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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#101
Hillel Furstenberg
#1730
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Hillel "Harry" Furstenberg is a German-born American-Israeli mathematician and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Abel Prize and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups.
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Dana Scott
#362
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Dana Stewart Scott is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, California. His work on automata theory earned him the Turing Award in 1976, while his collaborative work with Christopher Strachey in the 1970s laid the foundations of modern approaches to the semantics of programming languages. He has also worked on modal logic, topology, and category theory.
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Michael Freedman
#1831
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Hartley Freedman is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional generalized Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic ℝ4 manifold exists.
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Persi Diaconis
#1649
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, such as coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.
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W. T. Tutte
#1642
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant ...
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Richard Borcherds
#2071
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Richard Ewen Borcherds is a British mathematician currently working in quantum field theory. He is known for his work in lattices, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebrass, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.
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Irving Segal
#2341
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Irving Ezra Segal was an American mathematician known for work on theoretical quantum mechanics. He shares credit for what is often referred to as the Segal–Shale–Weil representation. Early in his career Segal became known for his developments in quantum field theory and in functional and harmonic analysis, in particular his innovation of the algebraic axioms known as C*-algebra.
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Alexander Beilinson
#3351
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Alexander A. Beilinson is the David and Mary Winton Green University professor at the University of Chicago and works on mathematics. His research has spanned representation theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. In 1999, Beilinson was awarded the Ostrowski Prize with Helmut Hofer. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics and in 2020 the Shaw Prize in Mathematics.
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Elon Lages Lima
#2867
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Elon Lages Lima was a Brazilian mathematician whose research concerned differential topology, algebraic topology, and differential geometry. Lima was an influential figure in the development of mathematics in Brazil.
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Noga Alon
#1723
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Noga Alon is an Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers.
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Herbert Robbins
#2154
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Herbert Ellis Robbins was an American mathematician and statistician. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Courant, of What is Mathematics?, a popularization that is still in print. The Robbins lemma, used in empirical Bayes methods, is named after him. Robbins algebras are named after him because of a conjecture that he posed concerning Boolean algebras. The Robbins theorem, in graph theory, is also named after him, as is the Whitney–Robbins synthesis, a tool he introduced to prove this theorem. The we...
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Pierre Samuel
#2518
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Pierre Samuel was a French mathematician, known for his work in commutative algebra and its applications to algebraic geometry. The two-volume work Commutative Algebra that he wrote with Oscar Zariski is a classic. Other books of his covered projective geometry and algebraic number theory.
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Alan Sokal
#148
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
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Jacques Tits
#2622
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Jacques Tits was a Belgian-born French mathematician who worked on group theory and incidence geometry. He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric. Life and career Tits was born in Uccle to Léon Tits, a professor, and Lousia André. Jacques attended the Athénée of Uccle and the Free University of Brussels. His thesis advisor was Paul Libois, and Tits graduated with his doctorate in 1950 with the dissertation Généralisation des groupes projectifs basés sur la notion de transitivité. His academic career includes professorships at the Free University ...
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Ian Stewart
#1137
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ian Nicholas Stewart is a British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England. Education and early life Stewart was born in 1945 in Folkestone, England. While in the sixth form at Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone he came to the attention of the mathematics teacher. The teacher had Stewart sit mock A-level examinations without any preparation along with the upper-sixth students; Stewart was placed first in the examination. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge ...
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Tom M. Apostol
#2574
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Tom Mike Apostol was an American analytic number theorist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, best known as the author of widely used mathematical textbooks. Life and career Apostol was born in Helper, Utah. His parents, Emmanouil Apostolopoulos and Efrosini Papathanasopoulos, were Greek immigrants. Apostolopoulos's name was shortened to Mike Apostol when he obtained his United States citizenship, and Tom Apostol inherited this Americanized surname.
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Nathan Jacobson
#3209
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Nathan Jacobson was an American mathematician. Biography Born Nachman Arbiser in Warsaw, Jacobson emigrated to America with his family in 1918. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1930 and was awarded a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1934. While working on his thesis, Non-commutative polynomials and cyclic algebras, he was advised by Joseph Wedderburn.
