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
Lester S. Hill
1891 - 1961 (70 years)
Lester S. Hill was an American mathematician and educator who was interested in applications of mathematics to communications. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Columbia College and a Ph.D. from Yale University . He taught at the University of Montana, Princeton University, the University of Maine, Yale University, and Hunter College. Among his notable contributions was the Hill cipher. He also developed methods for detecting errors in telegraphed code numbers and wrote two books.
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Martin Kutta
1867 - 1944 (77 years)
Martin Wilhelm Kutta was a German mathematician. Kutta was born in Pitschen, Upper Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia . He attended the University of Breslau from 1885 to 1890, and continued his studies in Munich until 1894, where he became the assistant of Walther Franz Anton von Dyck. From 1898, he spent half a year at the University of Cambridge. From 1899 to 1909, he worked again as an assistant of von Dyck in Munich; from 1909 to 1910, he was adjunct professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He was professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1910 to 1912. Kutta became professor at the Univers...
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Ernesto Pascal
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Ernesto Pascal was an Italian mathematician. Life and work Pascal graduated in mathematics from the University of Naples in 1887. In the following two years he attended courses in the universities of Pisa and Göttingen; in the last one Pascal studied under Felix Klein who influenced him. From 1890 to 1907 he was teaching at the university of Pavia and in 1907 he returned to the university of Naples were he taught until his death. Here, as Dean of the Faculty of Sciences he reorganised the teaching of mathematics, creating for each professorship a laboratory equipped with models and instrument...
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Michael Maestlin
1550 - 1631 (81 years)
Michael Maestlin was a German astronomer and mathematician, known for being the mentor of Johannes Kepler. He was a student of Philipp Apian and was known as the teacher who most influenced Kepler. Maestlin was considered to be one of the most significant astronomers between the time of Copernicus and Kepler.
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Thomas Heath
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Sir Thomas Little Heath was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. He was educated at Clifton College. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.
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Cargill Gilston Knott
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Cargill Gilston Knott FRS, FRSE LLD was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was a pioneer in seismological research. He spent his early career in Japan. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and President of the Scottish Meteorological Society.
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Ludwig Maurer
1859 - 1927 (68 years)
Ludwig Maurer was a German mathematician and professor at University of Tübingen. He was the eldest son of Konrad Maurer and Valerie Maurer, née von Faulhaber . His 1887 dissertation at the University of Strassburg was on the theory of linear substitutions, known today as matrix groups. A survey of his important contributions is contained in chapter V, §4 of .
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Albert Victor Bäcklund
1845 - 1922 (77 years)
Albert Victor Bäcklund was a Swedish mathematician and physicist. He was a professor at Lund University and its rector from 1907 to 1909. He was born in Malmöhus County, now Skåne County, in southern Sweden and became a student at the nearby University of Lund in 1861. In 1864 he started to work for the observatory, and received his Ph.D. in 1868 working on methods to obtain the latitude of a place by astronomical observations. He was awarded the title of associate professor in Mechanics and Mathematical Physics in 1878, and elected Fellow of the Swedish Academy of Science in 1888. In 1897 he...
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Friedrich Heinrich Albert Wangerin
1844 - 1933 (89 years)
Friedrich Heinrich Albert Wangerin was a German mathematician. Early life Wangerin was born on 18 November 1844 in Greifenberg Pomerania, Prussia . He studied at the gymnasium at Greifenberg and completed his final examination with an "excellent" grade in 1862.
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Anton Davidoglu
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Anton Davidoglu was a Romanian mathematician who specialized in differential equations. He was born in 1876 in Bârlad, Vaslui County, the son of Profira Moțoc and Doctor Cleante Davidoglu. His older brother was General Cleante Davidoglu.
