Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#10201

Jesse Douglas

1897 - 1965 (68 years)

Jesse Douglas was an American mathematician and Fields Medalist known for his general solution to Plateau's problem. Life and career He was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Sarah and Louis Douglas. He attended City College of New York as an undergraduate, graduating with honors in Mathematics in 1916. He then moved to Columbia University as a graduate student, obtaining a PhD in mathematics in 1920.

#10202

Harry Pollard

1919 - 1985 (66 years)

Harry Pollard was an American mathematician. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1942 under the supervision of David Widder. He then taught at Cornell University, and was Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University from 1961 until his death in 1985. He is known for his work on celestial mechanics, orthogonal polynomials and the n-body problem as well as for the several textbooks he authored or co-authored. In the theory of Orthogonal polynomials, Pollard solved a conjecture of Antoni Zygmund norms for the Legendre polynomials and Jacobi polynomials in a series of three papers in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.

#10203

Hans Petersson

1902 - 1984 (82 years)

Hans Petersson was a German mathematician. He introduced the Petersson inner product and is also known for the Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture. See also Weil–Petersson metric

#10204

Heinz Rutishauser

1918 - 1970 (52 years)

Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...

#10205

Aleksandr Khinchin

Aleksandr Khinchin

1894 - 1959 (65 years)

Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin was a Soviet mathematician and one of the most significant contributors to the Soviet school of probability theory. Due to romanization conventions, his name is sometimes written as "Khinchin" and other times as "Khintchine".

#10206

Erhard Schmidt

1876 - 1959 (83 years)

Erhard Schmidt was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu , in the Governorate of Livonia .

#10207

George Gallup

1901 - 1984 (83 years)

George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...

#10208

Oswald Veblen

1880 - 1960 (80 years)

Oswald Veblen was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905; while this was long considered the first rigorous proof of the theorem, many now also consider Camille Jordan's original proof rigorous.

#10209

Ralph Palmer Agnew

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

Ralph Palmer Agnew was an American mathematician. Agnew was born in Poland, Ohio, and did his undergraduate studies at Allegheny College. After completing a master's degree at Iowa State College he moved to Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1930. He was appointed to the Cornell faculty in 1931. He chaired the mathematics department at Cornell from 1940 to 1950, and was responsible for bringing William Feller and Mark Kac to Cornell.

#10210

Arne Beurling

1905 - 1986 (81 years)

Arne Carl-August Beurling was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.

#10211

Albert Ingham

1900 - 1967 (67 years)

Albert Edward Ingham was an English mathematician. Early life and education Ingham was born in Northampton. He went to Stafford Grammar School and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1919 after service in the British Army in World War I. Ingham received a distinction as a Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1922. He also received an 1851 Research Fellowship.

#10212

Józef Marcinkiewicz

Józef Marcinkiewicz

1910 - 1940 (30 years)

Józef Marcinkiewicz was a Polish mathematician. He was a student of Antoni Zygmund; and later worked with Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Kaczmarz and Raphaël Salem. He was a professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno.

#10213

Yudell Luke

1918 - 1983 (65 years)

Yudell Leo Luke was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to MRIGlobal, was awarded the N. T. Veatch award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity in 1975, and appointed as Curator's Professor at the University of Missouri in 1978, a post he held until his death.

#10214

Martin Beale

1928 - 1985 (57 years)

Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming. Career He was educated at Winchester College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1949 and gaining a diploma in mathematical statistics in 1950. He then joined the Mathematics Group at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, working under Stephen Vajda for 11 years, except for a leave of absence in 1957/58 to assist the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. In 1955 he extended George ...

#10215

Orrin Frink

1901 - 1988 (87 years)

Orrin Frink Jr. was an American mathematician who introduced Frink ideals in 1954. Frink earned a doctorate from Columbia University in 1926 or 1927 and worked on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University for 41 years, 11 of them as department chair. His time at Penn State was interrupted by service as assistant chief engineer at the Special Projects Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during World War II, and by two Fulbright fellowships to Dublin, Ireland in the 1960s.

#10216

Nelson Dunford

1906 - 1986 (80 years)

Nelson James Dunford was an American mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis, namely integration of vector valued functions, ergodic theory, and linear operators. The Dunford decomposition, Dunford–Pettis property, and Dunford-Schwartz theorem bear his name.

#10217

Joseph Proudman

1888 - 1975 (87 years)

Joseph Proudman , CBE, FRS was a distinguished British mathematician and oceanographer of international repute. His theoretical studies into the oceanic tides not only "solved practically all the remaining tidal problems which are soluble within the framework of classical hydrodynamics and analytical mathematics" but laid the basis of a tidal prediction service developed with Arthur Doodson of great international importance.

#10218

H. J. Ryser

1923 - 1985 (62 years)

Herbert John Ryser was a professor of mathematics, widely regarded as one of the major figures in combinatorics in the 20th century. He is the namesake of the Bruck–Ryser–Chowla theorem, Ryser's formula for the computation of the permanent of a matrix, and Ryser's conjecture.

