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,
#10301
Gustav Roch
1839 - 1866 (27 years)
Gustav Adolph Roch was a German mathematician who made significant contributions to the theory of Riemann surfaces. His promising career was cut short by untimely death at the age of 26. Biography Born in Leipzig, Roch attended the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden, initially focusing on chemistry, encouraged by his father. However the mathematician Oscar Schlömilch identified his exceptional talents and guided him towards a mathematical career. Combining studies at the Polytechnic Institute with private studies at another institute enabled Roch to be already publishing original research on t...
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Charles Méray
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Hugues Charles Robert Méray was a French mathematician. He is noted as the first to publish an arithmetical theory of irrational numbers. His work did not have much of a role in the history of mathematics because France, at that time, was less interested in such matters than Germany.
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Julian Sochocki
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Julian Karol Sochocki was a Polish-Russian mathematician. His name is sometimes transliterated from Russian in several different ways . Life and work Sochocki was born in Warsaw under the Russian domination to a Polish family, where he attended state gymnasium. In 1860 he registered at the physico-mathematical department of St Petersburg University. His study there was interrupted for the period 1860–1865 because of his involvement with Polish patriotic movement: he had to return to Warsaw to escape prosecution.
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John Leslie
1766 - 1832 (66 years)
Sir John Leslie, FRSE KH was a Scottish mathematician and physicist best remembered for his research into heat. Leslie gave the first modern account of capillary action in 1802 and froze water using an air-pump in 1810, the first artificial production of ice.
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Jordanus de Nemore
1225 - 1235 (10 years)
Jordanus de Nemore , also known as Jordanus Nemorarius and Giordano of Nemi, was a thirteenth-century European mathematician and scientist. The literal translation of Jordanus de Nemore would indicate that he was an Italian. He wrote treatises on at least 6 different important mathematical subjects: the science of weights; “algorismi” treatises on practical arithmetic; pure arithmetic; algebra; geometry; and stereographic projection. Most of these treatises exist in several versions or reworkings from the Middle Ages. We know nothing about him personally, other than the approximate date of hi...
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Olry Terquem
1782 - 1862 (80 years)
Olry Terquem was a French mathematician. He is known for his works in geometry and for founding two scientific journals, one of which was the first journal about the history of mathematics. He was also the pseudonymous author of a sequence of letters advocating radical reform in Judaism. He was French Jewish.
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Aleksander Rajchman
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Aleksander Michał Rajchman was a mathematician of the Warsaw School of Mathematics of the Interwar period. He had origins in the Lwów School of Mathematics and contributed to real analysis, probability and mathematical statistics.
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Ernest William Brown
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Ernest William Brown FRS was an English mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States and became a naturalised American citizen in 1923. His life's work was the study of the Moon's motion and the compilation of extremely accurate lunar tables. He also studied the motion of the planets and calculated the orbits of Trojan asteroids.
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Jean Cavaillès
1903 - 1944 (41 years)
Jean Cavaillès was a French philosopher and logician who specialized in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He took part in the French Resistance within the Libération movement and was arrested by the Gestapo on 17 February 1944 and shot on 4 April 1944.
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Stanisław Gołąb
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Stanisław Gołąb was a Polish mathematician from Kraków, working in particular on the field of affine geometry. In 1932, he proved that the perimeter of the unit disc respect to a given metric can take any value in between 6 and 8, and that these extremal values are obtained if and only if the unit disc is an affine regular hexagon resp. a parallelogram.
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Cassius Jackson Keyser
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Cassius Jackson Keyser was an American mathematician of pronounced philosophical inclinations. Life Keyser's initial higher education was at North West Ohio Normal School , then became a school teacher and principal. In 1885, he married a fellow student at the Normal School, Ella Maud Crow. He completed a second undergraduate degree, a BSc, at the University of Missouri in 1892. After teaching there, at the New York State Normal School , and at Washington University in St. Louis, he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, earning the MA in 1896 and the PhD in 1901. He spent th...
