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,
#9901
Wacław Sierpiński
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory , number theory, theory of functionss, and topology. He published over 700 papers and 50 books.
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Konrad Knopp
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Konrad Hermann Theodor Knopp was a German mathematician who worked on generalized limits and complex functions. Family and education Knopp was born in 1882 in Berlin to Paul Knopp , a businessman in manufacturing, and Helene , née Ostertun, whose own father was a butcher. Paul's hometown of Neustettin, then part of Germany, became Polish territory after the Second World War and is now called Szczecinek. In 1910, Konrad married the painter Gertrud Kressner . They had a daughter Ortrud Knopp , with the grandchildren Willfried Spohn , Herbert Spohn und Wolfgang Spohn , and a son Ingolf Knopp ,...
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Truman Lee Kelley
1884 - 1961 (77 years)
Truman Lee Kelley was an American researcher who made seminal contributions to statistics and psychology. Life He was born in Whitehall, Muskegon County, Michigan in 1884. He died in 1961. Career He received his A.M. degree in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1911, where he became one of the four founding students of Kappa Delta Pi. He completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1914 under the supervision of Edward Thorndike. After doing so, he worked as an instructor at the University of Texas and at Teachers College, and then in 1920 became a professor at Stanford University.
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Earle Raymond Hedrick
1876 - 1943 (67 years)
Earle Raymond Hedrick , was an American mathematician and a vice-president of the University of California. Education and career Hedrick was born in Union City, Indiana. After undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, he obtained a Master of Arts from Harvard University. With a Parker fellowship, he went to Europe and obtained his PhD from Göttingen University in Germany under the supervision of David Hilbert in 1901. He then spent several months at the École Normale Supérieure in France, where he became acquainted with Édouard Goursat, Jacques Hadamard, Jules Tannery, Émile Picard and Paul Émile Appell, before becoming an instructor at Yale University.
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Gilbert Ames Bliss
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Gilbert Ames Bliss, , was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations. Life Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered the University of Chicago in 1893 . Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professional mandolin quartet.
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Elizabeth Scott
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Elizabeth Leonard Scott was an American mathematician specializing in statistics. Scott was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Her family moved to Berkeley, California when she was 4 years old. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she studied astronomy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1949 in astronomy, and received a permanent position in the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley in 1951.
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Edward Linfoot
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Edward Hubert Linfoot was a British mathematician, primarily known for his work on optics, but also noted for his work in pure mathematics. Early life and career Edward Linfoot was born in Sheffield, England, in 1905. He was the eldest child of George Edward Linfoot, a violinist and mathematician, and George's wife Laura, née Clayton. After attending King Edward VII School he won a scholarship to Balliol College at the University of Oxford.
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Selig Brodetsky
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Selig Brodetsky was a Russian-born English mathematician, a member of the World Zionist Executive, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the second president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Edward Vermilye Huntington
1874 - 1952 (78 years)
Edward Vermilye Huntington was an American mathematician. Biography Huntington was awarded the B.A. and the M.A. by Harvard University in 1895 and 1897, respectively. After two years' teaching at Williams College, he began a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg, which was awarded in 1901. He then spent his entire career at Harvard, retiring in 1941. He taught in the engineering school, becoming Professor of Mechanics in 1919. Although Huntington's research was mainly in pure mathematics, he valued teaching mathematics to engineering students. He advocated mechanical calculators and had one in his office.
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Bernard Lewis Welch
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Bernard Lewis Welch was a British statistician and educator. He is known for creating Welch's t-test. Biography Born in 1911 in Sunderland in County Durham, the youngest of four brothers, Welch was educated at the Bede School. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was captain of the college cricket team for two years. Welch graduated, first class, in mathematics in 1933.
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William Lloyd Garrison Williams
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
William Lloyd Garrison Williams was an American-Canadian Quaker and mathematician, known for the founding of the Canadian Mathematical Society and overseeing Elbert Frank Cox's doctorate in mathematics.
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Nikolai Smirnov
1900 - 1966 (66 years)
Nikolai Vasilyevich Smirnov was a Soviet Russian mathematician noted for his work in various fields including probability theory and statistics. Smirnov's principal works in mathematical statistics and probability theory were devoted to the investigation of limit distributions by means of the asymptotic behaviour of multiple integrals as the multiplicity is increased with limit. He was one of the creators of the nonparametric methods in mathematical statistics and of the theory of limit distributions of order statistics.
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Pierre Courcelle
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Pierre Paul Courcelle was a French historian who was a specialist of ancient philosophy and of Latin Patristics, especially of St Augustine. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1968.