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Charles Marie de La Condamine
1701 - 1774 (73 years)
Charles Marie de La Condamine was a French explorer, geographer, and mathematician. He spent ten years in territory which is now Ecuador, measuring the length of a degree of latitude at the equator and preparing the first map of the Amazon region based on astro-geodetic observations. Furthermore he was a contributor to the Encyclopédie.
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Helmut Ulm
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Helmut Ulm was a German mathematician who established the classification of countable periodic abelian groups by means of their Ulm invariants. Career Helmut Ulm's father was an elementary school teacher in Elberfeld. After finishing high school in Wuppertal in 1926, he attended the universities of Göttingen , Jena and Bonn , where he studied mathematics and physics, attending the lectures of Richard Courant, Erich Bessel-Hagen, Felix Hausdorff, and the joint Hausdorff–Otto Toeplitz seminar. He graduated summa cum laude in 1930 with a thesis about countable periodic abelian groups . In 1933–...
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Hel Braun
1914 - 1986 (72 years)
Helene Braun was a German mathematician who specialized in number theory and modular forms. Her autobiography, The Beginning of A Scientific Career, described her experience as a female scientist working in a male-dominated field at the time, in the Third Reich.
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Pietro Mengoli
1626 - 1686 (60 years)
Pietro Mengoli was an Italian mathematician and clergyman from Bologna, where he studied with Bonaventura Cavalieri at the University of Bologna, and succeeded him in 1647. He remained as professor there for the next 39 years of his life.
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Jakob Hermann
1678 - 1733 (55 years)
Jakob Hermann was a mathematician who worked on problems in classical mechanics. He is the author of Phoronomia, an early treatise on Mechanics in Latin, which has been translated by Ian Bruce in 2015-16. In 1729, he proclaimed that it was as easy to graph a locus on the polar coordinate system as it was to graph it on the Cartesian coordinate system.
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Horatio Scott Carslaw
1870 - 1954 (84 years)
Dr Horatio Scott Carslaw FRSE LLD was a Scottish-Australian mathematician. The book he wrote with his colleague John Conrad Jaeger, Conduction of Heat in Solids, remains a classic in the field. Life He was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, the son of the Rev Dr William Henderson Carslaw and his wife, Elizabeth Lockhead. He was educated at The Glasgow Academy. He went on to study at Cambridge University and then obtained a postgraduate doctorate at Glasgow University. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1901. He was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and worked as ...
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Hans Carl Friedrich von Mangoldt
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Hans Carl Friedrich von Mangoldt was a German mathematician who contributed to the solution of the prime number theorem. Biography Mangoldt completed his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1878 at the University of Berlin, where his supervisors were Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass. He contributed to the solution of the prime number theorem by providing rigorous proofs of two statements in Bernhard Riemann's seminal paper "On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude". Riemann himself had only given partial proofs of these statements. Mangoldt worked as professor at the RWTH Aachen and was s...
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Joan Miró
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
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Hermann Rothe
1882 - 1923 (41 years)
Hermann Rothe was an Austrian mathematician. Rothe studied at the University of Vienna and the University of Göttingen. He attained the Doctorate in Engineering in 1909 in Vienna. Then he was assistant at the Vienna University of Technology, where he attained the Habilitation in 1910. In 1913 Rothe married and began to teach mathematics at the Vienna University of Technology as Professor extraordinarius, and from 1920 as Professor ordinarius. In 1923 he died after a long disease.
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Jadav Chandra Chakravarti
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Jadav Chandra Chakravarti was a prominent Bengali mathematician of the Indian subcontinent. He was famous for his two books named Arithmetic and Algebra. Early life Chakravarti was born in 1855 at the village of Tatulia in Kamarkhanda, just few miles from Sirajganj city of the then British Raj to Krishna Chandra Chakravarti and Durga Sundari. He moved to Kolkata for higher education and obtained his M.A. degree in mathematics from Presidency College at the University of Calcutta in 1882. While he was a student of Presidency, he taught physics and chemistry at St. Paul's Cathedral Mission Col...
