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,
#10101
Stefan Mazurkiewicz
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning . His students included Karol Borsuk, Bronisław Knaster, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Stanisław Saks, and Antoni Zygmund. For a time Mazurkiewicz was a professor at the University of Paris; however, he spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Warsaw.
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Heinrich Wieleitner
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.
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Temple Rice Hollcroft
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Temple Rice Hollcroft, Sr. was an American mathematician and local historian. Hollcroft received B.S. in 1912 and A.B. in 1914 from Hanover College and then A.M. in 1915 from the University of Kentucky. He received in 1917 his Ph.D. from Cornell University under Virgil Snyder and during WW I served in France as a second lieutenant in the Field Artillery. Hollcroft was a mathematics professor at Wells College from 1918 to 1954, when he retired as professor emeritus. He served for 14 years as associate secretary of the American Mathematical Society. In 1932 in Zurich he was an Invited Speaker o...
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Taira Honda
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working on number theory who proved the Honda–Tate theorem classifying abelian varieties over finite fields.
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Hitoshi Kumano-Go
1935 - 1982 (47 years)
Hitoshi Kumano-Go was a Japanese mathematician who specialized in partial differential equations. He is especially recognized for his work on pseudo-differential operators and Fourier integral operators.
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Henri Lebesgue
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Henri Léon Lebesgue was a French mathematician known for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th-century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Intégrale, longueur, aire at the University of Nancy during 1902.
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Alexander Weinstein
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Alexander Weinstein was a mathematician who worked on boundary value problems in fluid dynamics. Early life, family and personal life Weinstein was born to Judel Jejb Weinstein and Praskovya Levkovich, his family were Jewish, and his father was a doctor. His family moved to Astrakhan, but later decided to emigrate to Germany, there Weinstein completed his schooling, having studied first in Würzburg, then at the University of Göttingen during 1913/14.
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Alfred Brauer
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Alfred Theodor Brauer was a German-American mathematician who did work in number theory. He was born in Charlottenburg, and studied at the University of Berlin. As he served Germany in World War I, even being injured in the war, he was able to keep his position longer than many other Jewish academics who had been forced out after Hitler's rise to power. In 1935 he lost his position and in 1938 he tried to leave Germany, but was not able to until the following year. He initially worked in the Northeast, but in 1942 he settled into a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A good deal of his works, and the Alfred T.
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Alfred Errera
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Alfred Errera was a Belgian mathematician. Errera studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he received his Ph.D. in 1921 with dissertation Du coloriage des cartes et de quelques questions d'analysis situs. In his dissertation he introduced what is now called the Errera graph, which is a counterexample to the validity of the alleged proof of the four color theorem by Alfred Kempe. From 1928 to 1956 he was a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
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Wanda Szmielew
1918 - 1976 (58 years)
Wanda Szmielew née Montlak was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups. Life Wanda Montlak was born on 5 April 1918 in Warsaw. She completed high school in 1935 and married, taking the name Szmielew. In the same year she entered the University of Warsaw, where she studied logic under Adolf Lindenbaum, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Alfred Tarski. Her research at this time included work on the axiom of choice, but it was interrupted by the 1939 Invasion of Poland.
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Arthur Milgram
1912 - 1961 (49 years)
Arthur Norton Milgram was an American mathematician. He made contributions in functional analysis, combinatorics, differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations, and Galois theory. Perhaps one of his more famous contributions is the Lax–Milgram theorem—a theorem in functional analysis that is particularly applicable in the study of partial differential equations. In the third chapter of Emil Artin's book Galois Theory, Milgram also discussed some applications of Galois theory. Milgram also contributed to graph theory, by co-authoring the article Verallgemeinerung eines graphe...
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Elisha Netanyahu
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Elisha Netanyahu was an Israeli mathematician specializing in complex analysis. Over the course of his work at the Technion he was the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and established the separate Department of Mathematics. Historian Benzion Netanyahu was his brother, while current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is his nephew.
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Leonidas Alaoglu
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Leonidas Alaoglu was a mathematician, known for his result, called Alaoglu's theorem on the weak-star compactness of the closed unit ball in the dual of a normed space, also known as the Banach–Alaoglu theorem.