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Robert Horton Cameron
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Robert Horton Cameron was an American mathematician, who worked on analysis and probability theory. He is known for the Cameron–Martin theorem. Education and career Cameron received his Ph.D. in 1932 from Cornell University under the direction of W. A. Hurwitz. He studied under a National Research Council postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1933 to 1935. Cameron was a faculty member at MIT from 1935 to 1945. He was then a faculty member at the University of Minnesota until his retirement. He spent the academic year 1953–1954 on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study.
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Ruth Lyttle Satter
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Ruth Lyttle Satter was an American botanist best known for her work on circadian leaf movement. Biography Ruth Lyttle Satter was born March 8, 1923, in New York City as Ruth Lyttle. Satter received a B.A. in mathematics and physics from Barnard College in 1944. After graduating, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Maxson Company. In 1946 she married Robert Satter and in 1947 she became a homemaker, devoting herself to raising her and Robert's four children, Mimi, Shoshana, Jane and Dick. While raising her children, her love of plants led her to complete the New York Botanical Garden's horticu...
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Frank Adams
1930 - 1989 (59 years)
John Frank Adams was a British mathematician, one of the major contributors to homotopy theory. Life He was born in Woolwich, a suburb in south-east London, and attended Bedford School. He began his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a student of Abram Besicovitch, but soon switched to algebraic topology. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1956. His thesis, written under the direction of Shaun Wylie, was titled On spectral sequences and self-obstruction invariants. He held the Fielden Chair at the University of Manchester , and became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at the University of Cambridge .
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Morgan Ward
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Henry Morgan Ward was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and career Ward was born in New York City. He studied at University of California, Berkeley, receiving his BA in 1924. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1928, with a dissertation titled The Foundations of General Arithmetic; his advisor was Eric Temple Bell. He became a research fellow at Caltech, and then in 1929 a member of the faculty; he remained at Caltech until his death in 1963. Among his doctoral students was Robert P. Dilworth, who also became a Caltech professor.
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Jane Worcester
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Jane Worcester was a biostatistician and epidemiologist who became the second tenured female professor, after Martha May Eliot, and the first female chair of biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Leon Mirsky
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Leonid Mirsky was a Russian-British mathematician who worked in number theory, linear algebra, and combinatorics. Mirsky's theorem is named after him. Biography Mirsky was born in Russia on 19 December 1918 to a medical family, but his parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, a wool merchant in Germany, when he was eight. His uncle's family moved to Bradford, England in 1933, bringing Mirsky with them. He studied at Herne Bay High School and King's College, London, graduating in 1940. Because of the evacuation of London during the Blitz, students at King's College were moved to Bristol University, where Mirsky earned a master's degree.
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Tracy Yerkes Thomas
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Tracy Yerkes Thomas was an American mathematician. Biography Thomas received his A.B. in 1921 from Rice University and then his A.M. in 1922 and Ph.D. in 1923 from Princeton University. For the academic year 1923–1924 he was a National Research Fellow in Physics at the University of Chicago and in the academic year 1924–1925 a postdoc in Zürich. For the academic year 1925–1926 he was a National Research Fellow in Mathematics at Harvard University and then Princeton University, where he was on the mathematics faculty from 1926 to 1938. From 1938 to 1944 he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Szolem Mandelbrojt
1899 - 1983 (84 years)
Szolem Mandelbrojt was a Polish-French mathematician who specialized in mathematical analysis. He was a professor at the Collège de France from 1938 to 1972, where he held the Chair of Analytical Mechanics and Celestial Mechanics.
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Nachman Aronszajn
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Nachman Aronszajn was a Polish American mathematician. Aronszajn's main field of study was mathematical analysis, where he systematically developed the concept of reproducing kernel Hilbert space. He also contributed to mathematical logic.
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Paul Lévy
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Paul Pierre Lévy was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions. Lévy processes, Lévy flights, Lévy measures, Lévy's constant, the Lévy distribution, the Lévy area, the Lévy arcsine law, and the fractal Lévy C curve are named after him.
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Philip Hall
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Philip Hall FRS , was an English mathematician. His major work was on group theory, notably on finite groups and solvable groups. Biography He was educated first at Christ's Hospital, where he won the Thompson Gold Medal for mathematics, and later at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951 and awarded its Sylvester Medal in 1961. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1955–1957, and awarded its Berwick Prize in 1958 and De Morgan Medal in 1965.
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Edward Schaumberg Quade
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Edward Schaumberg Quade was an American mathematician at the Rand Corporation who worked on trigonometric series and systems analysis.
