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,
#10251
Arthur Cayley
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Arthur Cayley was a prolific British mathematician who worked mostly on algebra. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics. As a child, Cayley enjoyed solving complex maths problems for amusement. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years.
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Ernst Zermelo
1871 - 1953 (82 years)
Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic set theory and his proof of the well-ordering theorem. Furthermore, his 1929 work on ranking chess players is the first description of a model for pairwise comparison that continues to have a profound impact on various applied fields utilizing this method.
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Augustin-Louis Cauchy
1789 - 1857 (68 years)
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He single-handedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 - 1716 (70 years)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became less common during the Industrial Revolution and spread of specialized labor after his lifetime. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physic...
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Pierre de Fermat
1601 - 1665 (64 years)
Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
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Gottlob Frege
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano , Bertrand Russell , and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ev...
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Giuseppe Peano
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione , which is a simplified version of Classical Latin.
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William Rowan Hamilton
1805 - 1865 (60 years)
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA, FRAS was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory.
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James Clerk Maxwell
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist with broad interests who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" where the first one had been realised by Isaac Newton.
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Diophantus
201 - 300 (99 years)
Diophantus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantus is considered "the father of algebra" by many mathematicians because of his contributions to number theory, mathematical equations, and the earliest known use of algebraic notation and symbolism in his works. In modern use, Diophantine equations are algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
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Leopold Kronecker
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory, algebra and logic. He criticized Georg Cantor's work on set theory, and was quoted by as having said, "" . Kronecker was a student and life-long friend of Ernst Kummer.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749 - 1827 (78 years)
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste . This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.
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Joseph Liouville
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Joseph Liouville was a French mathematician and engineer. Life and work He was born in Saint-Omer in France on 24 March 1809. His parents were Claude-Joseph Liouville and Thérèse Liouville . Liouville gained admission to the École Polytechnique in 1825 and graduated in 1827. Just like Augustin-Louis Cauchy before him, Liouville studied engineering at École des Ponts et Chaussées after graduating from the Polytechnique, but opted instead for a career in mathematics. After some years as an assistant at various institutions including the École Centrale Paris, he was appointed as professor at the École Polytechnique in 1838.
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Hermann Minkowski
1864 - 1909 (45 years)
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736 - 1813 (77 years)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
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Édouard Goursat
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat was a French mathematician, now remembered principally as an expositor for his Cours d'analyse mathématique, which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. It set a standard for the high-level teaching of mathematical analysis, especially complex analysis. This text was reviewed by William Fogg Osgood for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. This led to its translation into English by Earle Raymond Hedrick published by Ginn and Company. Goursat also published texts on partial differential equations and hypergeometric series.
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Madhava of Sangamagrama
1350 - 1425 (75 years)
Mādhava of Sangamagrāma was an Indian mathematician and astronomer who is considered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of the greatest mathematician-astronomers of the Late Middle Ages, Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra. He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".
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Pierre Ossian Bonnet
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Pierre Ossian Bonnet was a French mathematician. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, including the Gauss–Bonnet theorem. Biography Early years Pierre Bonnet attended the Collège in Montpellier. In 1838 he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris. He also studied at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées.
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Thābit ibn Qurra
836 - 901 (65 years)
Thābit ibn Qurra ; 826 or 836 – February 19, 901, was a polymath known for his work in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and translation. He lived in Baghdad in the second half of the ninth century during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate.
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Zu Chongzhi
429 - 500 (71 years)
Zu Chongzhi , courtesy name Wenyuan , was a Chinese astronomer, mathematician, politician, inventor, and writer during the Liu Song and Southern Qi dynasties. He was most notable for calculating pi as between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, a record in accuracy which would not be surpassed for over 800 years.
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Wilhelm Wirtinger
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
Wilhelm Wirtinger was an Austrian mathematician, working in complex analysis, geometry, algebra, number theory, Lie groups and knot theory. Biography He was born at Ybbs on the Danube and studied at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1887, and his habilitation in 1890. Wirtinger was greatly influenced by Felix Klein with whom he studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Göttingen.
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Eugène Charles Catalan
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Eugène Charles Catalan was a French and Belgian mathematician who worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics; stating the famous Catalan's conjecture, which was eventually proved in 2002; and introducing the Catalan number to solve a combinatorial problem.
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Mark Naimark
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Mark Aronovich Naimark was a Soviet mathematician who made important contributions to functional analysis and mathematical physics. Life Naimark was born on 5 December 1909 in Odessa, part of modern-day Ukraine, but which was then part of the Russian Empire. His family was Jewish, his father Aron Iakovlevich Naimark a professional artist, and his mother was Zefir Moiseevna. He was four years old at the onset of World War I in 1914, and seven when the tumultuous Russian Revolution began in 1917. Showing an early talent for mathematics, Naimark enrolled in a technical college at the age of fifteen in 1924 soon after the Russian Civil War had ended.