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Horace Yomishi Mochizuki
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Horace Yomishi Mochizuki was an American mathematician known for his contributions to group theory. Mochizuki received a special award from the National Science Foundation for his work on the Burnside problem.
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Matila Ghyka
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Prince Matila Costiescu Ghyka , was a Romanian naval officer, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher, academic and diplomat. He did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora. His first name is sometimes written as Matyla.
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R. E. Siday
1912 - 1956 (44 years)
Raymond Eldred Siday was an English mathematician specialising in quantum mechanics. He obtained his BSc in Special Physics and later worked at the University of Edinburgh. He began collaborating with Werner Ehrenberg in 1933.
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Shikao Ikehara
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Shikao Ikehara was a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Norbert Wiener at MIT . Following Wiener in 1928, in 1931 Ikehara used Wiener's Tauberian theory to derive another proof of the prime number theorem, demonstrated solely via the non-vanishing of the zeta function on the line Re s = 1. An improved version of Ikehara's 1931 result by Wiener in 1932 is now known as the Wiener–Ikehara theorem.
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Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
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John Jay Gergen
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
John Jay Gergen was an American mathematician who introduced the Lebesgue–Gergen criterion for convergence of a Fourier series. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1925 and a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1928. His doctoral advisors were Griffith C. Evans and Szolem Mandelbrojt. From 1928 to 1930, as a National Research fellow, Gergen visited Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Clermont. From 1930 to 1933 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University, and from 1933 to 1936 he was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester.
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Johannes Tropfke
1866 - 1939 (73 years)
Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.
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Oliver Edmunds Glenn
1878 - Present (148 years)
Oliver Edmunds Glenn was a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who worked on finite groups and invariant theory. He received the degrees of A.B. in 1902 and A.M. in 1903 from Indiana University and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905. He married Alice Thomas Kinnard on Aug. 18, 1903, and they had two sons, William James and Robert Culbertson. Glenn began his career instructing mathematics at Indiana University in 1902 and subsequently taught at Drury College . He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 where he became a full professor ...
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Pia Nalli
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Pia Maria Nalli was an Italian mathematician known for her work on the summability of Fourier series, on Morera's theorem for analytic functions of several variables and for finding the solution to the Fredholm integral equation of the third kind for the first time. Her research interests ranged from algebraic geometry to functional analysis and tensor analysis; she was a speaker at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians.
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Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky was a Russian-Soviet-Uzbek mathematician, founder of the Tashkent school of mathematics. Education and career In 1906 Romanovsky received, under the supervision of A. A. Markov, his doctoral degree from St. Petersburg University. During 1900–1908 he was a student and then a docent at St. Petersburg University. In 1911–1915 he was a senior lecturer and then professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw, in 1915–1918 a professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw in Rostov-on-Don, and from 1918 a professor of probability and mathematical statistics at what is now called the National University of Uzbekistan .
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Iacopo Barsotti
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Iacopo Barsotti, or Jacopo Barsotti was an Italian mathematician who introduced Barsotti–Tate groups. In 1942 he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and became assistant professor Francesco Severi at the University of Rome in 1946. In 1948 he emigrated to the US, first as a guest professor at Princeton University, then as a full professor at the University of Pittsburgh and at Brown University. In 1961 he was recalled to Pisa as a teacher first of Geometry, then of Algebra. From 1968 to his death he taught Geometry at the University of Padua. Iacopo was a visiting scholar at ...
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Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina
1899 - 1999 (100 years)
Pelageya Yakovlevna Polubarinova-Kochina was a Soviet and Russian applied mathematician, known for her work on fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, particularly, the application of Fuchsian equations, as well in the history of mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946 and full member in 1958.
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Ernst Jacobsthal
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Ernst Erich Jacobsthal was a German mathematician, and brother to the archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal. In 1906, he earned his PhD at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Georg Frobenius, Hermann Schwarz and Issai Schur; his dissertation, Anwendung einer Formel aus der Theorie der quadratischen Reste , provided a proof that prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 are the sum of two square numbers. In 1934, he was fired from his professorship at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, because of his Jewish origins. In 1939 he fled to Norway and became after the war a professor at the Norwegian ...
