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
Juliusz Schauder
1899 - 1943 (44 years)
Juliusz Paweł Schauder was a Polish mathematician known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics. Life and career Born on 21 September 1899 in Lwów to a lawyer father of Jewish descent, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army right after his graduation from school and saw action on the Italian front. He was captured and imprisoned in Italy. He entered the university in Lwów in 1919 and received his doctorate in 1923. He got no appointment at the university and continued his research while working as teacher at a secondary school. Due t...
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Sally Elizabeth Carlson
1896 - 2000 (104 years)
Sally Elizabeth Carlson was an American mathematician, the first woman and one of the first two people to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Minnesota. Early life and education Carlson was born in Minneapolis to a large working-class family of Swedish immigrants. She became her high school valedictorian in 1913, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1917, and earned a master's degree there in 1918. After teaching mathematics for two years, she returned to graduate study in 1920, and completed her Ph.D. at Minnesota in 1924. Both students were supervised by Dunham...
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Paco Lagerstrom
1914 - 1989 (75 years)
Paco Axel Lagerstrom was an applied mathematician and aeronautical engineer. He was trained formally in mathematics, but worked for much of his career in aeronautical applications. He was known for work in applying the method of asymptotic expansion to fluid mechanics problems. Several of his works have become classics, including "Matched Asymptotic Expansions: Ideas And Techniques".
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Edwin Plimpton Adams
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
Edwin Plimpton Adams was an American physicist known for translating Einstein's lectures. Clinton Joseph Davisson attended his lectures. Adams was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1915.
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Henry Lewis Rietz
1875 - 1943 (68 years)
Henry Lewis Rietz was an American mathematician, actuarial scientist, and statistician, who was a leader in the development of statistical theory. He became the first president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
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Alexander Friedmann
1888 - 1925 (37 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He originated the pioneering theory that the universe is expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed known as the Friedmann equations.
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Leonida Tonelli
1885 - 1946 (61 years)
Leonida Tonelli was an Italian mathematician, noted for proving Tonelli's theorem, a variation of Fubini's theorem, and for introducing semicontinuity methods as a common tool for the direct method in the calculus of variations.
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Georges Darmois
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Georges Darmois was a French mathematician and statistician. He pioneered in the theory of sufficiency, in stellar statistics, and in factor analysis. He was also one of the first French mathematicians to teach British mathematical statistics.
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Åke Pleijel
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Åke Vilhelm Carl Pleijel was a Swedish mathematician. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Stockholm University in 1940 , and later became Professor of Mathematics at Uppsala University. Åke Vilhelm Carl Pleijel published the paper in which the Minakshisundaram–Pleijel zeta function was introduced.
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Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram
1913 - 1968 (55 years)
Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram , also known as Minakshi or SMS, was an Indian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and heat kernels. In 1946, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, America, where he met Åke Pleijel. In 1949, the two wrote a paper together called, Some properties of the eigenfunctions of the Laplace-operator on Riemannian manifolds, in which they introduced the Minakshisundaram-Pleijel zeta function.
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Johann Radon
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Johann Karl August Radon was an Austrian mathematician. His doctoral dissertation was on the calculus of variations . Life Radon was born in Tetschen, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, now Děčín, Czech Republic. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in 1910. He spent the winter semester 1910/11 at the University of Göttingen, then he was an assistant at the German Technical University in Brno, and from 1912 to 1919 at the Technical University of Vienna. In 1913/14, he passed his habilitation at the University of Vienna. Due to his near-sightedness, he was exempt from the draft d...
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Charles Ernest Weatherburn
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Charles Ernest Weatherburn was an Australian-born mathematician. Weatherburn graduated from the University of Sydney an MA in 1906. After being awarded a scholarship he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge sitting the Mathematical Tripos examinations in 1908. Weatherburn was awarded a First Class degree. On his return to Australia, Weatherburn taught at Ormond College of the University of Melbourne.
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Margaret Merrell
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Margaret Merrell was an American biostatistician who taught at Johns Hopkins University for many years and became the first female full professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is known for her research with Lowell Reed on the construction of life tables. She also observed that, for longitudinal data on individuals, fitting a curve to each individual and then averaging the parameters describing the curve will typically give different results than averaging the data values of the individuals and fitting a single curve to the averaged data.