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Ken Ribet
#3070
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Alan Ribet is an American mathematician working in algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. He is known for the Herbrand–Ribet theorem and Ribet's theorem, which were key ingredients in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, as well as for his service as President of the American Mathematical Society from 2017 to 2019. He is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Barry Simon
#2425
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barry Martin Simon is an American mathematical physicist and was the IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics , including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 400 publications on mathematics and physics.
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Irving Kaplansky
#2826
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Irving Kaplansky was a mathematician, college professor, author, and amateur musician. Biography Kaplansky or "Kap" as his friends and colleagues called him was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Polish-Jewish immigrants; his father worked as a tailor, and his mother ran a grocery and, eventually, a chain of bakeries. He went to Harbord Collegiate Institute receiving the Prince of Wales Scholarship as a teenager. He attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate and finished first in his class for three consecutive years. In his senior year, he competed in the first William Lowell P...
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Fan Chung
#2768
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Fan-Rong King Chung Graham , known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution .
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Frank Harary
#1519
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Frank Harary was an American mathematician, who specialized in graph theory. He was widely recognized as one of the "fathers" of modern graph theory. Harary was a master of clear exposition and, together with his many doctoral students, he standardized the terminology of graphs. He broadened the reach of this field to include physics, psychology, sociology, and even anthropology. Gifted with a keen sense of humor, Harary challenged and entertained audiences at all levels of mathematical sophistication. A particular trick he employed was to turn theorems into games—for instance, students w...
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Richard Schoen
#3106
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Richard Melvin Schoen is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984. Career Born in Celina, Ohio, and a 1968 graduate of Fort Recovery High School, he received his B.S. from the University of Dayton in mathematics. He then received his PhD in 1977 from Stanford University. After faculty positions at the Courant Institute, NYU, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Diego, he was Professor at Stanford University from 1987–2014, as Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences since 1992.
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Philip Candelas
#1724
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Philip Candelas, is a British physicist and mathematician. After 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, he served as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford until 2020 and is a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.
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Masaki Kashiwara
#3125
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
is a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Mikio Sato at the University of Tokyo. Kashiwara made leading contributions towards algebraic analysis, microlocal analysis, D-module theory, Hodge theory, sheaf theory and representation theory.
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John G. Thompson
#2370
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Griggs Thompson is an American mathematician at the University of Florida noted for his work in the field of finite groups. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970, the Wolf Prize in 1992, and the Abel Prize in 2008.
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Peter Sarnak
#2911
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#128
Richard P. Stanley
#3703
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Peter Stanley is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2010, he was the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota. He is an expert in the field of combinatorics and its applications to other mathematical disciplines.
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Arthur Jaffe
#2646
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Arthur Michael Jaffe is an American mathematical physicist at Harvard University, where in 1985 he succeeded George Mackey as the Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science. Education and career After graduating from Pelham Memorial High School in 1955, Jaffe attended Princeton University as an undergraduate obtaining a degree in chemistry in 1959, and later Clare College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar, obtaining a degree in mathematics in 1961. He then returned to Princeton, obtaining a doctorate in physics in 1966 with Arthur Wightman. His whole career has been spent teaching mathematical physics and pursuing research at Harvard University.
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Michael Spivak
#2633
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Michael David Spivak was an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. Spivak was the author of the five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry.
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Shokichi Iyanaga
#3212
Overall Influence
1906 - 2006 (100 years)
Shokichi Iyanaga was a Japanese mathematician. Early life Iyanaga was born in Tokyo, Japan on April 2, 1906. He studied at the University of Tokyo from 1926 to 1929. He studied under Teiji Takagi. As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the Japanese Journal of Mathematics and the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Tokyo. Both of his papers appeared in print in 1928. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1929, he stayed at Tokyo and worked under Takagi for his doctorate. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics 1931.
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David Gale
#1282
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
David Gale was an American mathematician and economist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, game theory, and convex analysis.
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Joe Harris
#3962
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Joseph Daniel Harris is a mathematician at Harvard University working in the field of algebraic geometry. After earning an AB from Harvard College, where he took Math 55, he continued at Harvard to study for a PhD under Phillip Griffiths.
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Erich Kähler
#3317
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Erich Kähler was a German mathematician with wide-ranging interests in geometry and mathematical physics, who laid important mathematical groundwork for algebraic geometry and for string theory. Education and life Erich Kähler was born in Leipzig, the son of a telegraph inspector Ernst Kähler. Inspired as a boy to be an explorer after reading books about Sven Hedin that his mother Elsa Götsch had given to him, the young Kähler soon focused his passion for exploration on astronomy. He is said to have written a 50-page thesis on fractional differentiation while still in high school, hoping that it would earn him a PhD.