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Evgenii Nikishin
1945 - 1986 (41 years)
Evgenii Mikhailovich Nikishin was a Russian mathematician, who specialized in harmonic analysis. Biography Nikishin, at age of 24, earned his candidate doctorate at Moscow State University, becoming the youngest Candidate Doctorate in a history of MSU and in 1971 his habilitation at the Steklov Institute under Pyotr Ulyanov . In 1977 he became a professor at Moscow State University, where he remained until his death after a long battle with cancer.
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Karel deLeeuw
1930 - 1978 (48 years)
Karel deLeeuw, or de Leeuw , was a mathematics professor at Stanford University, specializing in harmonic analysis and functional analysis. Life and career Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1950. He stayed at Chicago to earn an M.S. degree in mathematics in 1951, then went to Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1954. His thesis, titled "The relative cohomology structure of formations", was written under the direction of Emil Artin.
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Michael Sadowsky
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Michael A. Sadowsky was a researcher in solid mechanics, particularly the mathematical theory of elasticity and materials science. Born in the Russian Empire, he earned his doctorate in 1927 under the applied mathematician Georg Hamel at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled Spatially periodic solutions in the theory of elasticity . He made contributions in the use of potential functions in elasticity and force transfer mechanisms in composites. Many of his early papers were written in German.
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Henry Jack
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Henry Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician at University College Dundee. The Jack polynomials are named after him. His research dealt with the development of analytic methods to evaluate certain integrals over matrix spaces. His most famous paper relates his integrals to classes of symmetric polynomials important in the theory of the representation of the symmetric group. He discovered a new, natural basis for the symmetric polynomials.
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Robert Remak
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Robert Erich Remak was a German mathematician. He is chiefly remembered for his work in group theory . His other interests included algebraic number theory, mathematical economics and geometry of numbers. Robert Remak was the son of the neurologist Ernst Julius Remak and the grandson of the embryologist Robert Remak. He was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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Anil Kumar Gain
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Anil Kumar Gain FRSS FCPS was an Indian mathematician and statistician best known for his works on the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient in the field of applied statistics, with his colleague Ronald Fisher. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Henry Ellis Daniels, who was the then President of the Royal Statistical Society. He was honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
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Marion Cameron Gray
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Marion Gray was a Scottish mathematician who discovered a graph with 54 vertices and 81 edges while working at American Telephone & Telegraph. The graph is commonly known as the Gray graph. Early life and education Marion Gray was born in Ayr, Scotland on 26 March 1902 to Marion and James Gray. She attended Ayr Grammar School and Ayr Academy . In 1919 she entered the University of Edinburgh where she graduated in 1922 with a first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. She continued on at the University for a further two years as a post doctoral student in mathematics where she was supervised by E.T.
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Jerome Cornfield
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Jerome Cornfield was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role in the early development of input-output analysis and linear programming. Cornfield played a crucial role in establishing the causal link between smoking and incidence of lung cancer. He introduced the Rare disease assumption and the "Cornfield condition" that allows one to assess whether an unmeasured confounder can explain away the observed relative risk due to ...
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Bernard Vauquois
1929 - 1985 (56 years)
Bernard Vauquois was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions.
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Józef Schreier
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Józef Schreier was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, group theory and combinatorics. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics and a victim of the Holocaust.
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Herman Müntz
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Herman Müntz was a German mathematician, now remembered for the Müntz approximation theorem. Biography He was born in Łódź in a secular Jewish family, who had adopted a German spelling of the surname Minc. He was educated there and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, graduating in 1906. He wrote a doctoral dissertation there on partial differential equations and the Plateau problem, in 1910, supervised by H. A. Schwarz.
