The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10151
Marino Ghetaldi
1568 - 1626 (58 years)
Marino Ghetaldi was a Ragusan scientist. A mathematician and physicist who studied in Italy, England and Belgium, his best results are mainly in physics, especially optics, and mathematics. He was one of the few students of François Viète and friend of Giovanni Camillo Glorioso.
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Edmund Hess
1843 - 1903 (60 years)
Edmund Hess was a German mathematician who discovered several regular polytopes. See also Schläfli–Hess polychoronHess polytope
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Charles Graves
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Charles Graves was an Irish mathematician, academic, and clergyman. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin , and was president of the Royal Irish Academy . He served as dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, and later as Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. He was the brother of both the jurist and mathematician John Graves, and the writer and clergyman Robert Perceval Graves.
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Johann III Bernoulli
1744 - 1807 (63 years)
Johann III Bernoulli , grandson of Johann Bernoulli and son of Johann II Bernoulli, was a Swiss mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and geographer, known around the world as a child prodigy. Biography He studied at Basel and at Neuchâtel, and when thirteen years of age took the degree of doctor in philosophy. When he was fourteen, he got the degree of master of jurisprudence. At nineteen he was appointed astronomer royal of Berlin. A year later, he reorganized the astronomical observatory at the Berlin Academy. Some years after, he visited Germany, France and England, and subsequently Italy, Courland, Russia and Poland.
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Jean-Charles de Borda
1733 - 1799 (66 years)
Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda was a French mathematician, physicist, and Navy officer. Biography Borda was born in the city of Dax to Jean‐Antoine de Borda and Jeanne‐Marie Thérèse de Lacroix. In 1756, Borda wrote Mémoire sur le mouvement des projectiles, a product of his work as a military engineer. For that, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1764.
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Eugen Jahnke
1863 - 1921 (58 years)
Paul Rudolf Eugen Jahnke was a German mathematician. Jahnke studied mathematics and physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he graduated in 1886. In 1889 he received his doctorate from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg under Albert Wangerin on the integration of first-order ordinary differential equations. After that, he was a teacher at secondary schools in Berlin, where he simultaneously in 1901 taught at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and in 1905 he became a professor at the Mining Academy in Berlin, which merged in 1916 with the Berlin Institute of Technology.
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Ahmad ibn Yusuf
835 - 912 (77 years)
Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Tammam al-Siddiq Al-Baghdadi , known in the West by his Latinized name Hametus, was a Muslim Arab mathematician, like his father Yusuf ibn Ibrahim . Life Ahmad ibn Yusuf was born in Baghdad and moved with his father to Damascus in 839. He later moved to Cairo, but the exact date is unknown: since he was also known as al-Misri, which means the Egyptian, this probably happened at an early age. Eventually, he also died in Cairo. He probably grew up in a strongly intellectual environment: his father worked on Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine, produced astronomical tables and was a member of a group of scholars.
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Alfred Tauber
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Alfred Tauber was an Austrian Empire-born Austrian mathematician, known for his contribution to mathematical analysis and to the theory of functions of a complex variable: he is the eponym of an important class of theorems with applications ranging from mathematical and harmonic analysis to number theory. He was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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Saly Ruth Ramler
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Saly Ruth Ramler , also known as Saly Ruth Struik, was the first woman to receive a mathematics PhD from the German University in Prague, now known as Charles University. Her 1919 dissertation, on the axioms of affine geometry, was supervised by Gerhard Kowalewski and Georg Alexander Pick. She married the Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics Dirk Jan Struik in 1923. Between 1924 and 1926, the pair traveled Europe and met many prominent mathematicians, using Dirk Struik's Rockefeller fellowship. In 1926, they emigrated to the United States, and Dirk Struik accepted a position at MI...
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John Keill
1671 - 1721 (50 years)
John Keill FRS was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher, and cryptographer who was an important defender of Isaac Newton. Biography Keill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 December 1671. His father was Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. His brother, James Keill, became a noted physician.
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Iosif Gikhman
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Iosif Ilyich Gikhman was a Soviet mathematician. Gikhman is well known for a comprehensive treatise on the theory of stochastic processes, co-authored with Skorokhod. In the words of mathematician and probability theorist Daniel W. Stroock "Gikhman and Skorokhod have done an excellent job of presenting the theory in its present state of rich imperfection.”
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Francesco Tricomi
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Francesco Giacomo Tricomi was an Italian mathematician famous for his studies on mixed type partial differential equations. He was also the author of a book on integral equations. Biography Tricomi was born in Naples. He first enrolled in the University of Bologna, where he took chemistry courses. However, Tricomi realized that he preferred physics rather than chemistry; he moved to the University of Naples in 1915. He graduated at the University of Naples in 1918 and later was assistant to Francesco Severi, first in Padua and then in Rome. Later he was professor at Turin, called by Giuseppe...