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Rafael Bombelli
1526 - 1573 (47 years)
Rafael Bombelli was an Italian mathematician. Born in Bologna, he is the author of a treatise on algebra and is a central figure in the understanding of imaginary numbers. He was the one who finally managed to address the problem with imaginary numbers. In his 1572 book, L'Algebra, Bombelli solved equations using the method of del Ferro/Tartaglia. He introduced the rhetoric that preceded the representative symbols +i and -i and described how they both worked.
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Wilhelm Blaschke
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Wilhelm Johann Eugen Blaschke was an Austrian mathematician working in the fields of differential and integral geometry. Education and career Blaschke was the son of mathematician Josef Blaschke, who taught geometry at the Landes Oberrealschule in Graz. After studying for two years at the Technische Hochschule in Graz, he went to the University of Vienna, and completed a doctorate in 1908 under the supervision of Wilhelm Wirtinger. His dissertation was Über eine besondere Art von Kurven vierter Klasse.
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Axel Thue
1863 - 1922 (59 years)
Axel Thue was a Norwegian mathematician, known for his original work in diophantine approximation and combinatorics. Work Thue published his first important paper in 1909. He stated in 1914 the so-called word problem for semigroups or Thue problem, closely related to the halting problem.
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Karl Schwarzschild
1873 - 1916 (43 years)
Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist and astronomer. Schwarzschild provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to a derivation of the Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.
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Jean-Robert Argand
1768 - 1822 (54 years)
Jean-Robert Argand was a Genevan amateur mathematician. In 1806, while managing a bookstore in Paris, he published the idea of geometrical interpretation of complex numbers known as the Argand diagram and is known for the first rigorous proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.
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Pyotr Novikov
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Pyotr Sergeyevich Novikov was a Soviet mathematician. Novikov is known for his work on combinatorial problems in group theory: the word problem for groups, and his progress in the Burnside problem. He was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1957 for proving the undecidability of the word problem in groups.
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Theodorus of Cyrene
465 BC - 398 BC (67 years)
Theodorus of Cyrene was an ancient Greek mathematician who lived during the 5th century BC. The only first-hand accounts of him that survive are in three of Plato's dialogues: the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman. In the former dialogue, he posits a mathematical construction now known as the Spiral of Theodorus.
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Giulio Ascoli
1843 - 1896 (53 years)
Giulio Ascoli was a Jewish-Italian mathematician. He was a student of the Scuola Normale di Pisa, where he graduated in 1868. In 1872 he became Professor of Algebra and Calculus of the Politecnico di Milano University. From 1879 he was professor of mathematics at the Reale Istituto Tecnico Superiore, where, in 1901, was affixed a plaque that remembers him.
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E. T. Whittaker
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker was a British mathematician, physicist, and historian of science. Whittaker was a leading mathematical scholar of the early 20th-century who contributed widely to applied mathematics and was renowned for his research in mathematical physics and numerical analysis, including the theory of special functions, along with his contributions to astronomy, celestial mechanics, the history of physics, and digital signal processing.
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Michel Plancherel
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Michel Plancherel was a Swiss mathematician. He was born in Bussy and obtained his Diplom in mathematics from the University of Fribourg and then his doctoral degree in 1907 with a thesis written under the supervision of Mathias Lerch. Plancherel was a professor in Fribourg , and from 1920 at ETH Zurich.
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Alfred Clebsch
1833 - 1872 (39 years)
Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch was a German mathematician who made important contributions to algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He attended the University of Königsberg and was habilitated at Berlin. He subsequently taught in Berlin and Karlsruhe. His collaboration with Paul Gordan in Giessen led to the introduction of Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.
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Alexander Macfarlane
1851 - 1913 (62 years)
Alexander Macfarlane FRSE LLD was a Scottish logician, physicist, and mathematician. Life Macfarlane was born in Blairgowrie, Scotland, to Daniel MacFarlane and Ann Small. He studied at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral thesis "The disruptive discharge of electricity" reported on experimental results from the laboratory of Peter Guthrie Tait.
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Benjamin Peirce
1809 - 1880 (71 years)
Benjamin Peirce was an American mathematician who taught at Harvard University for approximately 50 years. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, statistics, number theory, algebra, and the philosophy of mathematics.
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Leonard Eugene Dickson
1874 - 1954 (80 years)
Leonard Eugene Dickson was an American mathematician. He was one of the first American researchers in abstract algebra, in particular the theory of finite fields and classical groups, and is also remembered for a three-volume history of number theory, History of the Theory of Numbers. The L. E. Dickson instructorships at the University of Chicago Department of Mathematics are named after him.
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Corrado Segre
1863 - 1924 (61 years)
Corrado Segre was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to the early development of algebraic geometry. Early life Corrado's parents were Abramo Segre and Estella De Benedetti.
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Walther von Dyck
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
Walther Franz Anton von Dyck , born Dyck and later ennobled, was a German mathematician. He is credited with being the first to define a mathematical group, in the modern sense in . He laid the foundations of combinatorial group theory, being the first to systematically study a group by generators and relations.
