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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#10251

Kenneth O. May

1915 - 1977 (62 years)

Kenneth O. May was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who developed May's theorem. May was a prime mover behind the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, and was the first editor of its journal Historia Mathematica. Every four years the ICHM awards the Kenneth O. May Prize for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics.

#10252

Irving Reiner

1924 - 1986 (62 years)

Irving Reiner was a mathematician at the University of Illinois who worked on representation theory. He solved the problem of finding which abelian groups have a finite number of indecomposable modules. His book with Charles W. Curtis, , was for many years the standard text on representation theory.

#10253

Abraham Robinson

Abraham Robinson

1918 - 1974 (56 years)

Abraham Robinson was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of nonstandard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were reincorporated into modern mathematics. Nearly half of Robinson's papers were in applied mathematics rather than in pure mathematics.

#10254

George Forsythe

1917 - 1972 (55 years)

George Elmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist and numerical analyst who founded and led Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Forsythe is often credited with coining the term "computer science" and is recognized as a founding figure in the field.

#10255

Rolf Nevanlinna

Rolf Nevanlinna

1895 - 1980 (85 years)

Rolf Herman Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician who made significant contributions to complex analysis. Background Nevanlinna was born Rolf Herman Neovius, becoming Nevanlinna in 1906 when his father changed the family name.

#10256

Melvin R. Novick

1932 - 1986 (54 years)

Melvin R. Novick was an American statistician. He was a professor of Statistics at the University of Iowa, and a consultant for the Educational Testing Service . Books

#10257

Dunham Jackson

1888 - 1946 (58 years)

Dunham Jackson was a mathematician who worked within approximation theory, notably with trigonometrical and orthogonal polynomials. He is known for Jackson's inequality. He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1935. His book Fourier Series and Orthogonal Polynomials was reprinted in 2004.

#10258

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

#10259

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...

#10260

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".

#10261

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 .

#10262

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...

#10263

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.

#10264

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.

#10265

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.

#10266

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.

#10267

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.

#10268

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...

#10269

Allan Birnbaum

1923 - 1976 (53 years)

Allan Birnbaum was an American statistician who contributed to statistical inference, foundations of statistics, statistical genetics, statistical psychology, and history of statistics. Life and career Birnbaum was born in San Francisco. His parents were Russian-born Orthodox Jews. He studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, doing a premedical programme at the same time. After taking a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1945, he spent two years doing graduate courses in science, mathematics and philosophy, planning perhaps a career in the philosophy of science. One of h...

#10270

Solomon Mikhlin

Solomon Mikhlin

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Solomon Grigor'evich Mikhlin was a Soviet mathematician of who worked in the fields of linear elasticity, singular integrals and numerical analysis: he is best known for the introduction of the symbol of a singular integral operator, which eventually led to the foundation and development of the theory of pseudodifferential operators.

#10271

Hyman Levy

1889 - 1975 (86 years)

Prof Hyman Levy was a Scottish-Jewish philosopher, Emeritus Professor of Imperial College London, mathematician, political activist and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life The son of Minna Cohen and Marcus Levy, a picture-framer and occasional art dealer in Edinburgh, Hyman was the third oldest of eight children. They lived at 70 Bristo Street in Edinburgh's South Side.

#10272

Hans Heilbronn

1908 - 1975 (67 years)

Hans Arnold Heilbronn was a mathematician. Education He was born into a German-Jewish family. He was a student at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg and Göttingen, where he met Edmund Landau, who supervised his doctorate. In his thesis, he improved a result of Hoheisel on the size of prime gaps.

#10273

Frigyes Riesz

1880 - 1956 (76 years)

Frigyes Riesz was a Hungarian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to functional analysis, as did his younger brother Marcel Riesz. Life and career He was born into a Jewish family in Győr, Austria-Hungary and died in Budapest, Hungary. Between 1911 and 1919 he was a professor at the Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary. The post-WW1 Treaty of Trianon transferred former Austro-Hungarian territory including Kolozsvár to the Kingdom of Romania, whereupon Kolozsvár's name changed to Cluj and the University of Kolozsvár moved to Szeged, Hungary, becoming the University of Szeged.

#10274

Franz Rellich

1906 - 1955 (49 years)

Franz Rellich was an Austrian-German mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equations. The Rellich–Kondrachov theorem is named after him.

#10275

Georg Hamel

1877 - 1954 (77 years)

Georg Karl Wilhelm Hamel was a German mathematician with interests in mechanics, the foundations of mathematics and function theory. Biography Hamel was born in Düren, Rhenish Prussia. He studied at Aachen, Berlin, Göttingen, and Karlsruhe. His doctoral adviser was David Hilbert. He taught at Brünn in 1905, Aachen in 1912, and at the Technical University of Berlin in 1919. In 1927, Hamel studied the size of the key space for the Kryha encryption device. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1932 at Zurich and in 1936 at Oslo. He was the author of several important treatises on mechanics. He...

#10276

John Charles Burkill

1900 - 1993 (93 years)

John Charles Burkill was an English mathematician who worked on analysis and introduced the Burkill integral. He was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Burkill was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1953. In 1948, Burkill won the Adams Prize. He was Master of Peterhouse until 1973. His doctoral students include Frederick Gehring.