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David Francis Barrow
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
David Francis Barrow was an American mathematician who introduced Barrow's inequality in 1937. Barrow's father, David Crenshaw Barrow Jr., was also a mathematician, and served as chancellor of the University of Georgia from 1906 to 1925. His son, David F. Barrow, did his undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia and then studied at Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1913. After a year abroad, he taught for two years at the University of Texas, and then at the Sheffield Scientific School. After a brief stint in the U.S. armed services, he joined the faculty of his father's university in 1920.
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István Fáry
1922 - 1984 (62 years)
István Fáry was a Hungarian-born mathematician known for his work in geometry and algebraic topology. He proved Fáry's theorem that every planar graph has a straight-line embedding in 1948, and the Fáry–Milnor theorem lower-bounding the curvature of a nontrivial knot in 1949.
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Alfred Brousseau
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Brother Alfred Brousseau, F.S.C. , was an educator, photographer and mathematician and was known mostly as a founder of the Fibonacci Association and as an educator. Biography Brother Alfred Brousseau was born in North Beach, San Francisco, as one of six children. On August 14, 1920, Brousseau entered the juniorate of the De La Salle Christian Brothers , a religious institute of teachers in the Roman Catholic Church. He was accepted into the Christian Brothers novitiate on 31 July 1923 and advanced to the scholasticate on the campus of St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, in 1924.
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Guido Hoheisel
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Guido Karl Heinrich Hoheisel was a German mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Cologne. Academic life He did his PhD in 1920 from the University of Berlin under the supervision of Erhard Schmidt. During World War II Hoheisel was required to teach classes simultaneously at three universities, in Cologne, Bonn, and Münster. His doctoral students include Arnold Schönhage.
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Frithiof Nevanlinna
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Frithiof Edvard Henrik Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician and professor who worked on classical and complex analysis. He was born in Joensuu, and was the older brother of Rolf Nevanlinna. Publications
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Helene Stähelin
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Helene Stähelin was a Swiss mathematician, teacher, and peace activist. Between 1948 and 1967, she was president of the Swiss section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and its representative in the Swiss Peace Council.
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William Anthony Granville
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
William Anthony Granville was an American mathematician, and served as president of Gettysburg College from 1910 until 1923. Overview Granville began his teaching career at Bethany College, where he was an instructor of mathematics and served as the college treasurer. In 1893 he was awarded a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University. For fifteen years, beginning in 1895, he was professor of mathematics at Yale, and was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from that institution in 1897 under James Pierpont. His dissertation was titled, "Referat on the Origin and Development of the Addition-Theorem in Elliptic Functions".
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Lorado Taft
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Lorado Zadok Taft was an American sculptor, writer and educator. Part of the American Renaissance movement, his monumental pieces include, Fountain of Time, Spirit of the Great Lakes, and The Eternal Indian. His 1903 book, The History of American Sculpture, was the first survey of the subject and stood for decades as the standard reference. He has been credited with helping to advance the status of women as sculptors.
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Lillian Rosanoff Lieber
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Lillian Rosanoff Lieber was a Russian-American mathematician and popular author. She often teamed up with her illustrator husband, Hugh Gray Lieber, to produce works. Life and career Early life and education Lieber was one of four children of Abraham H. and Clara Rosanoff. Her brothers were Denver publisher Joseph Rosenberg, psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff, and chemist Martin André Rosanoff. Aaron and Martin changed their names to sound more Russian, less Jewish. Lieber moved to the US with her family in 1891. She received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1908, her M.A. from Columbia University in 1911, and her Ph.D.
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Ida Rhodes
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ida Rhodes was an American mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States. Childhood Hadassah Itzkowitz was born in a Jewish village Kamianets-Podilskyi between Nemyriv and Tulchyn in Ukraine on May 15, 1900.
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Alessandro Padoa
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Alessandro Padoa was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano. He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory, a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms.
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Tadao Tannaka
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Tadao Tannaka was a Japanese mathematician who worked in algebraic number theory. Biography Tannaka was born in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture on December 27, 1908. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Tohoku Imperial University in 1932, he was appointed a lecturer in the university in 1934 and received a Doctor of Science degree from the university in 1941. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1942 and full professor in 1945. Tannaka was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study from September 1955 to April 1957. Tannaka retired from Tohoku University in 1972, after ...
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