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Philippe de La Hire
1640 - 1718 (78 years)
Philippe de La Hire was a French painter, mathematician, astronomer, and architect. According to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle he was an "academy unto himself". He was born in Paris, the son of Laurent de La Hire, a distinguished artist and Marguerite Coquin. In 1660, he moved to Venice for four years to study painting. Upon his return to Paris, he became a disciple of Girard Desargues from whom he learned geometrical perspective and was received as a master painter on 4 August 1670. His paintings have sometimes been confused with those of his son, Jean Nicolas de La Hire, who was a docto...
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Agnes Meyer Driscoll
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Agnes Meyer Driscoll , known as "Miss Aggie" or "Madame X'", was an American cryptanalyst during both World War I and World War II and was known as "the first lady of naval cryptology." Early years Born Agnes May Meyer in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1889, Driscoll moved with her family to Westerville, Ohio, in 1895 where her father, Gustav Meyer, had taken a job teaching music at Otterbein College. In 1909, he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League, which had recently moved its headquarters to Westerville. The home was later donated to the Westerville Public Library and is now home to the...
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Pao Ming Pu
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Pao Ming Pu , was a mathematician born in Jintang County, Sichuan, China. He was a student of Charles Loewner and a pioneer of systolic geometry, having proved what is today called Pu's inequality for the real projective plane, following Loewner's proof of Loewner's torus inequality. He later worked in the area of fuzzy mathematics. He spent much of his career as professor and chairman of the department of mathematics at Sichuan University.
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Roberto Marcolongo
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Roberto Marcolongo was an Italian mathematician, known for his research in vector calculus and theoretical physics. He graduated in 1886, and later he was an assistant of Valentino Cerruti in Rome. In 1895 he became professor of rational mechanics at the University of Messina. In 1908 he moved to the University of Naples, where he remained until retirement in 1935.
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Elias Loomis
1811 - 1889 (78 years)
Elias Loomis was an American mathematician. He served as a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Western Reserve College , the University of the City of New York and Yale University. During his tenure at Western Reserve College in 1838, he established the Loomis Observatory, currently the second oldest observatory in the United States.
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Anders Wiman
1865 - 1959 (94 years)
Anders Wiman was a Swedish mathematician. He is known for his work in algebraic geometry and applications of group theory. Life Wiman was born to well-off land-owing farmer family in Hammarlöv, Sweden in 1865. He attended school in Lund, and graduated from secondary school in 1885. In the autumn of the same year, Wiman went to Lund University studying Mathematics, Botany and Latin. He attained Bachelor's degree in 1887 and his Licentiate in 1891. He continued his study in the same university under supervision of Carl Fabian Björling and was awarded doctorate in 1892, with thesis Klassifikatio...
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Henri Padé
1863 - 1953 (90 years)
Henri Eugène Padé was a French mathematician, who is now remembered mainly for his development of Padé approximation techniques for functions using rational functions. Education and career Padé studied at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He then spent a year at Leipzig University and University of Göttingen, where he studied under Felix Klein and Hermann Schwarz.
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Lorenzo Mascheroni
1750 - 1800 (50 years)
Lorenzo Mascheroni was an Italian mathematician. Biography He was born near Bergamo, Lombardy. At first mainly interested in the humanities , he eventually became professor of mathematics at Pavia.
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Heinrich Maschke
1853 - 1908 (55 years)
Heinrich Maschke was a German mathematician who proved Maschke's theorem. Maschke earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Göttingen in 1880. He came to the United States in 1891, and took up an Assistant Professor position at the University of Chicago in 1892.
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John Collins
1625 - 1683 (58 years)
John Collins FRS was an English mathematician. He is most known for his extensive correspondence with leading scientists and mathematicians such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and John Wallis. His correspondence provides details of many of the discoveries and developments made in his time, and shows his role in making some of these discoveries available to a wider audience. He was called "English Mersenne" for his extensive collecting and diffusing of scientific information.