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Samuel Vince
1749 - 1821 (72 years)
Samuel Vince FRS was an English clergyman, mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge. Life He was born in Fressingfield. The son of a plasterer, he had laboured with his father up to the age of 12, but came to the attention of a clergyman who saw to it that he entered higher education. Vince was admitted as a sizar to Caius College, Cambridge in 1771. In 1775 he was Senior Wrangler, and Winner of the Smith Prize at Cambridge. Migrating to Sidney Sussex College in 1777, he gained his M.A. in 1778 and was ordained a clergyman in 1779. He was among seven men of that college who...
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Georg Mohr
1640 - 1697 (57 years)
Jørgen Mohr was a Danish mathematician, known for being the first to prove the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem, which states that any geometric construction which can be done with compass and straightedge can also be done with compasses alone.
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Dudley Weldon Woodard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Dudley Weldon Woodard was a Galveston-born American mathematician and professor, and the second African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics; the first was Woodard's mentor Elbert Frank Cox, who earned a PhD from Cornell in 1925
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Konstantin Andreev
1848 - 1921 (73 years)
Konstantin Alekseevich Andreev was a Russian mathematician, best known for his work on geometry, especially projective geometry. He was one of the founders of the Kharkov Mathematical Society. This society is one of the early mathematics societies in Russia and was founded in 1879.
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Kinnosuke Ogura
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Kinnosuke Ogura was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. He graduated in 1905 from Tokyo College of Science , and was a lecturer there from 1910 to 1911. He was assistant at the Department of Mathematics of the new Tohoku Imperial University from 1911 to 1917, and received his Ph.D. in 1916 with a thesis on trajectories in the conservative field of force. He did research in France for two years, from 1919 to 1922. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1920 at Strasbourg.
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Hermann Schapira
1840 - 1898 (58 years)
Zvi Hermann Schapira , or Hermann Hirsch Schapira, was a Lithuanian rabbi, mathematician at the University of Heidelberg, and Zionist. He was the first to suggest founding a Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land in Palestine.
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James Cullen
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
Father James Cullen, S.J. was born at Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland. He was born at 89 West Street, Drogheda, to Michael Cullen, a baker, and Catherine McDonough. Initially, he was educated privately, then by the Christian Brothers,. He studied pure and applied mathematics at the Trinity College, Dublin, then at Mungret College, Limerick, before deciding to become a Jesuit. He studied in England in Mansera House, and St. Mary's, and was ordained as a priest on 31 July 1901.
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Gerhard Hessenberg
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Gerhard Hessenberg was a German mathematician who worked in projective geometry, differential geometry, and set theory. Career Hessenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1899 under the guidance of Hermann Schwarz and Lazarus Fuchs.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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August Derleth
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House . Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
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Mojżesz Presburger
1904 - 1943 (39 years)
Mojżesz Presburger, or Prezburger, was a Polish Jewish mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He was a student of Alfred Tarski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, and Kazimierz Kuratowski. He is known for, among other things, having invented Presburger arithmetic as a student in 1929 – a form of arithmetic in which one allows induction but removes multiplication, to obtain a decidable theory.
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Jules Molk
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Jules Molk was a French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Prix Binoux for 1913. He was appointed to the chair of applied mathematics at the University of Nancy upon the death of Émile Léonard Mathieu in 1890. From 1902 until his death in 1914, Molk was the leader and editor-in-chief of the publication of a French encyclopedia of pure and applied mathematical sciences based upon Klein's encyclopedia. It was a translation of the volumes in German and required the collaboration of many mathematicians and theoretical physicists from France, Germany, and several other European countries.
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Charles Julien Brianchon
1783 - 1864 (81 years)
Charles Julien Brianchon was a French mathematician and chemist. Life He entered into the École Polytechnique in 1804 at the age of eighteen, and studied under Monge, graduating first in his class in 1808, after which he took up a career as a lieutenant in Napoleon's artillery. Later, in 1818, Brianchon became a professor in the Artillery School of the Royal Guard at Vincennes.
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Erastus L. De Forest
1834 - 1888 (54 years)
Erastus Lyman De Forest was an American mathematician, who studied at Yale University. Life and work Son of a Yale graduate, De Forest graduated himself at Yale University in 1854 and was awarded PhB in 1856. De Forest later vanished for two years while on a trip to New York, and his family feared the worst, but he eventually turned up in Australia, teaching in Melbourne. In 1861, he returned to New Haven and devoted himself to the study of mathematics.
