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,
#1001
Jean E. Sammet
#2171
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Jean E. Sammet was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and her M.A. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1949. She received an honorary D.Sc. from Mount Holyoke College in 1978.
Go to Profile#1002
Thomas M. Cover
#3506
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Thomas M. Cover [ˈkoʊvər] was an American information theorist and professor jointly in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Statistics at Stanford University. He devoted almost his entire career to developing the relationship between information theory and statistics.
Go to Profile#1003
Lee Lorch
#14722
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Lee Alexander Lorch was an American mathematician, early civil rights activist, and communist. His leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side of Manhattan, helped eventually to make housing discrimination illegal in the United States but also resulted in Lorch losing his own job twice. He and his family then moved to the Southern United States where he and his wife, Grace Lorch, became involved in the civil rights movement there while also teaching at several Black colleges. He encouraged black students to pursue studies in mathemat...
Go to Profile#1004
Christian Reiher
#22663
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Christian Reiher is a German mathematician. He is the fifth most successful participant in the history of the International Mathematical Olympiad, having won four gold medals in the years 2000 to 2003 and a bronze medal in 1999.
Go to Profile#1005
Dorothy Vaughan
#5791
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
Dorothy Jean Johnson Vaughan was an American mathematician and human computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.
Go to Profile#1006
Wojciech Samotij
#19380
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Wojciech Samotij is a Polish mathematician and an associate professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in combinatorics, additive number theory, Ramsey theory and graph theory.
Go to Profile#1007
Robin Wilson
#9605
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robin James Wilson is an emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Open University, having previously been Head of the Pure Mathematics Department and Dean of the Faculty. He was a stipendiary lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford and, , Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, where he has also been a visiting professor. On occasion, he teaches at Colorado College in the United States. He is also a long standing fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#1008
Eugenia Malinnikova
#23933
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Eugenia Malinnikova is a mathematician, winner of the 2017 Clay Research Award which she shared with Aleksandr Logunov "in recognition of their introduction of a novel geometric combinatorial method to study doubling properties of solutions to elliptic eigenvalue problems".
Go to Profile#1009
Grigory Barenblatt
#13719
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Grigory Isaakovich Barenblatt was a Russian mathematician. Education Barenblatt graduated in 1950 from Moscow State University, Department of Mechanics and Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1953 from Moscow State University under the supervision of A. N. Kolmogorov.
Go to Profile#1010
Günter Harder
#14855
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Günter Harder is a German mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry and number theory. Education and career Harder studied mathematics and physics in Hamburg und Göttingen. Simultaneously with the Staatsexamen in 1964 in Hamburg, he received his doctoral degree under Ernst Witt with a thesis Über die Galoiskohomologie der Tori. Two years later he completed his habilitation. After a one-year postdoc position at Princeton University and a position as an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg, he became a professor ordinarius at the University of Bonn. With the exception o...
Go to Profile#1011
Lenhard Ng
#18460
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Lenhard Ng is an American mathematician, working primarily on symplectic geometry. Ng is a professor of mathematics at Duke University. Background and education Lenhard Ng is an American of Chinese descent. His father, Jack Ng, is a professor of physics at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#1012
Helge Holden
#19735
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Helge Holden is a Norwegian mathematician working in the field of differential equations and mathematical physics. He was Praeses of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters from 2014 to 2016.
Go to Profile#1013
Ubiratan D'Ambrosio
#12554
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Ubiratan D'Ambrosio was a Brazilian mathematics educator and historian of mathematics. Life D'Ambrosio was born in São Paulo, and earned his doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 1963. He retired as a professor of mathematics from the State University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil in 1993.
Go to Profile#1014
Gary Chartrand
#16087
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gary Theodore Chartrand is an American-born mathematician who specializes in graph theory. He is known for his textbooks on introductory graph theory and for the concept of a highly irregular graph.
Go to Profile#1015
Monroe D. Donsker
#17816
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Monroe David Donsker was an American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at New York University . His research interest was probability theory. Education and career Donsker was born in Burlington, Iowa. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1948 under the supervision of Robert Horton Cameron. He became a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1962, about a year before his frequent co-author S.R.S. Varadhan started working there. Before joining NYU, Donsker taught at Cornell University and the University of Minnesota. His doctoral students include Glen E.
