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,
#10151
Ferdinand Gonseth
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ferdinand Gonseth was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher. He was born on 22 September 1890 at Sonvilier, the son of Ferdinand Gonseth, a clockmaker, and his wife Marie Bourquin. He studied at La Chaux-de-Fonds, and read physics and mathematics at ETH Zurich, from 1910 to 1914.
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Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs was a French mathematician who worked on analysis and geometry. He was elected as Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union after the first world war, and used his position to exclude countries with whom France had been at war from the mathematical congresses.
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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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William Wilson Hunter
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
Sir William Wilson Hunter was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service. He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, and which was eventually published in nine volumes in 1881, then fourteen, and later as a twenty-six volume set after his death.
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Chauncey Wright
1830 - 1875 (45 years)
Chauncey Wright was an American philosopher and mathematician, who was an influential early defender of Darwinism and an important influence on American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
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Roland Sprague
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Roland Percival Sprague was a German mathematician, known for the Sprague–Grundy theorem and for being the first mathematician to find a perfect squared square. Biography With two mathematicians, Thomas Bond Sprague and Hermann Amandus Schwarz, as grandfathers, Roland Sprague was also a great-grandson of the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and a great-grandson of the musical instrument maker Nathan Mendelssohn .
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Willem Jacob van Stockum
1910 - 1944 (34 years)
Willem Jacob van Stockum was a Dutch mathematician who made an important contribution to the early development of general relativity. Biography Van Stockum was born in Hattem in the Netherlands. His father was a mechanically talented officer in the Dutch Navy. After the family relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a gold medal. He went on to earn an M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
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Sophie Bryant
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Sophie Willock Bryant was an Anglo-Irish mathematician, educator, feminist and activist. She was the first woman to receive a DSc in England; one of the first to serve on a Royal Commission and on the Senate of the University of London.
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Samuel Klingenstierna
1698 - 1765 (67 years)
Samuel Klingenstierna was a renowned Swedish mathematician and scientist. He started his career as a lawyer but soon moved to natural philosophy. As a student he gave lectures on the then novel mathematical analysis of Newton and Leibniz. Klingenstierna was a professor of geometry at Uppsala University from 1728. In 1750 he moved to physics but retired two years later to become an advisor to the Commander of Artillery. In 1756 he assumed the post of the tutor of the Crown Prince, the future king Gustav III.
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Alfred North Whitehead
#10192
Edward Burns Ross
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Edward Burns Ross FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician who served as a professor of mathematics at the Madras Christian College. Life Ross was born on 28 September 1881 in Maud, Aberdeenshire the son of Ann and William Ross, an Inland Revenue supervisor. Following his father's death in 1887, his school teacher mother moved the family to Edinburgh in 1888. He was then educated at George Watson's School and was school dux in 1898. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Edinburgh graduating with an MA in 1902. He then continued with postgraduate studies, using a Fergu...
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Rudolf Luneburg
1903 - 1949 (46 years)
Rudolf Karl Lüneburg , after his emigration at first Lueneburg, later Luneburg, sometimes misspelled Luneberg or Lunenberg His work included an analysis of the geometry of visual space as expected from physiology and the assumption that the angle of vergence provides a constant measure of distance. From these premises he concluded that near field visual space is hyperbolic.
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Alfred Cardew Dixon
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Sir Alfred Cardew Dixon, 1st Baronet Warford FRS was an English mathematician. Biography Dixon was born on 22 May 1865 in Northallerton, Yorkshire, England. He studied at the University of London and graduated with an MA. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1883 and graduated as Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1886. In 1888, Dixon was awarded the second Smith's Prize, and also appointed a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He took the degree of Sc.D. at Cambridge University in 1897. He was Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College, Galway, from 1893 to 1901. In 1901 h...
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Matthew O'Brien
1814 - 1855 (41 years)
Matthew O'Brien was an Irish mathematician. Life and work O'Brien was born at Ennis son of a medical doctor. In 1830 he was admitted in the Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1834 in the Caius College where he graduated in 1838 as third wrangler, as pupil of William Hopkins. During a brief period he was fellow of Caius College.
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Christian August Hausen
1693 - 1743 (50 years)
Christian August Hausen was a German mathematician who is known for his research on electricity. Biography Hausen studied mathematics at the University of Wittenberg and received his master's degree in 1712. He became an extraordinary professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig at the age of 21 and later became an ordinary professor.
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Irving Stringham
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Washington Irving Stringham was an American mathematician born in Yorkshire, New York. He was the first person to denote the natural logarithm is commonplace in digital calculators today. , made up of the initial letters of logarithm and of natural or Napierian."
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Wesley S. B. Woolhouse
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Wesley Stoker Barker Woolhouse was an English actuary with diverse interests in music theory, the design of steam locomotives, measurements, and many other fields, publishing books in all these fields.
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Pietro Cossali
1748 - 1815 (67 years)
Pietro Cossali was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer. From 1787 to 1805, he taught physics at the University of Parma. In 1805, Napoleon named Cossali a professor of higher calculus at the University of Padua.
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Georg Feigl
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Georg Feigl was a German mathematician. Life and work Georg Feigl started studying mathematics and physics at the University of Jena in 1909. In 1918, he obtained his doctorate under Paul Koebe. From 1928 he was editor of the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik . In 1935 he became a full professor at the University of Breslau. In 1937—1941, he was an editor of the journal Deutsche Mathematik.
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