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,
#9951
James Dugundji
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
James Dugundji was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California. Dugundji's parents emigrated from Greece to New York City, where Dugundji was born in 1919. He studied at New York University, graduating with a B.A. in 1940, and went on to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying there under the supervision of Witold Hurewicz. After two years of study at UNC, Dugundji joined the United States Air Force for the duration of World War II, and then completed his doctorate from 1946 to 1948 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to which his advisor had moved.
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Franz Rellich
1906 - 1955 (49 years)
Franz Rellich was an Austrian-German mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equations. The Rellich–Kondrachov theorem is named after him.
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Paul Sophus Epstein
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Paul Sophus Epstein was a Russian-American mathematical physicist. He was known for his contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, part of a group that included Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski, Thomson, Rutherford, Sommerfeld, Röntgen, von Laue, Bohr, de Broglie, Ehrenfest and Schwarzschild.
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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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Edward Kasner
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Edward Kasner was an American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jewish person appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia University. Subsequently, he became an adjunct professor in 1906, and a full professor in 1910, at the university. Differential geometry was his main field of study. In addition to introducing the term "googol", he is known also for the Kasner metric and the Kasner polygon.
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R. H. Bing
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
R. H. Bing was an American mathematician who worked mainly in the areas of geometric topology and continuum theory. His father was named Rupert Henry, but Bing's mother thought that "Rupert Henry" was too British for Texas. She compromised by abbreviating it to R. H. Consequently, R. H. does not stand for a first or middle name.
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Richard Rado
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Richard Rado FRS was a German-born British mathematician whose research concerned combinatorics and graph theory. He was Jewish and left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. He earned two PhDs: in 1933 from the University of Berlin, and in 1935 from the University of Cambridge. He was interviewed in Berlin by Lord Cherwell for a scholarship given by the chemist Sir Robert Mond which provided financial support to study at Cambridge. After he was awarded the scholarship, Rado and his wife left for the UK in 1933. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Reading in 1954 and ...
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Dirk Jan Struik
1894 - 2000 (106 years)
Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch-born American mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S. Life Dirk Jan Struik was born in 1894 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a teacher's son. He attended the Hogere Burgerschool nl over there. It was in this school that he was first introduced to left-wing politics and socialism by one of his teachers, called Mister van Dam.
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Georg Hamel
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Georg Karl Wilhelm Hamel was a German mathematician with interests in mechanics, the foundations of mathematics and function theory. Biography Hamel was born in Düren, Rhenish Prussia. He studied at Aachen, Berlin, Göttingen, and Karlsruhe. His doctoral adviser was David Hilbert. He taught at Brünn in 1905, Aachen in 1912, and at the Technical University of Berlin in 1919. In 1927, Hamel studied the size of the key space for the Kryha encryption device. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1932 at Zurich and in 1936 at Oslo. He was the author of several important treatises on mechanics. He...
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Edward H. Bersoff
Edward H. Bersoff founded BTG, Inc. and served as its chief executive and president until 2001, when he sold the company to Titan Corporation. He was elected to the board of Titan in February 2002 and holds board positions with a number of other organizations.
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D. R. Fulkerson
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
Delbert Ray Fulkerson was an American mathematician who co-developed the [[FordFulkerson algorithm]], one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networkss. Early life and education D. R. Fulkerson was born in Tamms, Illinois, the third of six children of Elbert and Emma Fulkerson. Fulkerson became an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. His academic career was interrupted by military service during World War II. Having returned to complete his degree after the war, he went on to do a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of Cyrus MacDuffee, who was a student of L.
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Lothar Collatz
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Lothar Collatz was a German mathematician, born in Arnsberg, Westphalia. The "3x + 1" problem is also known as the Collatz conjecture, named after him and still unsolved. The Collatz–Wielandt formula for the Perron–Frobenius eigenvalue of a positive square matrix was also named after him.
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Richard von Mises
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:
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Karol Borsuk
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Karol Borsuk was a Polish mathematician. His main interest was topology, while he obtained significant results also in functional analysis. Borsuk introduced the theory of absolute retracts and absolute neighborhood retracts , and the cohomotopy groups, later called Borsuk–Spanier cohomotopy groups. He also founded shape theory. He has constructed various beautiful examples of topological spaces, e.g. an acyclic, 3-dimensional continuum which admits a fixed point free homeomorphism onto itself; also 2-dimensional, contractible polyhedra which have no free edge. His topological and geometric...
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L. H. C. Tippett
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Leonard Henry Caleb Tippett , known professionally as L. H. C. Tippett, was an English statistician. Tippett was born in London but spent most of his early life in Cornwall and attended St Austell County Grammar School, where his contemporaries included the historian A. L. Rowse. Tippett graduated in physics in the early 1920s from Imperial College London. He studied for his Master of Science in statistics under Karl Pearson at the Galton Laboratory, University College London and R. A. Fisher at Rothamsted. He spent his entire career, 1925 to 1965, on the staff of the Shirley Institute, Manchester becoming in 1952 one of the first Assistant Directors.