#10219

Gottfried Köthe

Gottfried Köthe

1905 - 1989 (84 years)

Gottfried Maria Hugo Köthe was an Austrian mathematician working in abstract algebra and functional analysis. Scientific career In 1923 Köthe enrolled in the University of Graz. He started studying chemistry, but switched to mathematics a year later after meeting the philosopher Alfred Kastil. In 1927 he submitted his thesis Beiträge zu Finslers Grundlegung der Mengenlehre and was awarded a doctorate. After spending a year in Zürich working with Paul Finsler, Köthe received a fellowship to visit the University of Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Emmy Noether and Bartel van der Waerden on the emerging subject of abstract algebra.

#10220

Albert Charles Schaeffer

1907 - 1957 (50 years)

Albert Charles Schaeffer was an American mathematician who worked on complex analysis. Biography Schaeffer was the son of Albert John and Mary Plane Schaeffer . He studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and was, from 1930 to 1933, employed as a highway engineer. In 1936, he received a PhD in mathematics under Eberhard Hopf at MIT. From 1936 to 1939, he was an instructor at Purdue University. In 1939, he became an instructor at Stanford University where he became, in 1941, assistant professor, in 1943 associate professor and in 1946 professor. From 1947 to 1950, he was a professor at Purdue University.

#10221

Gerhard Gentzen

Gerhard Gentzen

1909 - 1945 (36 years)

Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.

#10222

Barnet Woolf

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.

#10223

William Caspar Graustein

William Caspar Graustein

1888 - 1941 (53 years)

William Caspar Graustein was an American mathematician. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1910 and later became an instructor at Harvard University. In 1921, he married Mary Curtis Graustein , who was the first American woman to earn a mathematics Ph.D. from Radcliffe College.

#10224

Emil Grosswald

1912 - 1989 (77 years)

Emil Grosswald was a mathematician who worked primarily in number theory. Life and education Grosswald was born on December 15, 1912, in Bucharest, Romania. He received a master's degree in both mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Bucharest in 1933, spent six months in Italy and then received a Diplôme from École supérieure d'électricité in Paris.

#10225

Leonard Blumenthal

1901 - 1984 (83 years)

Leonard Mascot Blumenthal was a Jewish American mathematician. Career He received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Johns Hopkins University, under the supervision of Frank Morley; his dissertation was titled Lagrange Resolvents in Euclidean Geometry. He taught for the majority of his professional career at the University of Missouri and was the author of A Modern View of Geometry.

#10226

Beniamino Segre

Beniamino Segre

1903 - 1977 (74 years)

Beniamino Segre was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to algebraic geometry and one of the founders of finite geometry. Life and career He was born and studied in Turin. Corrado Segre, his uncle, also served as his doctoral advisor.

#10227

Ott-Heinrich Keller

1906 - 1990 (84 years)

Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of geometry, topology and algebraic geometry. He formulated the celebrated problem which is now called the Jacobian conjecture in 1939.

#10228

Eugene Lukacs

1906 - 1987 (81 years)

Eugene Lukacs was a Hungarian-American statistician notable for his work in characterization of distributions, stability theory, and being the author of Characteristic Functions, a classic textbook in the field.

#10229

Constantine Gatsonis

Constantine Achilleos Gatsonis is a Greek-born biostatistician, currently the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics, Chair of Biostatistics and Founding Director for the Center for Statistical Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. He is well known for his work with evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests.

#10230

Max Deuring

1907 - 1984 (77 years)

Max Deuring was a German mathematician. He is known for his work in arithmetic geometry, in particular on elliptic curves in characteristic p. He worked also in analytic number theory. Deuring graduated from the University of Göttingen in 1930, then began working with Emmy Noether, who noted his mathematical acumen even as an undergraduate. When she was forced to leave Germany in 1933, she urged that the university offer her position to Deuring. In 1935 he published a report entitled Algebren , which established his notability in the world of mathematics. He went on to serve as Ordinarius at ...

#10231

Ivan S. Sokolnikoff

1901 - 1976 (75 years)

Ivan Stephan Sokolnikoff was a Russian-American applied mathematician, who specialized in elasticity theory and wrote several mathematical textbooks for engineers and physicists. Biography Born to a wealthy family in Tsarist Russia, Ivan Sokolnikoff was educated by private tutors and at Anders Classical Gymnasium in Kiev. During the Russian Revolution, as a Tsarist naval officer, he was wounded in combat off the Kuril Islands. With the victory of the Reds, he became a refugee in China. There he worked for a subsidiary of an American electrical firm until 1922 when he became an American immigrant in Seattle.

#10232

Cyrus Colton MacDuffee

1895 - 1961 (66 years)

Cyrus Colton MacDuffee from Oneida, New York was a professor of mathematics at University of Wisconsin. He wrote a number of influential research papers in abstract algebra. MacDuffee served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society , was editor of the Transactions of the A.M.S., and served as president of the Mathematical Association of America .

