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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10001
Carlo Severini
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Carlo Severini was an Italian mathematician: he was born in Arcevia and died in Pesaro. Severini, independently from Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov, proved and published earlier a proof of the theorem now known as Egorov's theorem.
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André Derain
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse. Biography Early years Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1895 he began to study on his own, contrary to claims that meeting Vlaminck or Matisse began his efforts to paint, and occasionally went to the countryside with an old friend of Cézanne's, Father Jacomin along with his two sons. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse. In 1900, he met and shar...
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David Gregory
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
David Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and a proponent of Isaac Newton's Principia.
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Tommaso Boggio
1877 - 1963 (86 years)
Tommaso Boggio was an Italian mathematician. Boggio worked in mathematical physics, differential geometry, analysis, and financial mathematics. He was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians 1908 in Rome. He wrote, with Burali-Forti, Meccanica Razionale, published in 1921 by S. Lattes & Compagnia.
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William Mitchinson Hicks
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Mitchinson Hicks, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1873, and became a fellow at the college. Hicks spent most of his career at Sheffield, contributing to the development of the university there. He was principal of Firth College from 1892 to 1897. In 1897, Firth College merged with two other colleges to form the University College of Sheffield, and Hicks was its first principal until 1905, when the college received its own royal charter and became the University of Sheffield. Hicks was the first vice chancellor of...
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Mojżesz David Kirszbraun
1903 - 1942 (39 years)
Mojżesz David Kirszbraun was a Polish mathematician, mostly known for the Kirszbraun theorem on extensions of Lipschitz maps. This theorem appears in his master's thesis, defended in Warsaw in 1930.
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Simion Stoilow
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Simion Stoilow or Stoilov was a Romanian mathematician, creator of the Romanian school of complex analysis, and author of over 100 publications. Biography He was born in Bucharest, and grew up in Craiova. His father, Colonel Simion Stoilow, fought at the in the Romanian War of Independence. After studying at the Obedeanu elementary school and the Carol I High School, Stoilow went in 1907 to the University of Paris, where he earned a B.S. degree in 1910 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1916. His doctoral dissertation was written under the direction of Émile Picard.
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Georges Valiron
1884 - 1955 (71 years)
Georges Jean Marie Valiron was a French mathematician, notable for his contributions to analysis, in particular, the asymptotic behaviour of entire functions of finite order and Tauberian theorems. Biography Valiron obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1914, under supervision of Émile Borel. Since 1922 he held a professorship at the University of Strasbourg, and since 1931 a chair at the University of Paris. He gave a plenary speech at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich and was an invited speaker of the ICM in 1920 in Strasbourg and in 1928 in Bologna. H...
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Jules Drach
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Jules Joseph Drach was a French mathematician. Biography Drach came from an Alsatian family of peasants. Because of the Franco-Prussian war the parents fled with their children to Saint-Dié. He attended school there and in Nancy before he studied at the École Normale Supérieure . In 1892 he received his agrégation and in 1898 he received his PhD under Paul Tannery at ENS with thesis Essai sur la théorie générale de l'intégration et sur la classification des transcendantes. In his thesis, Drach developed a Galois theory for differential equations, building upon the work of Émile Picard, Sophus Lie and Ernest Vessiot.
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Bella Subbotovskaya
1938 - 1982 (44 years)
Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya was a Soviet mathematician who founded the short-lived Jewish People's University in Moscow. The school's purpose was to offer free education to those affected by structured anti-Semitism within the Soviet educational system. Its existence was outside Soviet authority and it was investigated by the KGB. Subbotovskaya herself was interrogated a number of times by the KGB and shortly thereafter was hit by a truck and died, in what has been speculated was an assassination.
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Sigekatu Kuroda
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Sigekatu Kuroda was a Japanese mathematician who worked in number theory and mathematical logic. In 1942 he became a professor at the newly founded Nagoya Imperial University, where he stayed for over twenty years. He is responsible for much of the effort in setting up its Department of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#10012
Victor Shestakov
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Victor Ivanovich Shestakov was a Russian/Soviet logician and theoretician of electrical engineering. In 1935 he discovered the possible interpretation of Boolean algebra of logic in electro-mechanical relay circuits. He graduated from Moscow State University and worked there in the General Physics Department almost until his death.
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Ludwig Immanuel Magnus
1790 - 1861 (71 years)
Ludwig Immanuel Magnus was a German Jewish mathematician who, in 1831, published a paper about the inversion transformation, which leads to inversive geometry. His reputation as a mathematician was established by 1834 and an honorary doctorate conferred on him by the University of Bonn. His work appeared in Gergonne's Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées vols. xi and xvi ; in Crelle's Journal, vols. v, vii, viii, and ix ; in the third part of Meier Hirsch's "Sammlung Geometrischer Aufgaben"; and in "Sammlung von Aufgaben und Lehrsätzen aus der Analytischen Geometrie des Raumes" .
