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,
#10201
James Jeans
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Sir James Hopwood Jeans was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician. Early life Born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the son of William Tulloch Jeans, a parliamentary correspondent and author. Jeans was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell and Trinity College, Cambridge. As a gifted student, Jeans was counselled to take an aggressive approach to the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos competition:
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Mathias Lerch
1860 - 1922 (62 years)
Mathias Lerch or Matyáš Lerch was a Czech mathematician who published about 250 papers, largely on mathematical analysis and number theory. He studied in Prague and Berlin; subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the Brno University of Technology in Brno, and finally at then newly founded Masaryk University in Brno where he became its first mathematics professor.
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Marquis de Condorcet
1743 - 1794 (51 years)
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet , known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested.
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James Gregory
1638 - 1675 (37 years)
James Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelt as Gregorie, the original Scottish spelling. He described an early practical design for the reflecting telescope – the Gregorian telescope – and made advances in trigonometry, discovering infinite series representations for several trigonometric functions.
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Karl Weissenberg
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Karl Weissenberg was an Austrian physicist, notable for his contributions to rheology and crystallography. Biography The Weissenberg effect was named after him, as was the Weissenberg number. He invented a Goniometer to study X-ray diffraction of crystals for which he received the Duddell Medal of the Institute of Physics in 1946, The European Society of Rheology offers a Weissenberg award in his honour. and the Weissenberg rheogoniometer, a type of rheometer.
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Nikolai Bugaev
1837 - 1903 (66 years)
Nikolai Vasilievich Bugaev was a prominent Russian mathematician, the father of Andrei Bely. Early life and education Bugaev was born in Georgia, Russian Empire into a somewhat unstable family , and at the age of ten young Nikolai was sent to Moscow to find his own means of obtaining an education. He graduated in 1859 from Moscow University, where he majored in mathematics and physics.
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William Burnside
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
This English mathematician is sometimes confused with the Irish mathematician William S. Burnside . William Burnside was an English mathematician. He is known mostly as an early researcher in the theory of finite groups.
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Robert Recorde
1512 - 1558 (46 years)
Robert Recorde was a Welsh physician and mathematician. He invented the equals sign and also introduced the pre-existing plus and minus signs to English speakers in 1557. Biography Born around 1510, Robert Recorde was the second and last son of Thomas and Rose Recorde of Tenby, Pembrokeshire, in Wales.
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Oscar Chisini
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Oscar Chisini was an Italian mathematician. He introduced the Chisini mean in 1929. Biography Chisini was born in Bergamo. In 1929, he founded the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Milan, along with Gian Antonio Maggi and Giulio Vivanti. He then held the position of chairman of the Institute from the early 1930s until 1959.
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Trygve Nagell
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
Trygve Nagell or Trygve Nagel was a Norwegian mathematician, known for his works on Diophantine equations in number theory. Education and career He was born Nagel and adopted the spelling Nagell later in life. He received his doctorate at the University of Oslo in 1926, where his advisor was Axel Thue. He continued to lecture at the University until 1931. He was a professor at the University of Uppsala from 1931 to 1962. His doctoral students include Harald Bergström.
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Ion Barbu
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Ion Barbu was a Romanian mathematician and poet. His name is associated with the Mathematics Subject Classification number 51C05, which is a major posthumous recognition reserved only to pioneers of investigations in an area of mathematical inquiry.
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Gyula Kőnig
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Gyula Kőnig was a mathematician from Hungary. His mathematical publications in German appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig was a graph theorist. Biography Gyula Kőnig was active literarily and mathematically. He studied medicine in Vienna and, from 1868 on, in Heidelberg. After having worked, instructed by Hermann von Helmholtz, on electrical stimulation of nerves, he switched to mathematics.
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Germinal Pierre Dandelin
1794 - 1847 (53 years)
Germinal Pierre Dandelin was a French mathematician, soldier, and professor of engineering. Life He was born near Paris to a French father and Belgian mother, studying first at Ghent then returning to Paris to study at the École Polytechnique. He was wounded fighting under Napoleon. He worked for the Ministry of the Interior under Lazare Carnot. Later he became a citizen of the Netherlands, a professor of mining engineering in Belgium, and then a member of the Belgian army.
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Richard Price
1721 - 1791 (70 years)
Richard Price was a Welsh moral philosopher, Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was also a political reformer, pamphleteer, active in radical, republican, and liberal causes such as the French and American Revolutions. He was well-connected and fostered communication between many people, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, Mirabeau and the Marquis de Condorcet. According to the historian John Davies, Price was "the greatest Welsh thinker of all time".
