace
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
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Yutaka Taniyama
1927 - 1958 (31 years)
Yutaka Taniyama was a Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. Contribution Taniyama was best known for conjecturing, in modern language, automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field. A partial and refined case of this conjecture for elliptic curves over rationals is called the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture or the modularity theorem whose statement he subsequently refined in collaboration with Goro Shimura. The names Taniyama, Shimura and Weil have all been attached to this conjecture, but the idea is essentially due to Taniyama.
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Charles Napoleon Moore
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Charles Napoleon Moore was an American mathematician at Bowling Green State University who worked on convergence factors. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1932 in Zürich. Publications External links
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Friedrich Bachmann
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Friedrich Bachmann was a German mathematician who specialised in geometry and group theory. Life Bachmann was the son of a Lutheran minister Hans Bachmann. Bachmann came from an intellectual family, his paternal grandfather was the number theorist Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann. Bachmann took his early education at the Gymnasium in Münster. After attending the Gymnasium, he attended the University of Münster and the Humboldt University of Berlin and graduated in 1927. While there he was a member of the Münster Wingolfs.
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Cristóbal de Losada y Puga
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Cristóbal de Losada y Puga was a Peruvian mathematician and mining engineer. He was Minister of Education of Peru in the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero and Director of the National Library of Peru between 1948 and 1961.
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Clara Latimer Bacon
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Dr Clara Latimer Bacon was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. Biography Bacon was the daughter of Larkin Crouch Bacon and Louisa Latimer. She was born in Knox, Illinois, the eldest of her parents four children. She also had four other half siblings. Bacon attended North Abingdon High School and begun her college life at Hedding Collegiate Seminary.
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Gianfranco Cimmino
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Gianfranco Cimmino was an Italian mathematician, working mathematical analysis, numerical analysis, and theory of elliptic partial differential equations: he is known for being the first mathematician generalizing in a weak sense the notion of boundary value in a boundary value problem, and for doing an influential work in numerical analysis.
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Ernest Wedderburn
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Sir Ernest MacLagan Wedderburn was a Scottish lawyer, and a significant figure both in the civic life of Edinburgh and in the legal establishment. He held the posts of Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh , Deputy Keeper of the Signet , and Chairman of the General Council of Solicitors , the forerunner to the Law Society of Scotland, and chaired the latter 1949/50. He was also an enthusiastic amateur scientist, and first Treasurer then Vice President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Tord Hall
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Tord Hall was a Swedish mathematician, university professor and bestselling author. Life He was born in 1910 in Jönköping, Sweden, and died in 1987. Career He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala University. His PhD advisor was Arne Beurling. The title of his PhD thesis was On Polynomials bounded at an Infinity of Points.
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André Sainte-Laguë
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
André Sainte-Laguë was a French mathematician who was a pioneer in the area of graph theory. His research on seat allocation methods led to one being named after him, the Sainte-Laguë method. Also named after him is the Sainte-Laguë Index for measuring the proportionality of an electoral outcome.
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Ferdinand Rudio
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Ferdinand Rudio was a German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Rudio's father and maternal grandfather were both public officials in the independent Duchy of Nassau, which was annexed by Prussia when Rudio was 10. He was educated at the local gymnasium and Realgymnasium in Wiesbaden, and then in 1874 began studying at ETH Zurich, then known as the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich. His initial courses in Zurich were in civil engineering, but in his second year he switched to mathematics and physics. Finishing at Zurich in 1877, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1877 to 1880, earning his Ph.D.
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Gheorghe Mihoc
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Gheorghe Mihoc was a Romanian mathematician and statistician. He was born in Brăila, the son of Ecaterina and Gheorghe Mihoc, both originally from the Banat. In 1908, his father moved the family to Bucharest. Here he attended elementary school and the Gheorghe Șincai High School. In 1925 Mihoc enrolled at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sciences, and was awarded his degree in mathematics in June 1928.
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Carlos Benjamin de Lyra
1927 - 1974 (47 years)
Carlos Benjamin de Lyra was a prominent Brazilian mathematician, a pioneer in algebraic topology in Brazil and professor at the University of São Paulo. Born in Recife, Pernambuco, he came from a family of sugarcane plantation owners and his dad was the owner of the Diário de Pernambuco, a newspaper that was known nationwide. Lyra was an important mathematician in his area, his course Introdução à Topologia Algébrica was taught in the first Colóquio Brasileiro de Matemática and would become the first text in this field written in Brazilian Portuguese.
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David Enskog
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
David Enskog was a Swedish mathematical physicist. Enskog helped develop the kinetic theory of gases by extending the Maxwell–Boltzmann equations. Biography After undergraduate studies at Uppsala University he received a licentiate degree in physics in 1911, working on gas diffusion under professor Gustaf Granqvist, who was an experimentalist. Enskog did not wish to continue with experimental physics, however, and transferred to professor Carl Wilhelm Oseen for his Ph.D. From 1913, Enskog worked as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics to support himself and his family, while continuing his research and thesis writing in his free time.
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