#10277

Alexander Doniphan Wallace

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Alexander Doniphan Wallace was an American mathematician who introduced proximity spaces. Wallace received from the University of Virginia B.A. in 1935, M.A. in 1936 and Ph.D. in 1940. He was an instructor at Princeton University in 1940–1941 and became an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 and remained there until 1947. He was a professor and chair of the mathematics department at Tulane University in 1947–1963. From 1963 until his retirement in 1973 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Florida.

#10278

Lipót Fejér

1880 - 1959 (79 years)

Lipót Fejér was a Hungarian mathematician of Jewish heritage. Fejér was born Leopold Weisz, and changed to the Hungarian name Fejér around 1900. Biography He was born in Pécs, Austria-Hungary, into the Jewish family of Victoria Goldberger and Samuel Weiss. His maternal great-grandfather Samuel Nachod was a doctor and his grandfather was a renowned scholar, author of a Hebrew-Hungarian dictionary. Leopold's father, Samuel Weiss, was a shopkeeper in Pecs. In primary schools Leopold was not doing well, so for a while his father took him away to home schooling. The future scientist developed his ...

#10279

Geoffrey Shepherd

1898 - 1984 (86 years)

Geoffrey Seddon Shepherd was an American statistician and econometrician. He taught at Iowa State University, after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1932. External links

#10280

Helen M. Walker

1891 - 1983 (92 years)

Helen Mary Walker was a statistician and prominent educational researcher, and the first female president of the American Statistical Association when she was elected in 1944. From 1949 to 1950, she was also president of the American Educational Research Association and served on the Young Women's Christian Association from 1936 to 1950.

#10281

James Lewin McGregor

1921 - 1988 (67 years)

James Lewin McGregor was a mathematician who introduced Karlin–McGregor polynomials. A native of Canada he served in the Canadian military during World War II. He received his undergrad degree from the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Cal Tech and then became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

#10282

Victor Thébault

1882 - 1960 (78 years)

Victor Michael Jean-Marie Thébault was a French mathematician best known for propounding three problems in geometry. The name Thébault's theorem is used by some authors to refer to the first of these problems and by others to refer to the third.

#10283

Edwin E. Floyd

1924 - 1990 (66 years)

Edwin Earl Floyd was an American mathematician, specializing in topology . Education and career Floyd studied received in 1943 his bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama and in 1948 his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia under Gordon Whyburn with thesis The extension of homeomorphisms. He was in the academic year 1948–1949 an instructor at Princeton University and became in 1949 a member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, where in the 1960s he collaborated with Pierre Conner in research on cobordism theory. At the University of Virginia, he was the chair of the department of mathematics from 1966 to 1969 and since 1966 the Robert C.

#10284

Arnold Walfisz

1892 - 1962 (70 years)

Arnold Walfisz was a Jewish-Polish mathematician working in analytic number theory. Life After the Abitur in Warsaw , Arnold Walfisz studied in Germany at Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen. Edmund Landau was his doctoral-thesis supervisor at the University of Göttingen. Walfisz lived in Wiesbaden from 1922 through 1927, then he returned to Warsaw, worked at an insurance company and at the mathematical institute of the university . In 1935, together with , he founded the mathematical journal Acta Arithmetica. In 1936, Walfisz became professor at the University of Tbilisi in the nation of Georgia .

#10285

Anne C. Morel

Anne C. Morel was an American mathematician known for her work in logic, order theory, and algebra. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Education and career Morel graduated in 1941 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She began graduate study in mathematics in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley, but left her studies to serve in the WAVES during World War II. She returned to her studies in Berkeley in 1946, and completed her Ph.D. in 1953. Her dissertation, A Study in the Arithmetic of Order Types, was supervised by Al...

#10286

Eric Harold Neville

1889 - 1961 (72 years)

Eric Harold Neville, known as E. H. Neville was an English mathematician. A heavily fictionalised portrayal of his life is rendered in the 2007 novel The Indian Clerk. He is the one who convinced Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England.

#10287

Clarence Raymond Adams

Clarence Raymond Adams

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Clarence Raymond Adams was an American mathematician who worked on partial difference equations. He entered Brown University in the fall of 1915 and graduated in 1918. Adams received his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under the direction of G. D. Birkhoff. On August 17, 1922, he married Rachel Blodgett, who earned a PhD from Radcliffe College in 1921. As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard University, he studied at the Sapienza University of Rome under Tullio Levi-Civita and at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant. In 1923 Adams returned to Brown University as an instructo...

#10288

Hellmuth Kneser

Hellmuth Kneser

1898 - 1973 (75 years)

Hellmuth Kneser was a Baltic German mathematician, who made notable contributions to group theory and topology. His most famous result may be his theorem on the existence of a prime decomposition for 3-manifolds. His proof originated the concept of normal surface, a fundamental cornerstone of the theory of 3-manifolds.