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Ladislaus Bortkiewicz
1868 - 1931 (63 years)
Ladislaus Josephovich Bortkiewicz was a Russian economist and statistician of Polish ancestry. He wrote a book showing how the Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, can be useful in applied statistics, and he made contributions to mathematical economics. He lived most of his professional life in Germany, where he taught at Strassburg University and Berlin University .
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Jiang Lifu
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Jiang Lifu was a Chinese mathematician and educator widely regarded as the Father of modern Chinese mathematics. His main research areas are the theory of syringine geometry and matrix. Life Born in 1890 during the late Qing Dynasty, Jiang Lifu was a native of Pingyang County in Wenzhou.
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Chiungtze C. Tsen
1898 - 1940 (42 years)
Chiungtze C. Tsen , given name Chiung , was a Chinese mathematician born in Nanchang, Jiangxi. He is known for his work in algebra. He was one of Emmy Noether's students at the University of Göttingen.
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André-Louis Cholesky
1875 - 1918 (43 years)
André-Louis Cholesky was a French military officer, geodesist, and mathematician. Cholesky was born in Montguyon, France. His paternal family was descendant from the Cholewski family who emigrated from Poland during the Great Emigration. He attended the Lycée in Bordeaux and entered the École Polytechnique, where Camille Jordan and Henri Becquerel taught. He worked in geodesy and cartography, and was involved in the surveying of Crete and North Africa before World War I. He is primarily remembered for the development of a form of matrix decomposition known as the Cholesky decomposition which he used in his surveying work.
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György Hajós
1912 - 1972 (60 years)
György Hajós was a Hungarian mathematician who worked in group theory, graph theory, and geometry. Biography Hajós was born February 21, 1912, in Budapest; his great-grandfather, Adam Clark, was the famous Scottish engineer who built the Chain Bridge in Budapest. He earned a teaching degree from the University of Budapest in 1935. He then took a position at the Technical University of Budapest, where he stayed from 1935 to 1949. While at the Technical University of Budapest, he earned a doctorate in 1938. He became a professor at the Eötvös Loránd University in 1949 and remained there until his death in 1972.
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Georges Braque
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
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W. W. Rouse Ball
1850 - 1925 (75 years)
Walter William Rouse Ball , known as W. W. Rouse Ball, was a British mathematician, lawyer, and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1878 to 1905. He was also a keen amateur magician, and the founding president of the Cambridge Pentacle Club in 1919, one of the world's oldest magic societies.
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Peter Tait
1831 - 1901 (70 years)
Peter Guthrie Tait was a Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics. He is best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Lord Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory.
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Vladimir Steklov
1863 - 1926 (63 years)
Vladimir Andreevich Steklov was a Prominent Russian and Soviet mathematician, mechanician and physicist. Biography Steklov was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. In 1887, he graduated from the Kharkov University, where he was a student of Aleksandr Lyapunov. In 1889–1906, he worked at the Department of Mechanics of this university. He became a full professor in 1896. During 1893–1905, he also taught theoretical mechanics in the Kharkov Polytechnical Institute . In 1906, he started working at Petersburg University. In 1921, he petitioned for the creation of the Institute of Physics and Mathematics.
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Paolo Ruffini
1765 - 1822 (57 years)
Paolo Ruffini was an Italian mathematician and philosopher. Education and career By 1788 he had earned university degrees in philosophy, medicine/surgery and mathematics. His works include developments in algebra:an incomplete proof that quintic equations cannot be solved by radicals . Abel would complete the proof in 1824.Ruffini's rule, which is a quick method for polynomial division.contributions to group theory.He also wrote on probability and the quadrature of the circle.
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Giuseppe Vitali
1875 - 1932 (57 years)
Giuseppe Vitali was an Italian mathematician who worked in several branches of mathematical analysis. He gives his name to several entities in mathematics, most notably the Vitali set with which he was the first to give an example of a non-measurable subset of real numbers.
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Eutocius of Ascalon
480 - 600 (120 years)
Eutocius of Ascalon was a Palestinian-born Greek mathematician who wrote commentaries on several Archimedean treatises and on the Apollonian Conics. Life and work Little is known about the life of Eutocius. He was born in Ascalon, then in Palestina Prima. He lived during the reign of Justinian. Eutocius probably became the head of the Alexandrian school following Ammonius, and he was succeeded in this position by Olympiodorus, possibly as early as 525. He traveled to the greatest scientific centers of his time to conduct research on Archimedes' manuscripts.