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Shiu-Yuen Cheng
#3614
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Shiu-Yuen Cheng is a Hong Kong mathematician. He is currently the Chair Professor of Mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Cheng received his Ph.D. in 1974, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern, from University of California at Berkeley. Cheng then spent some years as a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Then he became a full professor at University of California at Los Angeles. Cheng chaired the Mathematics departments of both the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in the 1990s.
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J. A. Todd
#3824
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
John Arthur Todd was an English mathematician who specialised in geometry. Biography He was born in Liverpool, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1925. He did research under H.F. Baker, and in 1931 took a position at the University of Manchester. He became a lecturer at Cambridge in 1937. He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his working life.
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Eugene Dynkin
#2722
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Eugene Borisovich Dynkin was a Soviet and American mathematician. He made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named after him.
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Joseph Bernstein
#2817
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph Bernstein is a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician working at Tel Aviv University. He works in algebraic geometry, representation theory, and number theory. Biography Bernstein received his Ph.D. in 1972 under Israel Gelfand at Moscow State University. In 1981, he emigrated to the United States due to growing antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Bernstein was a professor at Harvard during 1983-1993. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985-86 and again in 1997-98. In 1993, he moved to Israel to take a professorship at Tel Aviv University .
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William Lawvere
#3044
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Francis William Lawvere was an American mathematician known for his work in category theory, topos theory and the philosophy of mathematics. Biography Lawvere studied continuum mechanics as an undergraduate with Clifford Truesdell. He learned of category theory while teaching a course on functional analysis for Truesdell, specifically from a problem in John L. Kelley's textbook General Topology. Lawvere found it a promising framework for simple rigorous axioms for the physical ideas of Truesdell and Walter Noll. Truesdell supported Lawvere's application to study further with Samuel Eilenberg,...
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Yuri Matiyasevich
#1585
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Yuri Vladimirovich Matiyasevich, is a Russian mathematician and computer scientist. He is best known for his negative solution of Hilbert's tenth problem , which was presented in his doctoral thesis at LOMI .
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Jacob T. Schwartz
#1822
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Jacob Theodore "Jack" Schwartz was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the designer of the SETL programming language and started the NYU Ultracomputer project. He founded the New York University Department of Computer Science, chairing it from 1964 to 1980.
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Leonid Hurwicz
#379
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Leonid Hurwicz was a Polish–American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureates, having received the prize at the age of 90.
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George E. P. Box
#1720
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
George Edward Pelham Box was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century".
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Robert Aumann
#447
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Robert John Aumann is an Israeli-American mathematician, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He also holds a visiting position at Stony Brook University, and is one of the founding members of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory.
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Ernst Witt
#4352
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Ernst Witt was a German mathematician, one of the leading algebraists of his time. Biography Witt was born on the island of Alsen, then a part of the German Empire. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved the family to China to work as missionaries, and he did not return to Europe until he was nine.
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Tosio Kato
#3781
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
was a Japanese mathematician who worked with partial differential equations, mathematical physics and functional analysis. Kato studied physics and received his undergraduate degree in 1941 at the Imperial University of Tokyo. After disruption of the Second World War, he received his doctorate in 1951 from the University of Tokyo, where he became a professor in 1958. From 1962, he worked as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States.
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Edward Frenkel
#3163
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel is a Russian-American mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California Berkeley, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of the bestselling book Love and Math.
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Timothy Gowers
#2575
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#149
Richard Hamming
#382
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
Richard Wesley Hamming was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code , the Hamming window, Hamming numbers, sphere-packing , Hamming graph concepts, and the Hamming distance.
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Harold W. Kuhn
#2258
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Harold William Kuhn was an American mathematician who studied game theory. He won the 1980 John von Neumann Theory Prize jointly with David Gale and Albert W. Tucker. A former Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University, he is known for the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, for Kuhn's theorem, and for developing Kuhn poker. He described the Hungarian method for the assignment problem, but a paper by Carl Gustav Jacobi, published posthumously in 1890 in Latin, was later discovered that had described the Hungarian method a century before Kuhn.
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