Go to Profile#1016
Henry O. Pollak
#14061
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Henry Otto Pollak is an Austrian-American mathematician. He is known for his contributions to information theory, and with Ronald Graham is the namesake of the Graham–Pollak theorem in graph theory.
Go to Profile#1017
Keith Moffatt
#16241
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Henry Keith Moffatt, FRS FRSE is a British mathematician with research interests in the field of fluid dynamics, particularly magnetohydrodynamics and the theory of turbulence. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1980 to 2002.
Go to Profile#1018
Marc Levine
#21292
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Marc N. Levine is an American mathematician. Life and work Levine graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in 1979 from Brandeis University under Teruhisa Matsusaka. He was assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1979 and at Northeastern University from 1984 in Boston, where he has been associate professor since 1986 and since 1988 professor. He was a visiting professor at University Duisburg-Essen, where he worked with Hélène Esnault. Since 2009 he has been Alexander von Humboldt Professor there. He was also a visit...
Go to Profile#1019
Jacob Cohen
#7878
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Jacob Cohen was an American psychologist and statistician best known for his work on statistical power and effect size, which helped to lay foundations for current statistical meta-analysis and the methods of estimation statistics. He gave his name to such measures as Cohen's kappa, Cohen's d, and Cohen's h.
Go to Profile#1020
Steven Orszag
#17441
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Steven Alan Orszag was an American mathematician. Life and career Orszag was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Joseph Orszag, a lawyer. Orszag's paternal grandparents were emigrants from Hungary. Orszag was raised in Forest Hills, Queens and graduated from Forest Hills High School. In 1962, at the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. His thesis adviser was Martin David Kruskal.
Go to Profile#1021
Margaret H. Wright
#13986
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Margaret H. Wright is an American computer scientist and mathematician. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra, and scientific computing. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and for leadership in the applied mathematics community. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. She was the first woman to serve as Presiden...
Go to Profile#1022
Peter Nemenyi
#19413
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Peter Björn Nemenyi was an American mathematician, who worked in statistics and probability theory. He taught mathematics at a number of American colleges and universities, including Hunter College, Tougaloo College, Oberlin College, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Virginia State College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Several statistical tests, for example the Nemenyi test, bear his name. He was also a prominent civil-rights activist. He was the son of Paul Nemenyi an eminent fluid and engineering mechanics expert of the twentieth century. His mother was Aranka Heller,...
Go to Profile#1023
Adrian Lewis
#19669
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Adrian Stephen Lewis is a British-Canadian mathematician, specializing in variational analysis and nonsmooth optimization. Education and career At the University of Cambridge he graduated with B.A. in mathematics in 1983, M.A. in 1987, and Ph.D. in engineering in 1987. His doctoral dissertation is titled Extreme point methods for infinite linear programming. Lewis was a postdoc at Dalhousie University. In Canada he was a faculty member at the University of Waterloo from 1989 to 2001 and at Simon Fraser University from 2001 to 2004. Since 2004 he has been a full professor at Cornell University and since 2018 has been the Samuel B.
Go to Profile#1024
Ronald Solomon
#22586
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ronald "Ron" Mark Solomon is an American mathematician specializing in the theory of finite groups. Solomon studied as an undergraduate at Queens College and received a PhD in 1971 at Yale University under Walter Feit with a thesis entitled Finite Groups with Sylow 2-Subgroups of the Type of the Alternating Group on Twelve Letters. In 1972, he began his participation in the classification program for finite simple groups, after hearing a lecture by Daniel Gorenstein. He was for two years an instructor at the University of Chicago and the academic year 1974–1975 at Rutgers University, before he became a professor at Ohio State University, where he has remained.
Go to Profile#1025
Henk Tijms
#17926
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Henk Tijms is a Dutch mathematician and Emeritus Professor of Operations Research at the VU University Amsterdam. He studied mathematics in Amsterdam where he graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1972 under supervision of Gijsbert de Leve.
Go to Profile#1026
Yu-Chi Ho
#11476
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Yu-Chi "Larry" Ho is a Chinese-American mathematician, control theorist, and a professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. He is the co-author of Applied Optimal Control, and an influential researcher in differential games, pattern recognition, and discrete event dynamic systems.
Go to Profile#1027
Richard Kadison
#20093
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Richard Vincent Kadison was an American mathematician known for his contributions to the study of operator algebras. Work Born in New York City in 1925, Kadison was a Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1028
Robert Goldblatt
#14187
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Robert Ian Goldblatt is a mathematical logician who is Emeritus Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. His doctoral advisor was Max Cresswell. His most popular books are Logics of Time and Computation and Topoi: the Categorial Analysis of Logic. He has also written a graduate level textbook on hyperreal numbers which is an introduction to nonstandard analysis.
Go to Profile#1029
Michael Harris
#17243
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Howard Harris is an American mathematician known for his work in number theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Columbia University and professor emeritus of mathematics at Université Paris Cité.
Go to Profile#1030
Brendan McKay
#17149
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Brendan Damien McKay is an Australian computer scientist and mathematician. He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University . He has published extensively in combinatorics.
Go to Profile#1031
Karen Vogtmann
#19978
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Karen Vogtmann is an American mathematician working primarily in the area of geometric group theory. She is known for having introduced, in a 1986 paper with Marc Culler, an object now known as the Culler–Vogtmann Outer space. The Outer space is a free group analog of the Teichmüller space of a Riemann surface and is particularly useful in the study of the group of outer automorphisms of the free group on n generators, Out. Vogtmann is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University and the University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#1032
Anatole Katok
#16242
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Anatoly Borisovich Katok was an American mathematician with Russian-Jewish origins. Katok was the director of the Center for Dynamics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University. His field of research was the theory of dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#1033
Emmanuel Ullmo
#22577
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Emmanuel Ullmo is a French mathematician, specialised in arithmetic geometry. Since 2013 he has served as director of the Institut des Hautes Études scientifiques. Biography He wrote his thesis under Lucien Szpiro at the University of Paris-Sud in 1993, where he was appointed professor in 2001. He also held temporary positions at IMPA for 18 months, then two years at Princeton University, and six months at Tsinghua University.
Go to Profile#1034
Sun Zhiwei
#26090
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Sun Zhiwei is a Chinese mathematician, working primarily in number theory, combinatorics, and group theory. He is a professor at Nanjing University. Biography Sun Zhiwei was born in Huai'an, Jiangsu. Sun and his twin brother Sun Zhihong proved a theorem about what are now known as the Wall–Sun–Sun primes.
Go to Profile#1035
Solomon Marcus
#5453
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Solomon Marcus was a Romanian mathematician, member of the Mathematical Section of the Romanian Academy and emeritus professor of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Mathematics. His main research was in the fields of mathematical analysis, mathematical and computational linguistics and computer science. He also published numerous papers on various cultural topics: poetics, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, and history of science and education.
Go to Profile#1036
Jonathan Bennett
#15220
Overall Influence
Jonathan Bennett is a mathematician and Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the University of Birmingham. He was a recipient of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2011 for "his foundational work on multilinear inequalities in harmonic and geometric analysis, and for a number of major results in the theory of oscillatory integrals."
Go to Profile#1037
Yoichi Miyaoka
#26226
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Yoichi Miyaoka is a mathematician who works in algebraic geometry and who proved the Bogomolov–Miyaoka–Yau inequality in an Inventiones Mathematicae paper. In 1984, Miyaoka extended the Bogomolov–Miyaoka–Yau inequality to surfaces with quotient singularities, and in 2008 to orbifold surfaces. Doing so, he obtains sharp bound on the number of quotient singularities on surfaces of general type. Moreover, the inequality for orbifold surfaces gives explicit values for the coefficients of the so-called Lang-Vojta conjecture relating the degree of a curve on a surface with its geometric genus.
Go to Profile#1038
Leonid Khachiyan
#8070
Overall Influence
1952 - 2005 (53 years)
Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan was a Soviet and American mathematician and computer scientist. He was most famous for his ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming, which was the first such algorithm known to have a polynomial running time. Even though this algorithm was shown to be impractical, it has inspired other randomized algorithms for convex programming and is considered a significant theoretical breakthrough.