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Ethel M. Elderton
1878 - 1954 (76 years)
Ethel Mary Elderton was a British eugenics researcher who worked with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Biography Elderton was born on 31 December 1878 in Fulham, London. Her father, William Alexander Elderton was a private tutor and her mother, Sarah Isabella, née Lapidge was school headmistress. The couple had eight children, of which Elderton was the third and the eldest girl. Her eldest brother was William Palin Elderton, a statistician who worked as an actuary and became head of Equitable Life Assurance Society.
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John Colson
1680 - 1760 (80 years)
John Colson was an English clergyman, mathematician, and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Life John Colson was educated at Lichfield School before becoming an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, though he did not take a degree there. He became a schoolmaster at Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1713. He was Vicar of Chalk, Kent from 1724 to 1740. He relocated to Cambridge and lectured at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. From 1739 to 1760, he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He ...
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Charles Auguste Briot
1817 - 1882 (65 years)
Charles Auguste Briot was a French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions. The Académie des Sciences awarded him the Poncelet Prize in 1882. See also Holomorphic functionTimeline of abelian varieties
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Dugald Stewart
1753 - 1828 (75 years)
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and of Adam Smith. Trained in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, his lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.
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Pedro Nunes
1502 - 1578 (76 years)
Pedro Nunes was a Portuguese mathematician, cosmographer, and professor, probably from a New Christian family. Considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, Nunes is best known for his contributions to the nautical sciences , which he approached, for the first time, in a mathematical way. He was the first to propose the idea of a loxodrome, and was the inventor of several measuring devices, including the nonius , named after his Latin surname.
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Maurice Solovine
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.
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Robert Adrain
1775 - 1843 (68 years)
Robert Adrain was an Irish political exile who won renown as a mathematician in the United States. He left Ireland after leading republican insurgents in the Rebellion of 1798, and settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. With Nathaniel Bowditch, he shares the distinction of being the first scholar to publish original mathematical research in America. This included his formulation of the method of least squares while working on a surveying problem for which he is chiefly remembered. His fields of applied mathematical interest included physics, astronomy and geodesy. Many of his mathematical i...
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Diederik Korteweg
1848 - 1941 (93 years)
Diederik Johannes Korteweg was a Dutch mathematician. He is now best remembered for his work on the Korteweg–de Vries equation, together with Gustav de Vries. Early life and education Diederik Korteweg's father was a judge in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Korteweg received his schooling there, studying at a special academy which prepared students for a military career. However, he decided against a military career and, making the first of his changes of direction, he began his studies at the Polytechnical School of Delft. Korteweg originally intended to become an engineer but, although he ma...
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Irénée-Jules Bienaymé
1796 - 1878 (82 years)
Irénée-Jules Bienaymé was a French statistician. He built on the legacy of Laplace generalizing his least squares method. He contributed to the fields of probability and statistics, and to their application to finance, demography and social sciences. In particular, he formulated the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality concerning the law of large numbers and the Bienaymé formula for the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables.
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David Bierens de Haan
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
David Bierens de Haan was a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Biography Bierens de Haan was a son of the rich merchant Abraham Pieterszoon de Haan and Catharina Jacoba Bierens . In 1843 he completed a study in the exact sciences and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1847 under Gideon Janus Verdam for the work . After this he became a teacher of physics and mathematics at a gymnasium in Deventer. In 1852 he married Johanna Catharina Justina de Schepper in Deventer.
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Stanley Skewes
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Stanley Skewes was a South African mathematician, best known for his discovery of the Skewes's number in 1933. He was one of John Edensor Littlewood's students at Cambridge University. Skewes's numbers contributed to the refinement of the theory of prime numbers.
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Charles Jasper Joly
1864 - 1906 (42 years)
Charles Jasper Joly was an Irish mathematician and astronomer who became Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Life He was born at St Catherine's Rectory, Hop Hill, Tullamore, County Offaly, the eldest of six children of Rev. John Swift Joly and Elizabeth Slator .
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Henri Dulac
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Henri Claudius Rosarius Dulac was a French mathematician. Life Born in Fayence, France, Dulac graduated from École Polytechnique and obtained a Doctorate in Mathematics. He started to teach a class of mathematic analysis at University, in Grenoble , Algiers and Poitiers . Holder of a pulpit in pure mathematics in the Sciences University of Lyon in 1911, his teaching was suspended during the first world war and he had to serve as officer in the French army. After the war, he became holder of a pulpit of differential and integral calculus and also taught in École Centrale Lyon. He became examiner at École Polytechnique and President of the admission jury.