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Joshua King
1798 - 1857 (59 years)
Joshua King was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1839 to 1849. He was also the President of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1832 until his death and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University from 1833–4.
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Eugenio Bertini
1846 - 1933 (87 years)
Eugenio Bertini was an Italian mathematician who introduced Bertini's theorem. He was born at Forlì and died at Pisa. Selected works
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Carl Størmer
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Fredrik Carl Mülertz Størmer was a Norwegian mathematician and astrophysicist. In mathematics, he is known for his work in number theory, including the calculation of and Størmer's theorem on consecutive smooth numbers. In physics, he is known for studying the movement of charged particles in the magnetosphere and the formation of aurorae, and for his book on these subjects, From the Depths of Space to the Heart of the Atom. He worked for many years as a professor of mathematics at the University of Oslo in Norway. A crater on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
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James G. Oldroyd
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
James Gardner Oldroyd was a British mathematician and noted rheologist. He formulated the Oldroyd-B model to describe the viscoelastic behaviour of non-Newtonian fluids. Life Oldroyd was born in 1921 and educated at Bradford Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge. On graduation, during the Second World War, he worked for the Ministry of Supply. After the war he joined the Research Laboratory of Courtaulds. In 1946 he married Marged Katryn Evans. In 1953 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Wales, Swansea until 1965 and head of the Applied Mathematics department from 1957.
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Aldo Andreotti
1924 - 1980 (56 years)
Aldo Andreotti was an Italian mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, on the theory of functions of several complex variables and on partial differential operators. Notably he proved the Andreotti–Frankel theorem, the Andreotti–Grauert theorem, the Andreotti–Vesentini theorem and introduced, jointly with François Norguet, the Andreotti–Norguet integral representation for functions of several complex variables.
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Eustachy Żyliński
1889 - 1954 (65 years)
Eustachy Karol Żyliński was a Polish mathematician and university professor known for his work on number theory, algebra, and logic. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Biography Early life and career Żyliński was born in to a landless noble family. In 1907 he graduated with a gold medal from the gymnasium in Kiev, and in 1911 with a first-degree diploma from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Imperial Saint Vladimir University in Kiev, where he then worked from 1912to 1914, while doing internships in Göttingen, Cambridge and Marburg. In 1914 he obtai...
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Gaston Tarry
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Gaston Tarry was a French mathematician. Born in Villefranche de Rouergue, Aveyron, he studied mathematics at high school before joining the civil service in Algeria. He pursued mathematics as an amateur.
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Herbert William Richmond
1863 - 1948 (85 years)
Herbert William Richmond was a mathematician who studied the Cremona–Richmond configuration. One of his most popular works is an exact construction of the regular heptadecagon in 1893 . Herbert was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1911. On the 22 April 1948, Herbert died in Cambridge, England.
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Philipp von Jolly
1809 - 1884 (75 years)
Johann Philipp Gustav von Jolly was a German physicist and mathematician. Born in Mannheim as the son of merchant Louis Jolly and Marie Eleonore Jolly, he studied science in Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin. After his studies, he was appointed professor of mathematics in Heidelberg in 1839 and physics in 1846. He moved to Munich in 1854, where he took the position once held by Georg Simon Ohm. In 1854, he was knighted .
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Giuseppe Battaglini
1826 - 1894 (68 years)
Giuseppe Battaglini was an Italian mathematician. He studied mathematics at the Scuola d'Applicazione di Ponti e Strade of Naples. In 1860 he was appointed professor of Geometria superiore at the University of Naples. Alfredo Capelli and Giovanni Frattini were his Laurea students.