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Shigeo Sasaki
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Shigeo Sasaki was a Japanese mathematician working on differential geometry who introduced Sasaki manifolds. He retired from Tohoku University's Mathematical Institute in April 1976. Publications
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James Stirling
1692 - 1770 (78 years)
James Stirling was a Scottish mathematician. He was nicknamed "The Venetian". The Stirling numbers, Stirling permutations, and Stirling's approximation are named after him. He also proved the correctness of Isaac Newton's classification of cubic plane curves.
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Pierre Wantzel
1814 - 1848 (34 years)
Pierre Laurent Wantzel was a French mathematician who proved that several ancient geometric problems were impossible to solve using only compass and straightedge. In a paper from 1837, Wantzel proved that the problems ofdoubling the cube, andtrisecting the angleare impossible to solve if one uses only compass and straightedge. In the same paper he also solved the problem of determining which regular polygons are constructible:a regular polygon is constructible if and only if the number of its sides is the product of a power of two and any number of distinct Fermat primes The solution to these problems had been sought for thousands of years, particularly by the ancient Greeks.
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Miron Nicolescu
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Miron Nicolescu was a Romanian mathematician, best known for his work in real analysis and differential equations. He was President of the Romanian Academy and Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union.
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Giulio Racah
1909 - 1965 (56 years)
Giulio Racah was an Italian–Israeli physicist and mathematician. He was Acting President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1961 to 1962. The crater Racah on the Moon is named after him.
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Joseph Ludwig Raabe
1801 - 1859 (58 years)
Joseph Ludwig Raabe was a Swiss mathematician. Life As his parents were quite poor, Raabe was forced to earn his living from a very early age by giving private lessons. He began to study mathematics in 1820 at the Polytechnicum in Vienna, Austria. In the autumn of 1831, he moved to Zürich, where he became professor of mathematics in 1833. In 1855, he became professor at the newly founded Swiss Polytechnicum.
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Al-Karaji
953 - 1029 (76 years)
was a 10th-century Persian mathematician and engineer who flourished at Baghdad. He was born in Karaj, a city near Tehran. His three principal surviving works are mathematical: Al-Badi' fi'l-hisab , Al-Fakhri fi'l-jabr wa'l-muqabala , and Al-Kafi fi'l-hisab .
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Ludvig Lorenz
1829 - 1891 (62 years)
Ludvig Valentin Lorenz was a Danish physicist and mathematician. He developed mathematical formulae to describe phenomena such as the relation between the refraction of light and the density of a pure transparent substance, and the relation between a metal's electrical and thermal conductivity and temperature .
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Roger Cotes
1682 - 1716 (34 years)
Roger Cotes was an English mathematician, known for working closely with Isaac Newton by proofreading the second edition of his famous book, the Principia, before publication. He also invented the quadrature formulas known as Newton–Cotes formulas, and made a geometric argument that can be interpreted as a logarithmic version of Euler's formula. He was the first Plumian Professor at Cambridge University from 1707 until his death.
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Mohsen Hashtroodi
1908 - 1976 (68 years)
Mohsen Hashtroodi was a prominent Iranian mathematician, known as "Professor Hashtroodi ". His father, Shaikh Esmāeel Mojtahed was an advisor to Shaikh Mohammad Khiābāni, who played a significant role in the establishment of the parliamentary democracy in Iran during and after the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.
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Pierre Bouguer
1698 - 1758 (60 years)
Pierre Bouguer was a French mathematician, geophysicist, geodesist, and astronomer. He is also known as "the father of naval architecture". Career Bouguer's father, Jean Bouguer, one of the best hydrographers of his time, was Regius Professor of hydrography at Le Croisic in lower Brittany, and author of a treatise on navigation. He taught his sons Pierre and Jan at their home, where he also taught private students. In 1714, at the age of 16, Pierre was appointed to succeed his deceased father as professor of hydrography. In 1727 he gained the prize given by the French Academy of Sciences fo...
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Friedrich Schur
1856 - 1932 (76 years)
Friedrich Heinrich Schur was a German mathematician who studied geometry. Life and work Schur's family was originally Jewish, but converted to Protestantism. His father owned an estate. He attended high school in Krotoschin and in 1875 studied at University of Wroclaw astronomy and mathematics under Heinrich Schröter and Jacob Rosanes. He then went to the Berlin University, where he studied under Karl Weierstrass, Ernst Eduard Kummer, Leopold Kronecker and Gustav Kirchhoff and received his doctorate in 1879 from Kummer: Geometrische Untersuchungen über Strahlenkomplexe ersten und zweiten Grades.