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Burton Howard Camp
1880 - 1980 (100 years)
Burton Howard Camp was an American mathematician and mathematical statistician. For most of his career he was a professor of Mathematics at Wesleyan University. Early life and education He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Howard Alexander Camp and Alice Amelia Camp.
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Paul Koebe
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Paul Koebe was a 20th-century German mathematician. His work dealt exclusively with the complex numbers, his most important results being on the uniformization of Riemann surfaces in a series of four papers in 1907–1909. He did his thesis at Berlin, where he worked under Hermann Schwarz. He was an extraordinary professor at Leipzig from 1910 to 1914, then an ordinary professor at the University of Jena before returning to Leipzig in 1926 as an ordinary professor. He died in Leipzig.
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David van Dantzig
1900 - 1959 (59 years)
David van Dantzig was a Dutch mathematician, well known for the construction in topology of the dyadic solenoid. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1900, Van Dantzig started to study Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam in 1917, where Gerrit Mannoury lectured. He received his PhD at the University of Groningen in 1931 with a thesis entitled "" under supervision of Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.
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Robert H. Coats
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Robert Hamilton Coats was Canada's first Dominion Statistician. He was born in Clinton, Huron County, Ontario in 1874, the son of Robert Coats, who came to Canada from Scotland. In 1896, Coats received a B.A. from the University College in Toronto. He worked as a journalist for The Toronto World and then the Toronto Globe until 1902 when, at the request of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he became editor of the Labour Gazette; King himself had been the first editor of this publication which included statistical information related to labour.
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Robert Edouard Moritz
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Robert Edouard Moritz was a German-American mathematician. He published about 75 books and papers. For over 30 years he was head of the mathematics department at the University of Washington. Biography Moritz was born in Schleswig-Holstein to Karl R. and Maria Stahlhut Moritz, and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve where the family settled on a farm in Nebraska. From 1885 to 1892 he attended Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, and then studied another year at the University of Chicago. After two summer quarters in the next years he received his MA in mathematics in 1896.
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Stefan Mazurkiewicz
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning . His students included Karol Borsuk, Bronisław Knaster, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Stanisław Saks, and Antoni Zygmund. For a time Mazurkiewicz was a professor at the University of Paris; however, he spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Warsaw.
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Heinrich Wieleitner
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.
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Temple Rice Hollcroft
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Temple Rice Hollcroft, Sr. was an American mathematician and local historian. Hollcroft received B.S. in 1912 and A.B. in 1914 from Hanover College and then A.M. in 1915 from the University of Kentucky. He received in 1917 his Ph.D. from Cornell University under Virgil Snyder and during WW I served in France as a second lieutenant in the Field Artillery. Hollcroft was a mathematics professor at Wells College from 1918 to 1954, when he retired as professor emeritus. He served for 14 years as associate secretary of the American Mathematical Society. In 1932 in Zurich he was an Invited Speaker o...
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Taira Honda
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working on number theory who proved the Honda–Tate theorem classifying abelian varieties over finite fields.
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Hitoshi Kumano-Go
1935 - 1982 (47 years)
Hitoshi Kumano-Go was a Japanese mathematician who specialized in partial differential equations. He is especially recognized for his work on pseudo-differential operators and Fourier integral operators.
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Henri Lebesgue
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Henri Léon Lebesgue was a French mathematician known for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th-century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Intégrale, longueur, aire at the University of Nancy during 1902.
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Alexander Weinstein
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Alexander Weinstein was a mathematician who worked on boundary value problems in fluid dynamics. Early life, family and personal life Weinstein was born to Judel Jejb Weinstein and Praskovya Levkovich, his family were Jewish, and his father was a doctor. His family moved to Astrakhan, but later decided to emigrate to Germany, there Weinstein completed his schooling, having studied first in Würzburg, then at the University of Göttingen during 1913/14.