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Leon Lichtenstein
1878 - 1933 (55 years)
Leon Lichtenstein was a Polish-German mathematician, who made contributions to the areas of differential equations, conformal mapping, and potential theory. He was also interested in theoretical physics, publishing research in hydrodynamics and astronomy.
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Naum Akhiezer
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Naum Ilyich Akhiezer was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his works in approximation theory and the theory of differential and integral operators. He is also known as the author of classical books on various subjects in analysis, and for his work on the history of mathematics. He is the brother of the theoretical physicist Aleksandr Akhiezer.
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Charles Howard Hinton
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
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Li Shanlan
1811 - 1882 (71 years)
Li Shanlan was a Chinese mathematician of the Qing Dynasty. A native of Haining, Zhejiang, he was fascinated by mathematics since childhood, beginning with the Nine Chapters on Mathematical Art. He eked out a living by being a private tutor for some years before fleeing to Shanghai in 1852 to evade the Taiping Rebellion. There he collaborated with Alexander Wylie, Joseph Edkins , and others to translate many Western mathematical works into Chinese, including Elements of Analytical Geometry and the Differential and Integral Calculus by Elias Loomis, Augustus De Morgan's Elements of Algebra, a...
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Evgraf Fedorov
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov was a Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist. Fedorov was born in the Russian city of Orenburg. His father was a topographical engineer. The family later moved to Saint Petersburg. From the age of fifteen, he was deeply interested in the theory of polytopes, which later became his main research interest. He was a distinguished graduate of the Gorny Institute, which he joined at the age of 26. He was elected the first Director of the Institute in 1905.
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Viktor Wagner
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Viktor Vladimirovich Wagner, also Vagner was a Russian mathematician, best known for his work in differential geometry and on semigroups. Wagner was born in Saratov and studied at Moscow State University, where Veniamin Kagan was his advisor. He became the first geometry chair at Saratov State University. He received the Lobachevsky Medal in 1937.
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Erland Samuel Bring
1736 - 1798 (62 years)
Erland Samuel Bring was a Swedish mathematician. Bring studied at Lund University between 1750 and 1757. In 1762 he obtained a position of a reader in history and was promoted to professor in 1779. At Lund he wrote eight volumes of mathematical work in the fields of algebra, geometry, analysis and astronomy, including Meletemata quaedam mathematica circa transformationem aequationum algebraicarum . This work describes Bring's contribution to the algebraic solution of equations.
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Edward Arthur Milne
1896 - 1950 (54 years)
Edward Arthur Milne FRS was a British astrophysicist and mathematician. Biography Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. He attended Hymers College and from there he won an open scholarship in mathematics and natural science to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, gaining the largest number of marks which had ever been awarded in the examination. In 1916 he joined a group of mathematicians led by A. V. Hill for the Ministry of munitions working on the ballistics of anti-aircraft gunnery, they became known as ′Hill's Brigands′. Later Milne became an expert on sound localisation. In 1917 he became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
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Nicolaus II Bernoulli
1695 - 1726 (31 years)
Nicolaus II Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician as were his father Johann Bernoulli and one of his brothers, Daniel Bernoulli. He was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family.
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John R. Womersley
1907 - 1958 (51 years)
John Ronald Womersley was a British mathematician and computer scientist who made important contributions to computer development, and hemodynamics. Nowadays he is principally remembered for his contribution to blood flow, fluid dynamics and the eponymous Womersley number, a dimensionless parameter characterising unsteady flow.
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James Cockle
1819 - 1895 (76 years)
Sir James Cockle FRS FRAS FCPS was an English lawyer and mathematician. Cockle was born on 14 January 1819. He was the second son of James Cockle, a surgeon, of Great Oakley, Essex. Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the Middle Temple in 1838, practising as a special pleader in 1845 and being called in 1846. Joining the midland circuit, he acquired a good practice, and on the recommendation of Chief Justice Sir William Erle he was appointed as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland in Queensland, Australia on 21 February 1863; he served until his retirement on 24 June 1879.
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Moritz Abraham Stern
1807 - 1894 (87 years)
Moritz Abraham Stern was a German mathematician. Stern became Ordinarius at Göttingen University in 1858, succeeding Carl Friedrich Gauss. Stern was the first Jewish full professor at a German university who attained the position without changing his Jewish religion. Although Carl Gustav Jacobi preceded him as the first Jew to obtain a math professorial chair in Germany, Jacobi's family had converted to Christianity long before then.