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Rensis Likert
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.
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Jacob Tamarkin
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Jacob David Tamarkin was a Russian-American mathematician, best known for his work in mathematical analysis. Biography Tamarkin was born in Chernigov, Russian Empire , to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, David Tamarkin, was a physician and his mother, Sophie Krassilschikov, was from a family of a landowner. He shares a common ancestor with the Van Leer family, sometimes spelled Von Löhr or Valar. He moved to St. Petersburg as a child and grew up there. In high school, he befriended Alexander Friedmann, a future cosmologist, with whom he wrote his first mathematics paper in 1906, and remained friends and colleagues until Friedmann's sudden death in 1925.
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Rudolf Ernest Langer
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Rudolf Ernest Langer was an American mathematician, known for the Langer correction and as a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career Langer, the elder brother of William L. Langer, earned his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under G. D. Birkhoff. He taught mathematics at Dartmouth College from 1922 to 1925. From 1927 to 1964 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, from 1942 to 1952, the chair of the mathematics department. From 1956 to 1963 he was the director of the Army Mathematics Research Center; he was succeeded as director by J. Barkley Rosser.
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Hans Hahn
1879 - 1934 (55 years)
Hans Hahn was an Austrian mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to functional analysis, topology, set theory, the calculus of variations, real analysis, and order theory. In philosophy he was among the main logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.
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Joseph Gillis
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Joseph E. Gillis was a British-Israeli mathematician and one of the founders of the Faculty of Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he served as a Professor of Applied Mathematics. He made notable contributions to fractal sets, fluid dynamics, random walks, and pioneered the combinatorial theory of special functions of mathematical physics.
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Morris H. DeGroot
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Morris Herman DeGroot was an American statistician. Biography Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, DeGroot graduated from Roosevelt University and earned master's and doctor's degrees from the University of Chicago. DeGroot joined Carnegie Mellon in 1957 and became a University Professor, the school's highest faculty position.
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Robert Daniel Carmichael
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Robert Daniel Carmichael was an American mathematician. Biography Carmichael was born in Goodwater, Alabama. He attended Lineville College, briefly, and he earned his bachelor's degree in 1898, while he was studying towards his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University. Carmichael completed the requirements for his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1911. Carmichael's Ph.D. research in mathematics was done under the guidance of the noted American mathematician G. David Birkhoff, and it is considered to be the first significant American contribution to the knowledge of differential equations in mathematics.
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Helmut Hasse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Helmut Hasse was a German mathematician working in algebraic number theory, known for fundamental contributions to class field theory, the application of p-adic numberss to local class field theory and diophantine geometry , and to local zeta functions.
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Oscar Zariski
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Oscar Zariski was a Russian-born American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century. Education Zariski was born Oscher Zaritsky to a Jewish family and in 1918 studied at the University of Kyiv. He left Kyiv in 1920 to study at the University of Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi.
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Heinz Hopf
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Heinz Hopf was a German mathematician who worked on the fields of dynamical systems, topology and geometry. Early life and education Hopf was born in Gräbschen, German Empire , the son of Elizabeth and Wilhelm Hopf. His father was born Jewish and converted to Protestantism a year after Heinz was born; his mother was from a Protestant family.
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Luther P. Eisenhart
1876 - 1965 (89 years)
Luther Pfahler Eisenhart was an American mathematician, best known today for his contributions to semi-Riemannian geometry. Life Eisenhart was born in York, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Gettysburg College in 1896. He earned his doctorate in 1900 at Johns Hopkins University, where he was influenced by the work of Gaston Darboux and at shorter range by that of Thomas Craig. During the next two decades, Eisenhart's research focused on moving frames after the French school, but around 1921 took a different turn when he became enamored of the mathematical challenges and entrancing beauty of a...
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Hans Freudenthal
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hans Freudenthal was a Jewish German-born Dutch mathematician. He made substantial contributions to algebraic topology and also took an interest in literature, philosophy, history and mathematics education.
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Claude Chevalley
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Claude Chevalley was a French mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, class field theory, finite group theory and the theory of algebraic groups. He was a founding member of the Bourbaki group.
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Jack Kiefer
1924 - 1981 (57 years)
Jack Carl Kiefer was an American mathematical statistician at Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley . His research interests included the optimal design of experiments, which was his major research area, as well as a wide variety of topics in mathematical statistics.
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J. H. C. Whitehead
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
John Henry Constantine Whitehead FRS , known as "Henry", was a British mathematician and was one of the founders of homotopy theory. He was born in Chennai , in India, and died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1960.
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Marston Morse
1892 - 1977 (85 years)
Harold Calvin Marston Morse was an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large, a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse–Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue–Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications.