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Boleslav Mlodzeevskii
1858 - 1923 (65 years)
Boleslav Kornelievich Mlodzeevskii, also Mlodzievskii was a Russian mathematician, a former president of the Moscow Mathematical Society. He was working in differential and algebraic geometry. Biography Mlodzeevskii was born in Moscow July 10, 1858. His father was a doctor, a professor at Moscow University; he died when Boleslav was seven. After finishing Moscow gymnasium with a gold medal, he studied at Moscow University, where he received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1886, in differential geometry. In his dissertation he studied the problem of deformation of surfaces; his advisor was Vasily Zinger.
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Philippa Fawcett
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Philippa Garrett Fawcett was an English mathematician and educationalist. She was the first woman to obtain the top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams. She taught at Newnham College, Cambridge, and at the normal school in Johannesburg, and she became an administrator for the London County Council.
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Jacques Touchard
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Jacques Touchard was a French mathematician. In 1953, he proved that an odd perfect number must be of the form 12k + 1 or 36k + 9. In combinatorics and probability theory, he introduced the Touchard polynomials. He is also known for his solution to the ménage problem of counting seating arrangements in which men and women alternate and are not seated next to their spouses.
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Semyon Aranovich Gershgorin
1901 - 1933 (32 years)
Semyon Aronovich Gershgorin was a Soviet mathematician. He began as a student at the Petrograd Technological Institute in 1923, became a Professor in 1930, and was given an appointment at the Leningrad Mechanical Engineering Institute in the same year. His contributions include the Gershgorin circle theorem.
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James Mills Peirce
1834 - 1906 (72 years)
James Mills Peirce was an American mathematician and educator. He taught at Harvard University for almost 50 years. Early life and family Peirce was born May 1, 1834, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son of Sarah Hunt Peirce and Benjamin Peirce , a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. The family was considered part of the Boston Brahmin elite class. The surname is pronounced to rhyme with "". Benjamin Peirce's father, also named Benjamin, was librarian at Harvard. James had four younger siblings; one brother was philosopher, logician and professor Charles Sanders Peirce .
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Galina Tyurina
1938 - 1970 (32 years)
Galina Nikolaevna Tyurina was a Soviet mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. Despite dying young, she was known for "a series of brilliant papers" on the classification of complex or algebraic structures on topological spaces, on K3 surfaces, on singular points of algebraic varieties, and on the rigidity of complex structures. She was the only woman among a group of "exceptionally brilliant" Soviet mathematicians who became active in the 1960s and "quickly became the leaders and the driving forces of Soviet mathematics".
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John Dougall
1867 - 1960 (93 years)
Dr John Dougall FRSE was "one of Scotland's leading mathematicians". Two formulas are named Dougall's formula after him: one for the sum of a 7F6 hypergeometric series, and another for the sum of a bilateral hypergeometric series.
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John Wesley Young
1879 - 1932 (53 years)
John Wesley Young was an American mathematician who, with Oswald Veblen, introduced the axioms of projective geometry, coauthored a 2-volume work on them, and proved the Veblen–Young theorem. He was a proponent of Euclidean geometry and held it to be substantially "more convenient to employ" than non-Euclidean geometry. His lectures on algebra and geometry were compiled in 1911 and released as Lectures on Fundamental Concepts of Algebra and Geometry.
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Henri Delannoy
1833 - 1915 (82 years)
Henri–Auguste Delannoy was a French army officer and amateur mathematician, after whom the Delannoy numbers are named. Delannoy grew up in Guéret, France, the son of a military accountant. After taking the baccalaureate in 1849, he studied mathematics in Bourges, near where his family lived, and after continuing his studies in Paris entered the École Polytechnique in 1853. He served as a lieutenant in the French artillery in the Second Italian War of Independence, in 1859, and became a captain in 1863. He continued to serve in the military, but shifted from the artillery to the supply corps; ...
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Werner Weber
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Werner Weber was a German mathematician. He was one of the Noether boys, the doctoral students of Emmy Noether. Considered scientifically gifted but a modest mathematician, he was also an extreme Nazi, who would later take part in driving Jewish mathematicians out of the University of Göttingen.
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