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Adriaan van Roomen
1561 - 1615 (54 years)
Adriaan van Roomen , also known as Adrianus Romanus, was a mathematician, professor of medicine and medical astronomer from the Duchy of Brabant in the Habsburg Netherlands who was active throughout Central Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. As a mathematician he worked in algebra, trigonometry and geometry; and on the decimal expansion of π. He solved the Problem of Apollonius using a new method that involved intersecting hyperbolas. He also wrote on the Gregorian calendar reform.
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Giovanni Poleni
1683 - 1761 (78 years)
Giovanni Poleni was a Marquess, physicist, mathematician and antiquarian. Early life He was the son of Marquess Jacopo Poleni and studied the classics, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics at the School of the Somaschi Fathers, Venice.
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Timofei Osipovsky
1765 - 1832 (67 years)
Timofei Fyodorovich Osipovsky was a Russiann Imperial mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. Timofei Osipovsky graduated from the St Petersburg Teachers Seminary. He became a teacher at Imperial Kharkov University, in 1805, the year it was founded. The city of Kharkov, thanks to its educational establishments, became one of the most important cultural and educational centres of Russian Empire. In 1813 he became rector of the university. However, in 1820, Osipovsky was suspended from his post on religious grounds.
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Beppo Levi
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Beppo Levi was an Italian mathematician. He published high-level academic articles and books, not only on mathematics, but also on physics, history, philosophy, and pedagogy. Levi was a member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences and of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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Dorothy Walcott Weeks
1893 - 1990 (97 years)
Dorothy Walcott Weeks was an American mathematician and physicist. Weeks was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned degrees from Wellesley College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Simmons College. Weeks was the first woman to receive a PhD in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Wilhelm Fiedler
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Otto Wilhelm Fiedler was a German-Swiss mathematician, known for his textbooks of geometry and his contributions to descriptive geometry. Life Fiedler was the son of a shoemaker. He went to the Royal Mercantile College in Chemnitz and in 1849 to the Bergakademie Freiberg as an external student. In 1852 he became a mathematics teacher at the "Werkmeisterschule" in Freiberg and 1853 at the "Gewerbeschule" in Chemnitz. He had to take care of his widowed mother and his siblings, and educated himself without directly attending a university. In 1858 he obtained the doctorate in mathematics at the U...
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Georg Aumann
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Georg Aumann , was a German mathematician. He was known for his work in general topology and regulated functions. During World War II, he worked as part of a group of five mathematicians, recruited by Wilhelm Fenner, and which included Ernst Witt, Alexander Aigner, Oswald Teichmueller and Johann Friedrich Schultze, and led by Wolfgang Franz, to form the backbone of the new mathematical research department in the late 1930s, which would eventually be called: Section IVc of Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht . He also worked as a cryptanalyst, on the initial breaking of the most difficult cypherss.
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Aida Yasuaki
1747 - 1817 (70 years)
Aida Yasuaki also known as Aida Ammei, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. He made significant contributions to the fields of number theory and geometry, and furthered methods for simplifying continued fractions.
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Leo August Pochhammer
1841 - 1920 (79 years)
Leo August Pochhammer was a Prussian mathematician who was known for his work on special functions and introduced the Pochhammer symbol, now generally used for expressing hypergeometric functions in a compact notation.
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Forest Ray Moulton
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Forest Ray Moulton was an American astronomer. Biography He was born in Le Roy, Michigan, and was educated at Albion College. After graduating in 1894 , he performed his graduate studies at the University of Chicago and gained a Ph.D. in 1899. At the University of Chicago he was associate in astronomy , instructor , assistant professor , associate professor , and professor after 1912.
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Emanuel Czuber
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Emanuel Czuber was an Austrian mathematician. Biography He graduated from a German secondary school in 1869 and continued his studies at the German Technical University in Prague, where he played an active part in the Association for Free Lectures on Mathematics - a student association and the predecessor of the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists. From 1872 to 1874, while he was still a student, he acted as an assistant to Karel Koristka. He submitted his habilitation thesis on practical geometry to the Technical University at Prague in 1876 and obtained the right to lecture. From 1875 to 1886 he taught at the Second German Realschule in Prague.
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Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
1915 - 1975 (60 years)
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguistics. Biography Born Oscar Westreich in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, he was raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.
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Zu Gengzhi
480 - 525 (45 years)
Zu Geng or Zu Gengzhi was a Chinese mathematician, politician, and writer. His courtesy name was Jingshuo . He was the son of the famous mathematician Zu Chongzhi. He is known principally for deriving and proving the formula for the volume of a sphere. He additionally measured the angular distance between Polaris and the celestial north pole.