#10289

Theophil Henry Hildebrandt

1888 - 1980 (92 years)

Theophil Henry Hildebrandt was an American mathematician who did research on functional analysis and integration theory. Hildebrandt was born in Dover, Ohio, graduated from high school at age 14 and at age 17 in 1905 received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago he earned his master's degree in 1906 and his PhD in 1910, with thesis A Contribution to the Foundations of Fréchet's Calcul Fonctionnel written under the direction of E. H. Moore. He became an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1909 and then a full professor in 1923, serving as chair of the mathematics department from 1934 until his retirement in 1957.

#10290

Phyllis Nicolson

Phyllis Nicolson

1917 - 1968 (51 years)

Phyllis Nicolson was a British mathematician and physicist best known for her work on the Crank–Nicolson method together with John Crank. Early life and education Nicolson was born Phyllis Lockett in Macclesfield and went to Stockport High School for Girls. She graduated from Manchester University with a B.Sc. in 1938, M.Sc. in 1939 and a Ph.D. on Three Problems in Theoretical Physics in 1946. Her Ph.D. thesis began with cosmic ray research conducted under Lajos Jánossy during 1939 and 1940.

#10291

John Rogers Musselman

1890 - 1968 (78 years)

John Rogers Musselman was an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and known for Musselman's theorem. J. R. Musselman received his A.B. in 1910 from Pennsylvania College and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1916 under Arthur Byron Coble with thesis A set of eight self-associated points in space. Musselman was a teaching assistant at Gettysburg Academy from 1910 to 1912 and an instructor in mathematics at the University of Illinois in 1916–1918 and then at Washington University in St. Louis in 1920–1928. He was a professor mathematics at Western Reserve Universit...

#10292

William John McCallien

1902 - 1981 (79 years)

William John McCallien FRSE FGS OBE was a 20th-century Scottish geologist and artist. He is known generally as William J. McCallien as an author, a common misconception is that he was also the artist known as W. J. McCallien , this was in fact his father.

#10293

Oscar Goldman

1925 - 1986 (61 years)

Oscar Goldman was an American mathematician, who worked on algebra and its applications to number theory. Oscar Goldman received his Ph.D in 1948 under Claude Chevalley at Princeton University. He was chair of the Mathematics Department at Brandeis University from 1952 to 1960. As chair of the department his immediate successor was Maurice Auslander.

#10294

Georges Bouligand

1889 - 1979 (90 years)

Georges Louis Bouligand was a French mathematician. He worked in analysis, mechanics, analytical and differential geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. He is known for introducing the concept of paratingent cones and contingent cones.

#10295

Helmut Grunsky

1904 - 1986 (82 years)

Helmut Grunsky was a German mathematician who worked in complex analysis and geometric function theory. He introduced Grunsky's theorem and the Grunsky inequalities. In 1936, he was appointed editor of Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. In 1939 he was forced to leave this position after Ludwig Bieberbach accused him of employing Jewish referees in a notorious letter. He joined the Nazi Party on 1 April 1940, though he seems to have had little sympathy with its philosophy. He published in the journal Deutsche Mathematik. From 1949 he was Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen; ...

#10296

Morton L. Curtis

1921 - 1989 (68 years)

Morton Landers Curtis was an American mathematician, an expert on group theory and the W. L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. Born in Texas, Curtis earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 from Texas A&I University, and received his Ph.D. in 1951 from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Raymond Louis Wilder. Subsequently, he taught mathematics at Florida State University before moving to Rice. At Rice, he was the Ph.D. advisor of well-known mathematician John Morgan.

#10297

Tudor Ganea

1922 - 1971 (49 years)

Tudor Ganea was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology, especially homotopy theory. Ganea left Communist Romania to settle in the United States in the early 1960s. He taught at the University of Washington.

#10298

František Wolf

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

František Wolf was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to trigonometry and mathematical analysis, specifically the study of the perturbation of linear operators. Wolf was born 1904 in Prostějov, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now part of the Czech Republic, the elder of two children of a furniture maker. He studied physics at Charles University in Prague, and then mathematics at Masaryk University in Brno under the supervision of Otakar Borůvka; he was awarded a doctorate in 1928 . He then taught mathematics at the high school level until 1937, when he obtained a faculty position at Charles University.

#10299

Leonard Bairstow

1880 - 1963 (83 years)

Sir Leonard Bairstow was an English aeronautical engineer. Bairstow is best remembered for his work in aviation and for Bairstow's method for arbitrarily finding the roots of polynomials. Early life and education Bairstow was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, the son of Uriah Bairstow, a wealthy and keen mathematician. As a boy, Leonard went to Queens Road and Moorside Council Schools before going to Heath Grammar School which he attended briefly before going to the Council Secondary School - then known as the Higher Grade School. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Science where he se...

#10300

Herman L. Smith

1892 - 1950 (58 years)

Herman Lyle Smith was an American mathematician, the co-discoverer, with E. H. Moore, of netss, and also a discoverer of the related notion of filterss independently of Henri Cartan. Born in Pittwood, Illinois, Smith received his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon in 1914 and his M.S. from the University of Chicago the following year. His Ph.D. was granted in 1926 by the University of Chicago for work done under Moore. He was later employed as a professor of mathematics by Louisiana State University.

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