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Jacques Herbrand
1908 - 1931 (23 years)
Jacques Herbrand was a French mathematician. Although he died at age 23, he was already considered one of "the greatest mathematicians of the younger generation" by his professors Helmut Hasse and Richard Courant.
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Georgy Voronoy
1868 - 1908 (40 years)
Georgy Feodosevich Voronyi was a mathematician of Ukrainian descent noted for defining the Voronoi diagram. He was from the Russian Empire. Biography Voronyi was born in the village of Zhuravka, Pyriatyn, in the Poltava Governorate, which was a part of the Russian Empire at that time and is in Varva Raion, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine.
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Caspar Wessel
1745 - 1818 (73 years)
Caspar Wessel was a Danish–Norwegian mathematician and cartographer. In 1799, Wessel was the first person to describe the geometrical interpretation of complex numbers as points in the complex plane and vectors.
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Leo Königsberger
1837 - 1921 (84 years)
Leo Königsberger was a German mathematician, and historian of science. He is best known for his three-volume biography of Hermann von Helmholtz, which remains the standard reference on the subject.
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Ernst Kolman
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Ernst Kolman or Arnošt Yaromirovich Kolman was a Marxist philosopher, who renounced his former activities as an ideological enforcer in Soviet science. At the age of 84 he sought asylum in Sweden and published a retraction of his previous activity.
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Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen was a Danish mathematician. He is known for work on the enumerative geometry of conic sections, algebraic surfaces, and history of mathematics. Biography Zeuthen was born in Grimstrup near Varde where his father was a minister. In 1849, his father moved to a church in Sorø where Zeuthen began his secondary schooling. In 1857 he entered the University of Copenhagen to study mathematics and graduated with a master's degree in 1862. Following this he earned a scholarship to study abroad, and decided to visit Paris where he studied geometry with Michel Chasles.
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Anders Johan Lexell
1740 - 1784 (44 years)
Anders Johan Lexell was a Finnish-Swedish astronomer, mathematician, and physicist who spent most of his life in Imperial Russia, where he was known as Andrei Ivanovich Leksel . Lexell made important discoveries in polygonometry and celestial mechanics; the latter led to a comet named in his honour. La Grande Encyclopédie states that he was the prominent mathematician of his time who contributed to spherical trigonometry with new and interesting solutions, which he took as a basis for his research of comet and planet motion. His name was given to a theorem of spherical triangles.
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Heinrich Scherk
1798 - 1885 (87 years)
Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk was a German mathematician notable for his work on minimal surfaces and the distribution of prime numbers. He is also notable as the doctoral advisor of Ernst Kummer. External links Biography of ScherkMacTutor biography of Scherk
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Gilles de Roberval
1602 - 1675 (73 years)
Gilles Personne de Roberval , French mathematician, was born at Roberval near Beauvais, France. His name was originally Gilles Personne or Gilles Personier, with Roberval the place of his birth. Biography Like René Descartes, he was present at the siege of La Rochelle in 1627. In the same year he went to Paris, and in 1631 he was appointed the philosophy chair at Gervais College, Paris. Two years after that, in 1633, he was also made the chair of mathematics at the Royal College of France. A condition of tenure attached to this particular chair was that the holder would propose mathematical q...
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Carl Wilhelm Borchardt
1817 - 1880 (63 years)
Carl Wilhelm Borchardt was a German mathematician. Borchardt was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father, Moritz, was a respected merchant, and his mother was Emma Heilborn. Borchardt studied under a number of tutors, including Julius Plücker and Jakob Steiner. He studied at the University of Berlin under Lejeune Dirichlet in 1836 and at the University of Königsberg in 1839. In 1848 he began teaching at the University of Berlin.
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Theon of Smyrna
70 - 135 (65 years)
Theon of Smyrna was a Greek philosopher and mathematician, whose works were strongly influenced by the Pythagorean school of thought. His surviving On Mathematics Useful for the Understanding of Plato is an introductory survey of Greek mathematics.
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Waloddi Weibull
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull was a Swedish civil engineer, materials scientist, and applied mathematician. The Weibull distribution is named after him. Education and career Weibull joined the Swedish Coast Guard in 1905 as a midshipman. He moved up the ranks with promotion to sublieutenant in 1907, Captain in 1916 and Major in 1940. While in the coast guard he took courses at the Royal Institute of Technology. In 1924 he graduated and became a full professor. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1932. He was employed in Swedish and German industry as a consulting engin...
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