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Sergey Chaplygin
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Sergey Alexeyevich Chaplygin was a Russian and Soviet physicist, mathematician, and mechanical engineer. He is known for mathematical formulas such as Chaplygin's equation and for a hypothetical substance in cosmology called Chaplygin gas, named after him.
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Eugen Netto
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Eugen Otto Erwin Netto was a German mathematician. He was born in Halle and died in Giessen. Netto's theorem, on the dimension-preserving properties of continuous bijections, is named for Netto. Netto published this theorem in 1878, in response to Georg Cantor's proof of the existence of discontinuous bijections between the unit interval and unit square. His proof was not fully rigorous, but its errors were later repaired.
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Gyula Vályi
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Gyula Vályi was a Hungarian mathematician and theoretical physicist, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, known for his work on mathematical analysis, geometry, and number theory. Life and work Vályi was born in Marosvásárhely, the town of the famous mathematicians Farkas Bolyai and János Bolyai. He attended the Reformed College in Marosvásárhely . After graduating from school, he went to Kolozsvár, the capital of Transylvania, where he attended the Franz Joseph University.
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Raymond Clare Archibald
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Raymond Clare Archibald was a prominent Canadian-American mathematician. He is known for his work as a historian of mathematics, his editorships of mathematical journals and his contributions to the teaching of mathematics.
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William Wilson Hunter
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
Sir William Wilson Hunter was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service. He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, and which was eventually published in nine volumes in 1881, then fourteen, and later as a twenty-six volume set after his death.
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Chauncey Wright
1830 - 1875 (45 years)
Chauncey Wright was an American philosopher and mathematician, who was an influential early defender of Darwinism and an important influence on American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
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Roland Sprague
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Roland Percival Sprague was a German mathematician, known for the Sprague–Grundy theorem and for being the first mathematician to find a perfect squared square. Biography With two mathematicians, Thomas Bond Sprague and Hermann Amandus Schwarz, as grandfathers, Roland Sprague was also a great-grandson of the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and a great-grandson of the musical instrument maker Nathan Mendelssohn .
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Willem Jacob van Stockum
1910 - 1944 (34 years)
Willem Jacob van Stockum was a Dutch mathematician who made an important contribution to the early development of general relativity. Biography Van Stockum was born in Hattem in the Netherlands. His father was a mechanically talented officer in the Dutch Navy. After the family relocated to Ireland in the late 1920s, Willem studied mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned a gold medal. He went on to earn an M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.
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Sophie Bryant
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Sophie Willock Bryant was an Anglo-Irish mathematician, educator, feminist and activist. She was the first woman to receive a DSc in England; one of the first to serve on a Royal Commission and on the Senate of the University of London.
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Samuel Klingenstierna
1698 - 1765 (67 years)
Samuel Klingenstierna was a renowned Swedish mathematician and scientist. He started his career as a lawyer but soon moved to natural philosophy. As a student he gave lectures on the then novel mathematical analysis of Newton and Leibniz. Klingenstierna was a professor of geometry at Uppsala University from 1728. In 1750 he moved to physics but retired two years later to become an advisor to the Commander of Artillery. In 1756 he assumed the post of the tutor of the Crown Prince, the future king Gustav III.
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Alfred North Whitehead
#10336
Edward Burns Ross
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Edward Burns Ross FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician who served as a professor of mathematics at the Madras Christian College. Life Ross was born on 28 September 1881 in Maud, Aberdeenshire the son of Ann and William Ross, an Inland Revenue supervisor. Following his father's death in 1887, his school teacher mother moved the family to Edinburgh in 1888. He was then educated at George Watson's School and was school dux in 1898. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Edinburgh graduating with an MA in 1902. He then continued with postgraduate studies, using a Fergu...
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Rudolf Luneburg
1903 - 1949 (46 years)
Rudolf Karl Lüneburg , after his emigration at first Lueneburg, later Luneburg, sometimes misspelled Luneberg or Lunenberg His work included an analysis of the geometry of visual space as expected from physiology and the assumption that the angle of vergence provides a constant measure of distance. From these premises he concluded that near field visual space is hyperbolic.
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Alfred Cardew Dixon
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Sir Alfred Cardew Dixon, 1st Baronet Warford FRS was an English mathematician. Biography Dixon was born on 22 May 1865 in Northallerton, Yorkshire, England. He studied at the University of London and graduated with an MA. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1883 and graduated as Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1886. In 1888, Dixon was awarded the second Smith's Prize, and also appointed a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He took the degree of Sc.D. at Cambridge University in 1897. He was Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College, Galway, from 1893 to 1901. In 1901 h...
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Matthew O'Brien
1814 - 1855 (41 years)
Matthew O'Brien was an Irish mathematician. Life and work O'Brien was born at Ennis son of a medical doctor. In 1830 he was admitted in the Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1834 in the Caius College where he graduated in 1838 as third wrangler, as pupil of William Hopkins. During a brief period he was fellow of Caius College.
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Christian August Hausen
1693 - 1743 (50 years)
Christian August Hausen was a German mathematician who is known for his research on electricity. Biography Hausen studied mathematics at the University of Wittenberg and received his master's degree in 1712. He became an extraordinary professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig at the age of 21 and later became an ordinary professor.
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Irving Stringham
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Washington Irving Stringham was an American mathematician born in Yorkshire, New York. He was the first person to denote the natural logarithm is commonplace in digital calculators today. , made up of the initial letters of logarithm and of natural or Napierian."
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Wesley S. B. Woolhouse
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Wesley Stoker Barker Woolhouse was an English actuary with diverse interests in music theory, the design of steam locomotives, measurements, and many other fields, publishing books in all these fields.
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Pietro Cossali
1748 - 1815 (67 years)
Pietro Cossali was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer. From 1787 to 1805, he taught physics at the University of Parma. In 1805, Napoleon named Cossali a professor of higher calculus at the University of Padua.
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Georg Feigl
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Georg Feigl was a German mathematician. Life and work Georg Feigl started studying mathematics and physics at the University of Jena in 1909. In 1918, he obtained his doctorate under Paul Koebe. From 1928 he was editor of the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik . In 1935 he became a full professor at the University of Breslau. In 1937—1941, he was an editor of the journal Deutsche Mathematik.
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Jacobus Golius
1596 - 1667 (71 years)
Jacob Golius born Jacob van Gool was an Orientalist and mathematician based at the University of Leiden in Netherlands. He is primarily remembered as an Orientalist. He published Arabic texts in Arabic at Leiden, and did Arabic-to-Latin translations. His best-known work is an Arabic-to-Latin dictionary, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum , which he sourced for the most part from the Sihah dictionary of Al-Jauhari and the Qamous dictionary of Fairuzabadi.
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Karl Mollweide
1774 - 1825 (51 years)
Karl Brandan Mollweide was a German mathematician and astronomer who taught in Halle and Leipzig. In trigonometry, he rediscovered the formula now known as Mollweide's formula. He invented a map projection called the Mollweide projection.
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William McFadden Orr
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
William McFadden Orr, FRS was a British and Irish mathematician. He was born in Comber, County Down and educated at Methodist College Belfast and Queen's College, Belfast under John Purser, before entering St John's College, Cambridge and graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1888. He was elected a fellow of his college, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1909.
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Sylvia Skan
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sylvia Winifred Skan was an English applied mathematician. She is known for her work on aerodynamics, and in particular for the Falkner–Skan boundary layer in the fluid mechanics of airflow past a wedge-shaped obstacle, which she wrote about with V. M. Falkner in 1930, and for the associated Falkner–Skan equation.
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Jérôme Franel
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Jérôme Franel was a Swiss mathematician who specialised in analytic number theory. He is mainly known through a 1924 paper, in which he establishes the equivalence of the Riemann hypothesis to a statement on the size of the discrepancy in the Farey sequences, and which is directly followed by a development on the same subject by Edmund Landau.
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James Short
1710 - 1768 (58 years)
James Short FRS was a Scottish mathematician and manufacturer of optical instruments, principally telescopes. During his 35-year career as a telescope-maker he produced approximately 1,360 scientific instruments.
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