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Zeev Nehari
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Zeev Nehari was a mathematician who worked on Complex Analysis, Univalent Functions Theory and Differential and Integral Equations. He was a student of Michael Fekete. The Nehari manifold is named after him.
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Constantin Carathéodory
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Constantin Carathéodory was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to real and complex analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. He also created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. Carathéodory is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity.
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Arnold Scholz
1904 - 1942 (38 years)
Arnold Scholz was a German mathematician who proved Scholz's reciprocity law and introduced the Scholz conjecture. Scholz participated in the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences contributing the paper "On the Use of the Term Holism in Axiomatics" to the discussion on the foundation of mathematics.
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Duncan Sommerville
1879 - 1934 (55 years)
Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He compiled a bibliography on non-Euclidean geometry and also wrote a leading textbook in that field. He also wrote Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions, advancing the study of polytopes. He was a co-founder and the first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.
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Harold Grad
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Harold Grad was an American applied mathematician. His work specialized in the application of statistical mechanics to plasma physics and magnetohydrodynamics. Work In statistical mechanics he had developed in his thesis new methods for the solution of the Boltzmann equation. He derived the Boltzmann equation from Liouville equation using BBGKY hierarchy under certain limits, known as Boltzmann–Grad limit. Harold Grad was the founder of the Magneto-fluid Dynamics Division of the Courant Institute and served as its head until shortly before his death From 1964 to 1967 and 1974 to 1977 he was ...
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Einar Hille
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
Carl Einar Hille was an American mathematics professor and scholar. Hille authored or coauthored twelve mathematical books and a number of mathematical papers. Early life and education Hille was born in New York City. His parents were both immigrants from Sweden who separated before his birth. His father, Carl August Heuman, was a civil engineer. He was brought up by his mother, Edla Eckman, who took the surname Hille. When Einar was two years old, he and his mother returned to Stockholm. Hille spent the next 24 years of his life in Sweden, returning to the United States when he was 26 years old.
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Karl Menger
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Karl Menger was an Austrian–American mathematician, the son of the economist Carl Menger. In mathematics, Menger studied the theory of algebras and the dimension theory of low-regularity curves and regions; in graph theory, he is credited with Menger's theorem. Outside of mathematics, Menger has substantial contributions to game theory and social sciences.
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Kenjiro Shoda
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Kenjiro Shoda was a Japanese mathematician. Early life and career Kenjiro Shoda was born on February 25, 1902, in Tatebayashi, Gunma to a wealthy family. He was the second son of , who was the founder of Nisshin Flour , one of the biggest companies in Japan, a member of the House of Peers, and a great-grandfather of the Emperor. He was educated in Tokyo until he finished junior high school. He went to the National Eighth High School in Nagoya, today succeeded to Faculty of Liberal Arts of Nagoya University.
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Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the first Planning Commission of free India. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys. For his contributions, Mahalanobis has been considered the Father of statistics in India.
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Richard Courant
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Richard Courant was a German American mathematician. He is best known by the general public for the book What is Mathematics?, co-written with Herbert Robbins. His research focused on the areas of real analysis, mathematical physics, the calculus of variations and partial differential equations. He wrote textbooks widely used by generations of students of physics and mathematics. He is also known for founding the institute now bearing his name.
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Nicolas Rashevsky
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Nicolas Rashevsky was an American theoretical physicist who was one of the pioneers of mathematical biology, and is also considered the father of mathematical biophysics and theoretical biology. Academic career He studied theoretical physics at the St. Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev. He left Ukraine after the October Revolution, emigrating first to Turkey, then to Poland, France, and finally to the US in 1924.
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Felix Behrend
1911 - 1962 (51 years)
Felix Adalbert Behrend was a German mathematician of Jewish descent who escaped Nazi Germany and settled in Australia. His research interests included combinatorics, number theory, and topology. Behrend's theorem and Behrend sequences are named after him.
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Aurel Wintner
1903 - 1958 (55 years)
Aurel Friedrich Wintner was a mathematician noted for his research in mathematical analysis, number theory, differential equations and probability theory. He was one of the founders of probabilistic number theory. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1928 under the guidance of Leon Lichtenstein. He taught at Johns Hopkins University.