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Al-Nayrizi
865 - 922 (57 years)
Abū’l-‘Abbās al-Faḍl ibn Ḥātim al-Nairīzī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nayriz, now in Fars Province, Iran. Life Little is known of al-Nairīzī, though his nisba refers to the town of Neyriz. He mentioned al-Mu'tadid, the Abbasid caliph, in his works, and so scholars have assumed that al-Nairīzī flourished in Baghdad during this period. Al-Nairīzī wrote a book for al-Mu'tadid on atmospheric phenomena. He died in .
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Johann Faulhaber
1580 - 1635 (55 years)
Johann Faulhaber was a German mathematician, specifically, a Rechenmeister. Born in Ulm, Faulhaber was a trained weaver who later took the role of a surveyor of the city of Ulm. He collaborated with Johannes Kepler and Ludolph van Ceulen. In 1620, while in Ulm, Descartes probably corresponded with Faulhaber to discuss algebraic solutions of polynomial equations
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Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi
920 - 980 (60 years)
Abu'l Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim Al-Uqlidisi was a Muslim Arab mathematician, who was active in Damascus and Baghdad. He wrote the earliest surviving book on the positional use of the Arabic numerals, Kitab al-Fusul fi al-Hisab al-Hindi around 952. It is especially notable for its treatment of decimal fractions, and that it showed how to carry out calculations without deletions.
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Gustav Conrad Bauer
1820 - 1906 (86 years)
Gustav Conrad Bauer was a German mathematician, known for the Bauer-Muir transformation and Bauer's conic sections. He earned a footnote in the history of science as the doctoral advisor of Heinrich Burkhardt, who became one of the two referees of Albert Einstein's doctoral dissertation.
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Henry Schultz
1893 - 1938 (45 years)
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Life Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893, in a Polish Jewish family in Sharkawshchyna, in the Russian Empire . " Schultz's family - father, mother with their 2 sons - Henry and his brother Joseph moved to New York City in the United States. Henry Schultz completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiving a BA in 1916. For gradu...
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Jessie MacWilliams
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Florence Jessie Collinson MacWilliams was an English mathematician who contributed to the field of coding theory, and was one of the first women to publish in the field. MacWilliams' thesis "Combinatorial Problems of Elementary Group Theory" contains one of the most important combinatorial results in coding theory, and is now known as the MacWilliams Identity.
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Giuseppe Bruno
1828 - 1893 (65 years)
Giuseppe Bruno was an Italian mathematician, professor of geometry in the university of Turin. Life and work Bruno has born in a very poor family, but he won a stipend to study in the University of Turin, where he graduated in philosophy in 1846. The following years he was professor at secondary level, while he studied to graduate in engineering and to doctorate in mathematics .
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Yvon Villarceau
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Antoine-Joseph Yvon Villarceau was a French astronomer, mathematician, and engineer. He constructed an equatorial meridian-instrument and an isochronometric regulator for the Paris Observatory. He wrote Mécanique Céleste. Expose des Méthodes de Wronski et Composantes des Forces Perturbatrices suivant les Axes Mobiles and Sur l'établissement des arches de pont, envisagé au point de vue de la plus grande stabilité .
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Major Greenwood
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Major Greenwood FRS was an English epidemiologist and statistician. Biography Major Greenwood junior was born in Shoreditch in London's East End, the only child of Major Greenwood, a physician in general practice there and his wife Annie, daughter of Peter Lodwick Burchell, F.R.C.S., M.B., L.S.A. The Greenwood family is recorded back to the twelfth century in the person of Wyomarus Greenwode, of Greenwode Leghe, near Heptonstall, Yorkshire, caterer to the Empress Maude in 1154. Greenwood was educated on the classical side at Merchant Taylors' School and went on to study medicine at University College London and the London Hospital.
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Federico Amodeo
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
Federico Amodeo was an Italian mathematician, specializing in projective geometry, and a historian of mathematics. He received in 1883 his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Naples, where he became an instructor and from 1885 to 1923 taught projective geometry. He also taught as a professor in Naples at the Istituto Tecnico "Gianbattista Della Porta" from 1890 to 1923, when he retired. In 1890–1891 he visited the geometers at the University of Turin.
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Agnes Sime Baxter
1870 - 1917 (47 years)
Agnes Sime Baxter was a Canadian-born mathematician. She studied at Dalhousie University, receiving her BA in 1891, and her MA in 1892. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1895; her dissertation was "On Abelian integrals", a resume of Neumann's Abelian integral with comments and applications."