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Arthur Erdélyi
1908 - 1977 (69 years)
Arthur Erdélyi FRS, FRSE was a Hungarian-born British mathematician. Erdélyi was a leading expert on special functions, particularly orthogonal polynomials and hypergeometric functions. Biography He was born Arthur Diamant in Budapest, Hungary to Ignác Josef Armin Diamant and Frederike Roth. His name was changed to Erdélyi when his mother remarried to Paul Erdélyi. He attended the primary and secondary schools there from 1914 to 1926. His interest in mathematics dates back to this time. Erdélyi was a Jew, and so it was difficult for him to receive a university education in his native Hungary. He travelled to Brno, Czechoslovakia, to obtain a degree in electrical engineering.
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Abraham Adrian Albert
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Abraham Adrian Albert was an American mathematician. In 1939, he received the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize in Algebra for his work on Riemann matrices. He is best known for his work on the Albert–Brauer–Hasse–Noether theorem on finite-dimensional division algebras over number fields and as the developer of Albert algebras, which are also known as exceptional Jordan algebras.
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Arthur Rosenthal
1887 - 1959 (72 years)
Arthur Rosenthal was a German mathematician. Career Rosenthal's mathematical studies started in 1905 in Munich, under Ferdinand Lindemann and Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich and the Technical University Munich, as well as at the University of Göttingen. After submitting his thesis on regular polyhedra in 1909, he was promoted to assistant at the Technical University in 1911 and then associate professor in the University of Munich in 1920. The following year he was appointed associate professor in the University of Heidelberg, with a promotion to full professor in 1930. Between 1...
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Charles Francis Richter
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at the California Institute of Technology.
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Kurt Mahler
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Kurt Mahler FRS was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation, p-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers. Career Mahler was a student at the universities in Frankfurt and Göttingen, graduating with a Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1927; his advisor was Carl Ludwig Siegel. He left Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler and accepted an invitation by Louis Mordell to go to Manchester. However, at the start of World War II he was interned as an enemy alien in Central Camp in Douglas, Isle of Man, where he met Kurt Hirsch, although he was released after only three months.
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Eric Temple Bell
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.
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Harold Davenport
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Harold Davenport FRS was an English mathematician, known for his extensive work in number theory. Early life Born on 30 October 1907 in Huncoat, Lancashire, Davenport was educated at Accrington Grammar School, the University of Manchester , and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a research student of John Edensor Littlewood, working on the question of the distribution of quadratic residues.
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Alfred J. Lotka
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Alfred James Lotka was an American mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics. A biophysicist, Lotka is best known for his proposal of the predator–prey model, developed simultaneously but independently of Vito Volterra. The Lotka–Volterra model is still the basis of many models used in the analysis of population dynamics in ecology.
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Samuel S. Wilks
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Samuel Stanley Wilks was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications. Early life and education Wilks was born in Little Elm, Texas and raised on a farm. He studied Industrial Arts at the North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas, obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1926. He received his master's degree in mathematics in 1928 from the University of Texas. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa under Everett F. Lindquist; his thesis dealt with a problem of st...
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Quinn McNemar
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Quinn Michael McNemar was an American psychologist and statistician. He is known for his work on IQ tests, for his book Psychological Statistics and for McNemar's test, the statistical test he introduced in 1947.
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Billy James Pettis
1913 - 1979 (66 years)
Billy James Pettis , was an American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis. See also Dunford–Pettis propertyDunford–Pettis theoremMilman–Pettis theoremOrlicz–Pettis theoremPettis integralPettis theorem
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Norman Levinson
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
Norman Levinson was an American mathematician. Some of his major contributions were in the study of Fourier transforms, complex analysis, non-linear differential equations, number theory, and signal processing. He worked closely with Norbert Wiener in his early career. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1937. In 1954, he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society and in 1971 the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America for his paper A Motivated Account of an Elementary Proof of the Prime Number Theorem. In...
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Joseph Berkson
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Joseph Berkson was trained as a physicist , physician , and statistician . He is best known for having identified a source of bias in observational studies caused by selection effects known as Berkson's paradox.
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Louis Guttman
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Louis Guttman was an American sociologist and Professor of Social and Psychological Assessment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known primarily for his work in social statistics. Biography Guttman was born in New York City on February 10, 1916 and grew up in the Jewish community of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Guttman received both his BA in 1936 and MA in 1939 at the University of Minnesota, and his PhD in Social and Psychological Measurement in 1942.
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Zdeněk Frolík
1933 - 1989 (56 years)
Zdeněk Frolík was a Czech mathematician. His research interests included topology and functional analysis. In particular, his work concerned covering properties of topological spaces, ultrafilters, homogeneity, measures, uniform spaces. He was one of the founders of modern descriptive theory of sets and spaces.
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Jacob Wolfowitz
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish-born American Jewish statistician and Shannon Award-winning information theorist. He was the father of former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank Group President Paul Wolfowitz.
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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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