Go to Profile#1039
Matei Machedon
#21677
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Matei Machedon is a Romanian–American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations and mathematical physics. Machedon graduated from the University of Chicago with B.A./M.S. in 1982. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1986 with thesis advisor Charles Fefferman. Machedon was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1986 to 1988. At Princeton University he was an assistant professor from 1988 to 1994. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1994–1995. At the University of Maryland he was an associate profes...
Go to Profile#1040
Frieder Nake
#3223
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Frieder Nake is a mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer art. He is best known internationally for his contributions to the earliest manifestations of computer art, a field of computing that made its first public appearances with three small exhibitions in 1965.
Go to Profile#1041
Matthew Cook
#12622
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Matthew Cook is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Biography Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica.
Go to Profile#1042
Douglas West
#22308
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Douglas Brent West is a professor of graph theory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978; his advisor was Daniel Kleitman. He is the "W" in G. W. Peck, a pseudonym for a group of six mathematicians that includes West. He is the editor of the journal Discrete Mathematics.
Go to Profile#1043
Daniel Pedoe
#10450
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Dan Pedoe was an English-born mathematician and geometer with a career spanning more than sixty years. In the course of his life he wrote approximately fifty research and expository papers in geometry. He is also the author of various core books on mathematics and geometry some of which have remained in print for decades and been translated into several languages. These books include the three-volume Methods of Algebraic Geometry , The Gentle Art of Mathematics, Circles: A Mathematical View, Geometry and the Visual Arts and most recently Japanese Temple Geometry Problems: San Gaku .
Go to Profile#1044
Sergey Mergelyan
#11446
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Sergey Mergelyan was a Soviet and Armenian mathematician, who made major contributions to the Approximation theory. The modern Complex Approximation Theory is based on Mergelyan's classical work. Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union , member of NAS ASSR .
Go to Profile#1045
Norman Lloyd Johnson
#14165
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Norman Lloyd Johnson was a professor of statistics and author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probability theory. Education Johnson attended Ilford County High School, and went on to University College London, where he obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics 1936 and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in statistics in 1937 and 1938.
Go to Profile#1046
Yulij Ilyashenko
#21505
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Yulij Sergeevich Ilyashenko is a Russian mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems, differential equations, and complex foliations. Ilyashenko received in 1969 from Moscow State University his Russian candidate degree under Evgenii Landis. Ilyashenko was a professor at Moscow State University, an academic at Steklov Institute, and also taught at the Independent University of Moscow. He became a professor at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#1047
Steven Kerckhoff
#20520
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Steven Paul Kerckhoff is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, who works on hyperbolic 3-manifolds and Teichmüller spaces. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1978, under the direction of William Thurston. Among his most famous results is his resolution of the Nielsen realization problem, a 1932 conjecture by Jakob Nielsen. Along with William J. Floyd, he wrote large parts of Thurston's influential Princeton lecture notes, and he is well known for his work in exploring and clarifying Thurston's hyperbolic Dehn surgery.
Go to Profile#1048
Robert Frucht
#21830
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Robert Wertheimer Frucht was a German-Chilean mathematician; his research specialty was graph theory and the symmetries of graphs. Education and career In 1908, Frucht's family moved from Brünn, Austria-Hungary , where he was born, to Berlin. Frucht entered the University of Berlin in 1924 with an interest in differential geometry, but switched to group theory under the influence of his doctoral advisor, Issai Schur; he received his Ph.D. in 1931.
Go to Profile#1049
Walter Ledermann
#15293
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
Walter Ledermann FRSE was a German and British mathematician who worked on matrix theory, group theory, homological algebra, number theory, statistics, and stochastic processes. He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1944.
Go to Profile#1050
Bjarni Jónsson
#11175
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Bjarni Jónsson was an Icelandic mathematician and logician working in universal algebra, lattice theory, model theory and set theory. He was emeritus distinguished professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University and the honorary editor in chief of Algebra Universalis. He received his PhD in 1946 at UC Berkeley under supervision of Alfred Tarski.
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