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Ziauddin Ahmad
1878 - 1947 (69 years)
Sir Ziauddin Ahmad was an Indian mathematician, parliamentarian, logician, natural philosopher, politician, political theorist, educationist and a scholar. He was a member of the Aligarh Movement and was a professor, principal of MAO College, first pro vice-chancellor, vice chancellor and rector of Aligarh Muslim University, India.
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Yoshida Mitsuyoshi
1598 - 1672 (74 years)
Yoshida Mitsuyoshi, also known as Yoshida Kōyū, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. His popular and widely disseminated published work made him the most well known writer about mathematics in his lifetime.
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Léopold Leau
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his ties to international auxiliary languages. The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded on 7 January 1901 on Leau's initiative. He co-wrote with Prof. Louis Couturat the monumental Histoire de la Langue Universelle and its supplement Les Nouvelles Langues Internationales .
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Victor Vâlcovici
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Victor Vâlcovici was a Romanian mechanician and mathematician. Biography Born into a modest family in Galați, he graduated first in his class in 1904 from Nicolae Bălcescu High School in Brăila. Entering the University of Bucharest on a scholarship, he attended its faculty of sciences, where he had as teachers Spiru Haret and Gheorghe Țițeica. After graduating in 1907 with a degree in mathematics, he taught high school for two years before leaving for University of Göttingen on another scholarship to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. He wrote his thesis under the direction of Ludwig Prandtl...
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Henry Forder
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Henry George Forder was a New Zealand mathematician. Academic career Born in Shotesham All Saints, near Norwich, he won a scholarships first to a Grammar school and then to University of Cambridge. After teaching mathematics at a number of schools, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics at Auckland University College in New Zealand in 1933. He was very critical of the state of the New Zealand curriculum and set about writing a series of well received textbooks.
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Rudolf Fueter
1880 - 1950 (70 years)
Karl Rudolf Fueter was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work on number theory. Biography After a year of graduate study of mathematics in Basel, Fueter began study in 1899 at the University of Göttingen and completed his Promotion in 1903 with dissertation Der Klassenkörper der quadratischen Körper und die komplexe Multiplikation under David Hilbert. After his Promotion, Fueter studied for 1 year in Paris, 3 months in Vienna, and 6 months in London. In 1905 he completed his Habilitierung at the University of Marburg. Fueter worked as a docent in 1907/1908 at Marburg and in the winter of 1907/1908 at the Bergakademie Clausthal.
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Edward Mann Langley
1851 - 1933 (82 years)
Edward Mann Langley was a British mathematician, author of mathematical textbooks and founder of the Mathematical Gazette. He created the mathematical problem known as Langley’s Adventitious Angles.
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Axel Sophus Guldberg
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
Axel Sophus Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician. Biography Born in Christiania , Guldberg was the second oldest out of 11 siblings. He and his siblings were initially homeschooled, but he and his older brother, Cato Maximilian Guldberg, later began going to school in Fredrikstad, where they lived together with relatives. He completed his examen artium in 1856, cand.real. in 1863 and dr.philos. in 1867.
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William Garnett
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Dr. William Garnett was a British professor and educational adviser, specialising in physics and mechanics and taking a special interest in electric street lighting. Early years Garnett was born in Portsea, Portsmouth, England in 1850, the son of William Garnett. In January 1863 he entered the City of London School, where he was a pupil of Thomas Hall. In the May 1866 examination, he obtained the first Royal Exhibition, tenable at the Royal School of Mines and College of Chemistry, and during the winter session, he studied under Dr. Edward Frankland and Professor John Tyndall, but in the following year, resigned the Exhibition and returned to the City of London School.
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Ernest Shackleton
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
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John Howard Van Amringe
1836 - 1915 (79 years)
John Howard Van Amringe was an American educator and mathematician. Life and career Van Amringe was born in Philadelphia on April 3, 1835. He was a son of William Frederick Van Amringe and Susan Budd Van Amringe . Among his siblings was brother, Thomas Budd Van Amringe.
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Théophile Pépin
1826 - 1905 (79 years)
Jean François Théophile Pépin was a French mathematician. Born in Cluses, Haute-Savoie, he became a Jesuit in 1846, and from 1850 to 1856 and from 1862 to 1871 he was Professor of Mathematics at various Jesuit colleges. He was appointed Professor of Canon Law in 1873, moving to Rome in 1880. He died in Lyon at the age of 77.
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Florence Eliza Allen
1876 - 1960 (84 years)
Florence Eliza Allen was an American mathematician and women's suffrage activist. In 1907 she became the second woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the fourth Ph.D. overall from that department.
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