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Phyllis Nicolson
1917 - 1968 (51 years)
Phyllis Nicolson was a British mathematician and physicist best known for her work on the Crank–Nicolson method together with John Crank. Early life and education Nicolson was born Phyllis Lockett in Macclesfield and went to Stockport High School for Girls. She graduated from Manchester University with a B.Sc. in 1938, M.Sc. in 1939 and a Ph.D. on Three Problems in Theoretical Physics in 1946. Her Ph.D. thesis began with cosmic ray research conducted under Lajos Jánossy during 1939 and 1940.
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John Rogers Musselman
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
John Rogers Musselman was an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and known for Musselman's theorem. J. R. Musselman received his A.B. in 1910 from Pennsylvania College and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1916 under Arthur Byron Coble with thesis A set of eight self-associated points in space. Musselman was a teaching assistant at Gettysburg Academy from 1910 to 1912 and an instructor in mathematics at the University of Illinois in 1916–1918 and then at Washington University in St. Louis in 1920–1928. He was a professor mathematics at Western Reserve Universit...
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William John McCallien
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
William John McCallien FRSE FGS OBE was a 20th-century Scottish geologist and artist. He is known generally as William J. McCallien as an author, a common misconception is that he was also the artist known as W. J. McCallien , this was in fact his father.
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Oscar Goldman
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
Oscar Goldman was an American mathematician, who worked on algebra and its applications to number theory. Oscar Goldman received his Ph.D in 1948 under Claude Chevalley at Princeton University. He was chair of the Mathematics Department at Brandeis University from 1952 to 1960. As chair of the department his immediate successor was Maurice Auslander.
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Georges Bouligand
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Georges Louis Bouligand was a French mathematician. He worked in analysis, mechanics, analytical and differential geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. He is known for introducing the concept of paratingent cones and contingent cones.
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Helmut Grunsky
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Helmut Grunsky was a German mathematician who worked in complex analysis and geometric function theory. He introduced Grunsky's theorem and the Grunsky inequalities. In 1936, he was appointed editor of Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. In 1939 he was forced to leave this position after Ludwig Bieberbach accused him of employing Jewish referees in a notorious letter. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 April 1940, though he seems to have had little sympathy with its philosophy. He published in the journal Deutsche Mathematik. From 1949 he was Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen; ...
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Morton L. Curtis
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
Morton Landers Curtis was an American mathematician, an expert on group theory and the W. L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. Born in Texas, Curtis earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 from Texas A&I University, and received his Ph.D. in 1951 from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Raymond Louis Wilder. Subsequently, he taught mathematics at Florida State University before moving to Rice. At Rice, he was the Ph.D. advisor of well-known mathematician John Morgan.
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Tudor Ganea
1922 - 1971 (49 years)
Tudor Ganea was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology, especially homotopy theory. Ganea left Communist Romania to settle in the United States in the early 1960s. He taught at the University of Washington.
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František Wolf
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
František Wolf was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to trigonometry and mathematical analysis, specifically the study of the perturbation of linear operators. Wolf was born 1904 in Prostějov, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now part of the Czech Republic, the elder of two children of a furniture maker. He studied physics at Charles University in Prague, and then mathematics at Masaryk University in Brno under the supervision of Otakar Borůvka; he was awarded a doctorate in 1928 . He then taught mathematics at the high school level until 1937, when he obtained a faculty position at Charles University.
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Leonard Bairstow
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Sir Leonard Bairstow was an English aeronautical engineer. Bairstow is best remembered for his work in aviation and for Bairstow's method for arbitrarily finding the roots of polynomials. Early life and education Bairstow was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, the son of Uriah Bairstow, a wealthy and keen mathematician. As a boy, Leonard went to Queens Road and Moorside Council Schools before going to Heath Grammar School which he attended briefly before going to the Council Secondary School - then known as the Higher Grade School. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Science where he se...
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Herman L. Smith
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Herman Lyle Smith was an American mathematician, the co-discoverer, with E. H. Moore, of netss, and also a discoverer of the related notion of filterss independently of Henri Cartan. Born in Pittwood, Illinois, Smith received his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon in 1914 and his M.S. from the University of Chicago the following year. His Ph.D. was granted in 1926 by the University of Chicago for work done under Moore. He was later employed as a professor of mathematics by Louisiana State University.
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Ernest Preston Lane
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Ernest Preston Lane was an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Education and career In 1909, he received his bachelor's degree in from the University of Tennessee. Later in life, he went on to receive his master's degree from the University of Virginia in 1913. He taught mathematics at several academic institutions before receiving in 1918 from the University of Chicago his PhD under Ernest Julius Wilczynski with thesis Conjugate systems with indeterminate axis curves. At the University of Wisconsin Lane was from 1919 to 1923 an assistant professor. At the Universi...
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