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Alfred Brauer
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Alfred Theodor Brauer was a German-American mathematician who did work in number theory. He was born in Charlottenburg, and studied at the University of Berlin. As he served Germany in World War I, even being injured in the war, he was able to keep his position longer than many other Jewish academics who had been forced out after Hitler's rise to power. In 1935 he lost his position and in 1938 he tried to leave Germany, but was not able to until the following year. He initially worked in the Northeast, but in 1942 he settled into a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A good deal of his works, and the Alfred T.
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Alfred Errera
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Alfred Errera was a Belgian mathematician. Errera studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he received his Ph.D. in 1921 with dissertation Du coloriage des cartes et de quelques questions d'analysis situs. In his dissertation he introduced what is now called the Errera graph, which is a counterexample to the validity of the alleged proof of the four color theorem by Alfred Kempe. From 1928 to 1956 he was a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
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Wanda Szmielew
1918 - 1976 (58 years)
Wanda Szmielew née Montlak was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups. Life Wanda Montlak was born on 5 April 1918 in Warsaw. She completed high school in 1935 and married, taking the name Szmielew. In the same year she entered the University of Warsaw, where she studied logic under Adolf Lindenbaum, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Alfred Tarski. Her research at this time included work on the axiom of choice, but it was interrupted by the 1939 Invasion of Poland.
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Arthur Milgram
1912 - 1961 (49 years)
Arthur Norton Milgram was an American mathematician. He made contributions in functional analysis, combinatorics, differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations, and Galois theory. Perhaps one of his more famous contributions is the Lax–Milgram theorem—a theorem in functional analysis that is particularly applicable in the study of partial differential equations. In the third chapter of Emil Artin's book Galois Theory, Milgram also discussed some applications of Galois theory. Milgram also contributed to graph theory, by co-authoring the article Verallgemeinerung eines graphe...
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Elisha Netanyahu
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Elisha Netanyahu was an Israeli mathematician specializing in complex analysis. Over the course of his work at the Technion he was the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and established the separate Department of Mathematics. Historian Benzion Netanyahu was his brother, while current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is his nephew.
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Leonidas Alaoglu
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Leonidas Alaoglu was a mathematician, known for his result, called Alaoglu's theorem on the weak-star compactness of the closed unit ball in the dual of a normed space, also known as the Banach–Alaoglu theorem.
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Horace Yomishi Mochizuki
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Horace Yomishi Mochizuki was an American mathematician known for his contributions to group theory. Mochizuki received a special award from the National Science Foundation for his work on the Burnside problem.
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Matila Ghyka
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Prince Matila Costiescu Ghyka , was a Romanian naval officer, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher, academic and diplomat. He did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora. His first name is sometimes written as Matyla.
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R. E. Siday
1912 - 1956 (44 years)
Raymond Eldred Siday was an English mathematician specialising in quantum mechanics. He obtained his BSc in Special Physics and later worked at the University of Edinburgh. He began collaborating with Werner Ehrenberg in 1933.
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Shikao Ikehara
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Shikao Ikehara was a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Norbert Wiener at MIT . Following Wiener in 1928, in 1931 Ikehara used Wiener's Tauberian theory to derive another proof of the prime number theorem, demonstrated solely via the non-vanishing of the zeta function on the line Re s = 1. An improved version of Ikehara's 1931 result by Wiener in 1932 is now known as the Wiener–Ikehara theorem.
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Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
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John Jay Gergen
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
John Jay Gergen was an American mathematician who introduced the Lebesgue–Gergen criterion for convergence of a Fourier series. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1925 and a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1928. His doctoral advisors were Griffith C. Evans and Szolem Mandelbrojt. From 1928 to 1930, as a National Research fellow, Gergen visited Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Clermont. From 1930 to 1933 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University, and from 1933 to 1936 he was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester.
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Johannes Tropfke
1866 - 1939 (73 years)
Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.
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Oliver Edmunds Glenn
1878 - Present (147 years)
Oliver Edmunds Glenn was a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who worked on finite groups and invariant theory. He received the degrees of A.B. in 1902 and A.M. in 1903 from Indiana University and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905. He married Alice Thomas Kinnard on Aug. 18, 1903, and they had two sons, William James and Robert Culbertson. Glenn began his career instructing mathematics at Indiana University in 1902 and subsequently taught at Drury College . He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 where he became a full professor ...