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Nicomachus
60 - 120 (60 years)
Nicomachus of Gerasa was an Ancient Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from Gerasa, in the Roman province of Syria . Like many Pythagoreans, Nicomachus wrote about the mystical properties of numbers, best known for his works Introduction to Arithmetic and Manual of Harmonics, which are an important resource on Ancient Greek mathematics and Ancient Greek music in the Roman period. Nicomachus' work on arithmetic became a standard text for Neoplatonic education in Late antiquity, with philosophers such as Iamblichus and John Philoponus writing commentaries on it. A Latin paraphrase by Boethius of...
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Friedrich Bessel
1784 - 1846 (62 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. Certain important mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli before being generalised by Bessel.
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Scipione del Ferro
1465 - 1526 (61 years)
Scipione del Ferro was an Italian mathematician who first discovered a method to solve the depressed cubic equation. Life Scipione del Ferro was born in Bologna, in northern Italy, to Floriano and Filippa Ferro. His father, Floriano, worked in the paper industry, which owed its existence to the invention of the press in the 1450s and which probably allowed Scipione to access various works during the early stages of his life. He married and had a daughter, who was named Filippa after his mother.
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Ernst Steinitz
1871 - 1928 (57 years)
Ernst Steinitz was a German mathematician. Biography Steinitz was born in Laurahütte , Silesia, Germany , the son of Sigismund Steinitz, a Jewish coal merchant, and his wife Auguste Cohen; he had two brothers. He studied at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin, receiving his Ph.D. from Breslau in 1894. Subsequently, he took positions at Charlottenburg , Breslau, and the University of Kiel, Germany, where he died in 1928. Steinitz married Martha Steinitz and had one son.
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William Fogg Osgood
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
William Fogg Osgood was an American mathematician. Education and career William Fogg Osgood was born in Boston on March 10, 1864. In 1886, he graduated from Harvard, where, after studying at the universities of Göttingen and Erlangen , he was instructor , assistant professor , and thenceforth professor of mathematics. From 1918 to 1922, he was chairman of the department of mathematics at Harvard. He became professor emeritus in 1933. From 1934 to 1936, he was visiting professor of mathematics at Peking University.
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Émile Borel
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel was a French mathematician and politician. As a mathematician, he was known for his founding work in the areas of measure theory and probability. Biography Borel was born in Saint-Affrique, Aveyron, the son of a Protestant pastor. He studied at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and Lycée Louis-le-Grand before applying to both the École normale supérieure and the École Polytechnique. He qualified in the first position for both and chose to attend the former institution in 1889. That year he also won the concours général, an annual national mathematics competition. After...
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Alfred Enneper
1830 - 1885 (55 years)
Alfred Enneper was a German mathematician. Enneper earned his PhD from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 1856, under the supervision of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, for his dissertation about functions with complex arguments. After his habilitation in 1859 in Göttingen, he was from 1870 on Professor at Göttingen.
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Ferdinand Minding
1806 - 1885 (79 years)
Ernst Ferdinand Adolf Minding was a German-Russian mathematician known for his contributions to differential geometry. He continued the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss concerning differential geometry of surfaces, especially its intrinsic aspects. Minding considered questions of bending of surfaces and proved the invariance of geodesic curvature. He studied ruled surfaces, developable surfaces and surfaces of revolution and determined geodesics on the pseudosphere. Minding's results on the geometry of geodesic triangles on a surface of constant curvature anticipated Beltrami's approach to the f...
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Bruno de Finetti
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Bruno de Finetti was an Italian probabilist statistician and actuary, noted for the "operational subjective" conception of probability. The classic exposition of his distinctive theory is the 1937 , which discussed probability founded on the coherence of betting odds and the consequences of exchangeability.
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Sergei Sobolev
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Prof Sergei Lvovich Sobolev FRSE was a Soviet mathematician working in mathematical analysis and partial differential equations. Sobolev introduced notions that are now fundamental for several areas of mathematics. Sobolev spaces can be defined by some growth conditions on the Fourier transform. They and their embedding theorems are an important subject in functional analysis. Generalized functions were first introduced by Sobolev in 1935 for weak solutions, and further developed by Laurent Schwartz. Sobolev abstracted the classical notion of differentiation, so expanding the range of application of the technique of Newton and Leibniz.
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Nikolai Chebotaryov
1894 - 1947 (53 years)
Nikolai Grigorievich Chebotaryov was a Soviet mathematician. He is best known for the Chebotaryov density theorem. He was a student of Dmitry Grave, a Russian mathematician. Chebotaryov worked on the algebra of polynomials, in particular examining the distribution of the zeros. He also studied Galois theory and wrote a textbook on the subject titled Basic Galois Theory. His ideas were used by Emil Artin to prove the Artin reciprocity law. He worked with his student Anatoly Dorodnov on a generalization of the quadrature of the lune, and proved the conjecture now known as the Chebotaryov theor...
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