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Bernt Michael Holmboe
1795 - 1850 (55 years)
Bernt Michael Holmboe was a Norwegian mathematician. He was home-tutored from an early age, and was not enrolled in school until 1810. Following a short period at the Royal Frederick University, which included a stint as assistant to Christopher Hansteen, Holmboe was hired as a mathematics teacher at the Christiania Cathedral School in 1818, where he met the future renowned mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. Holmboe's lasting impact on mathematics worldwide has been said to be his tutoring of Abel, both in school and privately. The two became friends and remained so until Abel's early death. Ho...
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Édouard Le Roy
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Édouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Le Roy was a French philosopher and mathematician. Life Le Roy entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1892, and received the agrégation in mathematics in 1895. He became Doctor in Sciences in 1898, taught in several high schools, and became in 1909 professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris.
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Andreas von Ettingshausen
1796 - 1878 (82 years)
Andreas Freiherr von Ettingshausen was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. Ettingshausen studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the University of Vienna. In 1817, he joined the University of Vienna and taught mathematics and physics as an adjunct professor. In 1819, he became professor of physics at the University of Innsbruck and 1821 professor of higher mathematics at the University of Vienna. His lectures of that time marked a new era for the University of Vienna, and they were published in 1827 in two volumes. In 1834 Ettingshausen became the chair of physics.
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Guido Stampacchia
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
Guido Stampacchia was an Italian mathematician, known for his work on the theory of variational inequalities, the calculus of variation and the theory of elliptic partial differential equations. Life and academic career Stampacchia was born in Naples, Italy, to Emanuele Stampacchia and Giulia Campagnano. He obtained his high school certification from the Liceo-Ginnasio Giambattista Vico in Naples in classical subjects, although he showed a stronger aptitude for mathematics and physics.
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Johannes Hjelmslev
1873 - 1950 (77 years)
Johannes Trolle Hjelmslev was a mathematician from Hørning, Denmark. Hjelmslev worked in geometry and history of geometry. He was the discoverer and eponym of the Hjelmslev transformation, a method for mapping an entire hyperbolic plane into a circle with a finite radius. He was the father of Louis Hjelmslev.
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Tatyana Afanasyeva
1876 - 1964 (88 years)
Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva was a Russian-Dutch mathematician and physicist who made contributions to the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. On 21 December 1904, she married Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest . They had two daughters and two sons; one daughter, Tatyana Ehrenfest, also became a mathematician.
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Jules Hoüel
1823 - 1886 (63 years)
Guillaume-Jules Hoüel was a French mathematician. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1843 and received his doctoral degree in 1855 from the Sorbonne. He was sought by Urbain Le Verrier at the Paris Observatory, but chose instead to return to Thaon to study there. In 1859 he began to teach at Bordeaux.
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Hans Heinrich Bürmann
1750 - 1817 (67 years)
Hans Heinrich Bürmann was a German mathematician and teacher. He ran an "academy of commerce" in Mannheim since 1795 where he used to teach mathematics. He also served as a censor in Mannheim. He was nominated Headmaster of the Commerce Academy of the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1811. He did scientific research in the area of combinatorics and he contributed to the development of the symbolic language of mathematics. He discovered the generalized form of the Lagrange inversion theorem. He corresponded and published with Joseph Louis Lagrange and Carl Hindenburg.
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Jean Claude Bouquet
1819 - 1885 (66 years)
Jean-Claude Bouquet was a French mathematician who worked with Charles Briot on doubly periodic functions. Bouquet became friends with Briot at the Lycée and wanted to become a mathematics teacher.
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Charlotte Scott
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Charlotte Angas Scott was a British mathematician who made her career in the United States and was influential in the development of American mathematics, including the mathematical education of women. Scott played an important role in Cambridge changing the rules for its famous Mathematical Tripos exam.
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Ellen Hayes
1851 - 1930 (79 years)
Ellen Amanda Hayes was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was a controversial figure, not only because of being a female college professor, but also for embracing many radical causes. Early life Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, the first of six children to Ruth Rebecca Hayes and Charles Coleman Hayes. At the age of seven she studied at the Centerville school, a one-room ungraded public school and, in 1867, at sixteen, was employed to teach at a country school. In 1872, she entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College and was admitted as a freshman in 1875, where her mai...
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George Peacock
1791 - 1858 (67 years)
George Peacock FRS was an English mathematician and Anglican cleric. He founded what has been called the British algebra of logic. Early life Peacock was born on 9 April 1791 at Thornton Hall, Denton, near Darlington, County Durham. His father, Thomas Peacock, was a priest of the Church of England, incumbent and for 50 years curate of the parish of Denton, where he also kept a school. In early life Peacock did not show any precocity of genius, and was more remarkable for daring feats of climbing than for any special attachment to study. Initially, he received his elementary education from his...
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