#10233

Stefan E. Warschawski

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

Stefan Emanuel "Steve" Warschawski was a mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.

#10234

Joseph Slepian

1891 - 1969 (78 years)

Joseph Slepian was an American electrical engineer known for his contributions to the developments of electrical apparatus and theory. Born in Boston, MA of Jewish Russian immigrants, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, from which he was awarded a B.Sc. , a M.Sc. and Ph.D. on the thesis On the Functions of a Complex Variable Defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order and First Degree advised by George Birkhoff . Meanwhile, he also worked at Boston Elevated Railway.

#10235

John Myhill

1923 - 1987 (64 years)

John R. Myhill Sr. was a British mathematician. Education Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.

#10236

Joseph Wedderburn

Joseph Wedderburn

1882 - 1948 (66 years)

Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra.

#10237

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr.

1922 - 1990 (68 years)

Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr. was an American mathematician, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis working on analysis. Life Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform. Hirschman spent most of his career at Washington University, where he published mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey. While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem.

#10238

Shirley Jackson Case

Shirley Jackson Case

1872 - 1947 (75 years)

Shirley Jackson Case was an historian of early Christianity, and a liberal theologian. He served as dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Biography Case was born on September 28, 1872, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Acadia University. He taught mathematics at the New Hampton Library Institute. In 1904, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1908. He was professor of New Testament literature and interpretation at University of Chicago Divinity School until 1925.

#10239

Samuel Newby Curle

1930 - 1989 (59 years)

Samuel Newby Curle FRSE was a British mathematician. He served as Professor of Applied Mathematics at St Andrews University from 1967 until 1989. St Andrews University created the Curle Lecture in his memory.

#10240

Theodore William Chaundy

1889 - 1966 (77 years)

Theodore William Chaundy was an English mathematician who introduced Burchnall–Chaundy theory. Chaundy was born to widowed businessman John Chaundy and his second wife Sarah Pates in their shop-cum-home at 49 Broad Street in Oxford. John had eight children, one of whom died as a toddler, with his late first wife and died barely a year after Chaundy was born. The Chaundy home along Broad Street has since been demolished.

#10241

Emmy Noether

1882 - 1935 (53 years)

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

#10242

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet

1903 - 1984 (81 years)

Lancelot Stephen Bosanquet was a British mathematician who worked in analysis, especially Fourier series. His daughter, Rosamund Caroline Bosanquet was a British cellist, music teacher and composer.

#10243

Arthur Sard

1909 - 1980 (71 years)

Arthur Sard was an American mathematician, famous for his work in differential topology and in spline interpolation. His fame stems primarily from Sard's theorem, which says that the set of critical valuess of a differential function which has sufficiently many derivatives has measure zero.

#10244

Roman Sikorski

1920 - 1983 (63 years)

Roman Sikorski was a Polish mathematician. Biography Sikorski was a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1952 until 1982. Since 1962, he was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Sikorski's research interests included: Boolean algebrass, mathematical logic, functional analysis, the theory of distributions, measure theory, general topology, and descriptive set theory.

#10245

László Rédei

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

László Rédei was a Hungarian mathematician. Rédei graduated from the University of Budapest and initially worked as a schoolteacher. In 1940 he was appointed professor in the University of Szeged and in 1967 moved to the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

#10246

Thomas Muirhead Flett

1923 - 1976 (53 years)

Thomas Muirhead Flett was an English mathematician at Sheffield University working on analysis. Biography Thomas Muirhead Flett was born on 28 July 1923, in London, England, when his parents moved from Scotland to London. At age 11, he won a scholarship by the County of Middlesex from a state primary school to University College School , Hampstead.

#10247

Pavel Alexandrov

Pavel Alexandrov

1896 - 1982 (86 years)

Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov , sometimes romanized Paul Alexandroff , was a Soviet mathematician. He wrote roughly three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology. In topology, the Alexandroff compactification and the Alexandrov topology are named after him.

#10248

Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid

1927 - 1985 (58 years)

Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid was an American mathematician and theorist who worked extensively on probability theory, Markov chains, and statistics. The author of more than 70 papers and 6 books, his work touched on such diverse fields as economics, physics, and biology.

#10249

Paul Althaus Smith

1900 - 1980 (80 years)

Paul Althaus Smith was an American mathematician. His name occurs in two significant conjectures in geometric topology: the Smith conjecture, which is now a theorem, and the Hilbert–Smith conjecture, which was proved in dimension 3 in 2013. Smith theory is a theory about homeomorphisms of finite order of manifolds, particularly spheres.

#10250

Leo Moser

1921 - 1970 (49 years)

Leo Moser was an Austrian-Canadian mathematician, best known for his polygon notation. A native of Vienna, Leo Moser immigrated with his parents to Canada at the age of three. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba in 1943, and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto in 1945. After two years of teaching he went to the University of North Carolina to complete a PhD, supervised by Alfred Brauer. There, in 1950, he began suffering recurrent heart problems. He took a position at Texas Technical College for one year, and joined the faculty of the Uni...

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions