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
Shikao Ikehara
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Shikao Ikehara was a Japanese mathematician. He was a student of Norbert Wiener at MIT . Following Wiener in 1928, in 1931 Ikehara used Wiener's Tauberian theory to derive another proof of the prime number theorem, demonstrated solely via the non-vanishing of the zeta function on the line Re s = 1. An improved version of Ikehara's 1931 result by Wiener in 1932 is now known as the Wiener–Ikehara theorem.
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Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
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John Jay Gergen
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
John Jay Gergen was an American mathematician who introduced the Lebesgue–Gergen criterion for convergence of a Fourier series. He was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1925 and a Ph.D. from Rice University in 1928. His doctoral advisors were Griffith C. Evans and Szolem Mandelbrojt. From 1928 to 1930, as a National Research fellow, Gergen visited Princeton University, Oxford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Clermont. From 1930 to 1933 he was a Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard University, and from 1933 to 1936 he was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester.
Go to Profile#10254
Johannes Tropfke
1866 - 1939 (73 years)
Johannes Tropfke was a German mathematician and teacher, who is best remembered for his influential work on the history of mathematics Geschichte der Elementarmathematik, which consists of seven volumes.
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Oliver Edmunds Glenn
1878 - Present (148 years)
Oliver Edmunds Glenn was a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who worked on finite groups and invariant theory. He received the degrees of A.B. in 1902 and A.M. in 1903 from Indiana University and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905. He married Alice Thomas Kinnard on Aug. 18, 1903, and they had two sons, William James and Robert Culbertson. Glenn began his career instructing mathematics at Indiana University in 1902 and subsequently taught at Drury College . He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 where he became a full professor ...
Go to Profile#10256
Pia Nalli
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Pia Maria Nalli was an Italian mathematician known for her work on the summability of Fourier series, on Morera's theorem for analytic functions of several variables and for finding the solution to the Fredholm integral equation of the third kind for the first time. Her research interests ranged from algebraic geometry to functional analysis and tensor analysis; she was a speaker at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Go to Profile#10257
Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanovsky was a Russian-Soviet-Uzbek mathematician, founder of the Tashkent school of mathematics. Education and career In 1906 Romanovsky received, under the supervision of A. A. Markov, his doctoral degree from St. Petersburg University. During 1900–1908 he was a student and then a docent at St. Petersburg University. In 1911–1915 he was a senior lecturer and then professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw, in 1915–1918 a professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw in Rostov-on-Don, and from 1918 a professor of probability and mathematical statistics at what is now called the National University of Uzbekistan .
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Iacopo Barsotti
1921 - 1987 (66 years)
Iacopo Barsotti, or Jacopo Barsotti was an Italian mathematician who introduced Barsotti–Tate groups. In 1942 he graduated from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and became assistant professor Francesco Severi at the University of Rome in 1946. In 1948 he emigrated to the US, first as a guest professor at Princeton University, then as a full professor at the University of Pittsburgh and at Brown University. In 1961 he was recalled to Pisa as a teacher first of Geometry, then of Algebra. From 1968 to his death he taught Geometry at the University of Padua. Iacopo was a visiting scholar at ...
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Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina
1899 - 1999 (100 years)
Pelageya Yakovlevna Polubarinova-Kochina was a Soviet and Russian applied mathematician, known for her work on fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, particularly, the application of Fuchsian equations, as well in the history of mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946 and full member in 1958.
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Ernst Jacobsthal
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Ernst Erich Jacobsthal was a German mathematician, and brother to the archaeologist Paul Jacobsthal. In 1906, he earned his PhD at the University of Berlin, where he was a student of Georg Frobenius, Hermann Schwarz and Issai Schur; his dissertation, Anwendung einer Formel aus der Theorie der quadratischen Reste , provided a proof that prime numbers of the form 4n + 1 are the sum of two square numbers. In 1934, he was fired from his professorship at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, because of his Jewish origins. In 1939 he fled to Norway and became after the war a professor at the Norwegian ...
Go to Profile#10261
Evgenii Nikishin
1945 - 1986 (41 years)
Evgenii Mikhailovich Nikishin was a Russian mathematician, who specialized in harmonic analysis. Biography Nikishin, at age of 24, earned his candidate doctorate at Moscow State University, becoming the youngest Candidate Doctorate in a history of MSU and in 1971 his habilitation at the Steklov Institute under Pyotr Ulyanov . In 1977 he became a professor at Moscow State University, where he remained until his death after a long battle with cancer.
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Karel deLeeuw
1930 - 1978 (48 years)
Karel deLeeuw, or de Leeuw , was a mathematics professor at Stanford University, specializing in harmonic analysis and functional analysis. Life and career Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, earning a B.S. degree in 1950. He stayed at Chicago to earn an M.S. degree in mathematics in 1951, then went to Princeton University, where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1954. His thesis, titled "The relative cohomology structure of formations", was written under the direction of Emil Artin.
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Michael Sadowsky
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Michael A. Sadowsky was a researcher in solid mechanics, particularly the mathematical theory of elasticity and materials science. Born in the Russian Empire, he earned his doctorate in 1927 under the applied mathematician Georg Hamel at the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation entitled Spatially periodic solutions in the theory of elasticity . He made contributions in the use of potential functions in elasticity and force transfer mechanisms in composites. Many of his early papers were written in German.
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Henry Jack
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Henry Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician at University College Dundee. The Jack polynomials are named after him. His research dealt with the development of analytic methods to evaluate certain integrals over matrix spaces. His most famous paper relates his integrals to classes of symmetric polynomials important in the theory of the representation of the symmetric group. He discovered a new, natural basis for the symmetric polynomials.
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Robert Remak
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Robert Erich Remak was a German mathematician. He is chiefly remembered for his work in group theory . His other interests included algebraic number theory, mathematical economics and geometry of numbers. Robert Remak was the son of the neurologist Ernst Julius Remak and the grandson of the embryologist Robert Remak. He was murdered in the Holocaust.
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Valerie Myerscough
1942 - 1980 (38 years)
Valerie Patricia Myerscough was a British mathematician and astrophysicist remembered for her precocious talent and great contributions to a range of astrophysical applications, as well as to the evolution of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a very short life.
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Anil Kumar Gain
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Anil Kumar Gain FRSS FCPS was an Indian mathematician and statistician best known for his works on the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient in the field of applied statistics, with his colleague Ronald Fisher. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Henry Ellis Daniels, who was the then President of the Royal Statistical Society. He was honoured as a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
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Marion Cameron Gray
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Marion Gray was a Scottish mathematician who discovered a graph with 54 vertices and 81 edges while working at American Telephone & Telegraph. The graph is commonly known as the Gray graph. Early life and education Marion Gray was born in Ayr, Scotland on 26 March 1902 to Marion and James Gray. She attended Ayr Grammar School and Ayr Academy . In 1919 she entered the University of Edinburgh where she graduated in 1922 with a first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. She continued on at the University for a further two years as a post doctoral student in mathematics where she was supervised by E.T.
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Jerome Cornfield
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Jerome Cornfield was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role in the early development of input-output analysis and linear programming. Cornfield played a crucial role in establishing the causal link between smoking and incidence of lung cancer. He introduced the Rare disease assumption and the "Cornfield condition" that allows one to assess whether an unmeasured confounder can explain away the observed relative risk due to ...
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Bernard Vauquois
1929 - 1985 (56 years)
Bernard Vauquois was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions.
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Józef Schreier
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Józef Schreier was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin, known for his work in functional analysis, group theory and combinatorics. He was a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics and a victim of the Holocaust.
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Thorold Gosset
1869 - 1962 (93 years)
John Herbert de Paz Thorold Gosset was an English lawyer and an amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is noted for discovering and classifying the semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher, and for his generalization of Descartes' theorem on tangent circles to four and higher dimensions.
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Boyd Crumrine Patterson
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Boyd Crumrine Patterson was an American mathematician and the ninth president of Washington & Jefferson College. Patterson was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1902, and graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in 1923, completing his studies in three years. He was a member of the well-known Crumrine family of Washington County and a third-generation W&J graduate. His father, John P. Patterson, was a member of W&J's class of 1885; his grandfather, Boyd Crumrine, a noted local historian, was in Jefferson College's class of 1860. He was also a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fra...
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Samuel Lattès
1873 - 1918 (45 years)
Samuel Lattès was a French mathematician. From 1892 to 1895 he studied at the École Normale Superieure. After this he was a teacher in Algiers, Dijon and Nice. After a promotion to Paris in 1906 he moved first to Montpellier in 1908 and then to Besançon, before he took up a professorship at the University of Toulouse in 1911. He died of typhus in 1918.
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Giovanni Boaga
1902 - 1961 (59 years)
Giovanni Boaga was an Italian mathematician and geodesy professor. He was born in Trieste and died in Tripoli, Libya. His Gauss-Boaga Projection is the standard projection used in Italian topography by the Istituto Geografico Militare.
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Rollo Davidson
1944 - 1970 (26 years)
Rollo Davidson was a probabilist, alpinist, and Fellow-elect of Churchill College, Cambridge, who died aged 25 on Piz Bernina. He is known for his work on semigroups, stochastic geometry, and stochastic analysis, and for the Rollo Davidson Prize, given in his name to early-career probabilists.
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Charles Coulson
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Charles Alfred Coulson was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist. Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.
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Ernesto Laura
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
Ernesto Laura was an Italian mathematician born in Porto Maurizio. Biography He graduated in mathematics in 1901 at the University of Turin, where he was a student of Morera and of Somigliana. He taught rational mechanics at the Universities of Messina, Pavia and Padua.
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Ebenezer Cunningham
1881 - 1977 (96 years)
Ebenezer Cunningham was a British mathematician who is remembered for his research and exposition at the dawn of special relativity. Biography Cunningham went up to St John's College, Cambridge in 1899 and graduated Senior Wrangler in 1902, winning the Smith's Prize in 1904.
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Benjamin Finkel
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Benjamin Franklin Finkel was a mathematician and educator most remembered today as the founder of the American Mathematical Monthly journal. Born in Fairfield County, Ohio and educated in small country schools, Finkel received both a BS and MA from Ohio Northern University, then known as Ohio Normal University . In 1888 he copyrighted A Mathematical Solution Book. The purpose of the book was to provide mathematics teachers a text utilizing a systematic method of problem solving, "The Step Method", representing a chain of reasoning, in logical order, to arrive at the correct result. The first edition was postponed until 1893, due to financial problems of the original publisher.
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Boris Demidovich
1906 - 1977 (71 years)
Boris Pavlovich Demidovich was a Soviet Belarusian mathematician. Family and early life Demidovich was born in a family of teachers. His father, Pavel , was able to get higher education, graduating in 1897 in Vilna; Pavel Demidovich was a teacher throughout his life, first teaching in different towns in the Minsk and Vilna Governorates, and then in Minsk; he was very attached to his family, and to Belarusian beliefs and rituals. He also recorded some anonymous literary works of the Belarusian tradition. In 1908 Pavel Demidovich was nominated member of the Imperial Officer of the Company Enthusiasts science, Anthropology at Moscow University.
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Margherita Piazzola Beloch
1879 - 1976 (97 years)
Margherita Beloch Piazzolla was an Italian mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology and photogrammetry. Biography Beloch was the daughter of the German historian Karl Julius Beloch, who taught ancient history for 50 years at Sapienza University of Rome, and American Bella Bailey.
Go to Profile#10283
Andrea Razmadze
1889 - 1929 (40 years)
Andrea Mikhailovich Razmadze was a Georgian mathematician, and one of the founders of Tbilisi State University, whose Mathematics Institute was renamed in his honor in 1944. The department's scientific journal, published continuously since 1937, was also renamed as the Proceedings of A. Razmadze Mathematical Institute in his honor.
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Annette Smith Burgess
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Annette Smith Burgess was an American medical illustrator and instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life Annette Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1899 to Richard Henry Smith and his wife. She attended public schools in Baltimore. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under Max Brödel. She attended Johns Hopkins University from 1923 to 1926.
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Walter Gage
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Walter Henry Gage, was a Canadian professor and educational icon, widely acknowledged to have had a large impact on students during his 50 year career at the University of British Columbia, where he rose from undergraduate student to university president.
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Anna Mullikin
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Anna Margaret Mullikin was a mathematician who was one of the early investigators of point set theory. She received her BA from Goucher College in 1915 and went on to attend University of Pennsylvania for doctoral work. She was Robert Lee Moore's third student, graduating in 1922 with a dissertation titled Certain Theorems Relating to Plane Connected Point Sets. Her dissertation was published that year in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and subsequently became the catalyst for significant advances in the field. She spent most of her subsequent career as a secondary school mathematics teacher.
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Carl Johannes Thomae
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Carl Johannes Thomae was a German mathematician. Biography Thomae, son of Karl August Thomae and Emilie Gutsmuths, grew up in Laucha an der Unstrut and in 1864 attained a doctorate under Ernst Schering at the University of Göttingen. In 1866 Thomae attained the habilitation qualification at the University of Göttingen and one year later also at the University of Halle. In the year 1874, Thomae married Anna Uhde in Balgstädt in the proximity of his native city Laucha an der Unstrut. Their son Walter Thomae was born one year later on 5 November 1875, but Thomae's wife died 5 days after giving ...
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Stefan Cohn-Vossen
1902 - 1936 (34 years)
Stefan Cohn-Vossen was a mathematician, who was responsible for Cohn-Vossen's inequality and the Cohn-Vossen transformation is also named for him. He proved the first version of the splitting theorem.
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Vasily Zubov
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Zubov was a Russian and Soviet philosopher who wrote on architecture, art, and the history of science based on studies of texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He received a posthumous George Sarton medal from the history of science society in 1963.
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José Sebastião e Silva
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
José Sebastião e Silva was a Portuguese mathematician. Silva graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1937, and in 1942 he received a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura allowing him to travel to Rome, where he studied mathematics with several members of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. After writing a thesis on geometric transformations that was rejected by Federigo Enriques, he wrote a second thesis, on functional analysis, and earned his doctorate in 1949 from the University of Lisbon. He became a professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia from 1951 to 1961, and then ...
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Mayme Logsdon
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Mayme Farmer Irwin Logsdon was an American mathematician known for her research in algebraic geometry and mathematics education. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the University of Chicago mathematics department.
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Fernando de Helguero
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Fernando de Helguero was an Italian mathematician, statistician and pioneer of biostatistics. Fernando de Helguero was born near Florence. He studied mathematics at the University of Rome. After receiving his licentiate degree in 1903, he taught mathematics while he studied natural sciences, biology, statistics, and biometry. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Rome in April 1908. However, he died later the same year in the 1908 Messina earthquake.
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Giovanni Giambelli
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Giovanni Zeno Giambelli was an Italian mathematician who is best known for Giambelli's formula. External links Giovanni Zeno Giambelli bio
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Teresa Cohen
1892 - 1992 (100 years)
Teresa Cohen was an American mathematician. Early life and education She was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Rebecca Sinsheimer and Benjamin Cohen. She graduated in 1909 from the Friends School of Baltimore whose teachers she credited with her interest in mathematics and teaching. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Goucher College in 1912. Cohen was resident fellow at Goucher from 1912 to 1913. In 1915, she earned a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University where she later earned her PhD in 1918. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Mathematics.
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Helen Popova Alderson
1924 - 1972 (48 years)
Helen Popova Alderson was a Soviet and British mathematician and mathematics translator known for her research on quasigroups and on higher reciprocity laws. Life Alderson was born on 14 May 1924 in Baku, then part of the Soviet Union, to a family of two academics from Moscow. Her father, a neurophysiologist, had been a student of Ivan Pavlov. She began studying mathematics at Moscow University in 1937, when she was only 13. She had to break off her studies because of World War II, moving to Paris as a refugee with her family.
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Edgar Krahn
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Edgar Krahn was an Estonian mathematician. Krahn was born in Sootaga , Governorate of Livonia, as a member of the Baltic German minority. He died in Rockville, Maryland, United States. Krahn studied at the University of Tartu and the University of Göttingen. He graduated at Tartu in 1918, received his doctoral degree at Göttingen in 1926, with Richard Courant as his advisor, and his habilitation took place at Tartu in 1928. He is co-author of the Rayleigh–Faber–Krahn inequality.
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Bibhutibhushan Datta
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Bibhutibhushan Datta was a historian of Indian mathematics. Datta came from a poor Bengali family. He was a student of Ganesh Prasad, studied at University of Calcutta and secured the master's degree in mathematics in 1914 and doctorate degree in 1920 in applied mathematics. He taught at Calcutta University where he was lecturer at University Science College, and from 1924 to 1929 he was Rhashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics. During the 1920s and 1930s he created a reputation as an authority on the history of Indian mathematics. He was also deeply interested in Indian philosophy and religion.
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David K. Rubins
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
David Kresz Rubins was an American sculptor and professor. He taught at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and his various works adorn the Indiana State House, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
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Alfreds Meders
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders was a German-Latvian mathematician, and a student of Leopold Kronecker. He was a professor at the Riga Technical University until his mandatory repatriation to Germany in 1939.
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Danilo Blanuša
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Danilo Blanuša was a Croatian Serb mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb. Biography Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary , into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957–58 school year.
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