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Pia Nalli
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Pia Maria Nalli was an Italian mathematician known for her work on the summability of Fourier series, on Morera's theorem for analytic functions of several variables and for finding the solution to the Fredholm integral equation of the third kind for the first time. Her research interests ranged from algebraic geometry to functional analysis and tensor analysis; she was a speaker at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians.
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Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky was a Russian-Soviet-Uzbek mathematician, founder of the Tashkent school of mathematics. Education and career In 1906 Romanovsky received, under the supervision of A. A. Markov, his doctoral degree from St. Petersburg University. During 1900–1908 he was a student and then a docent at St. Petersburg University. In 1911–1915 he was a senior lecturer and then professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw, in 1915–1918 a professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw in Rostov-on-Don, and from 1918 a professor of probability and mathematical statistics at what is now called the National University of Uzbekistan .
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Iacopo Barsotti
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Iacopo Barsotti, or Jacopo Barsotti was an Italian mathematician who introduced Barsotti–Tate groups. In 1942 he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and became assistant professor Francesco Severi at the University of Rome in 1946. In 1948 he emigrated to the US, first as a guest professor at Princeton University, then as a full professor at the University of Pittsburgh and at Brown University. In 1961 he was recalled to Pisa as a teacher first of Geometry, then of Algebra. From 1968 to his death he taught Geometry at the University of Padua. Iacopo was a visiting scholar at ...
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Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina
1899 - 1999 (100 years)
Pelageya Yakovlevna Polubarinova-Kochina was a Soviet and Russian applied mathematician, known for her work on fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, particularly, the application of Fuchsian equations, as well in the history of mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946 and full member in 1958.
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Ernst Jacobsthal
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Ernst Erich Jacobsthal was a German mathematician, and brother to the archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal. In 1906, he earned his PhD at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Georg Frobenius, Hermann Schwarz and Issai Schur; his dissertation, Anwendung einer Formel aus der Theorie der quadratischen Reste , provided a proof that prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 are the sum of two square numbers. In 1934, he was fired from his professorship at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, because of his Jewish origins. In 1939 he fled to Norway and became after the war a professor at the Norwegian ...
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Evgenii Nikishin
1945 - 1986 (41 years)
Evgenii Mikhailovich Nikishin was a Russian mathematician, who specialized in harmonic analysis. Biography Nikishin, at age of 24, earned his candidate doctorate at Moscow State University, becoming the youngest Candidate Doctorate in a history of MSU and in 1971 his habilitation at the Steklov Institute under Pyotr Ulyanov . In 1977 he became a professor at Moscow State University, where he remained until his death after a long battle with cancer.
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Karel deLeeuw
1930 - 1978 (48 years)
Karel deLeeuw, or de Leeuw , was a mathematics professor at Stanford University, specializing in harmonic analysis and functional analysis. Life and career Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1950. He stayed at Chicago to earn an M.S. degree in mathematics in 1951, then went to Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1954. His thesis, titled "The relative cohomology structure of formations", was written under the direction of Emil Artin.
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Michael Sadowsky
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Michael A. Sadowsky was a researcher in solid mechanics, particularly the mathematical theory of elasticity and materials science. Born in the Russian Empire, he earned his doctorate in 1927 under the applied mathematician Georg Hamel at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled Spatially periodic solutions in the theory of elasticity . He made contributions in the use of potential functions in elasticity and force transfer mechanisms in composites. Many of his early papers were written in German.
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Henry Jack
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Henry Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician at University College Dundee. The Jack polynomials are named after him. His research dealt with the development of analytic methods to evaluate certain integrals over matrix spaces. His most famous paper relates his integrals to classes of symmetric polynomials important in the theory of the representation of the symmetric group. He discovered a new, natural basis for the symmetric polynomials.
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Robert Remak
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Robert Erich Remak was a German mathematician. He is chiefly remembered for his work in group theory . His other interests included algebraic number theory, mathematical economics and geometry of numbers. Robert Remak was the son of the neurologist Ernst Julius Remak and the grandson of the embryologist Robert Remak. He was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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