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,
#10451
Mojżesz Presburger
1904 - 1943 (39 years)
Mojżesz Presburger, or Prezburger, was a Polish Jewish mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He was a student of Alfred Tarski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, and Kazimierz Kuratowski. He is known for, among other things, having invented Presburger arithmetic as a student in 1929 – a form of arithmetic in which one allows induction but removes multiplication, to obtain a decidable theory.
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Jules Molk
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Jules Molk was a French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Prix Binoux for 1913. He was appointed to the chair of applied mathematics at the University of Nancy upon the death of Émile Léonard Mathieu in 1890. From 1902 until his death in 1914, Molk was the leader and editor-in-chief of the publication of a French encyclopedia of pure and applied mathematical sciences based upon Klein's encyclopedia. It was a translation of the volumes in German and required the collaboration of many mathematicians and theoretical physicists from France, Germany, and several other European countries.
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Charles Julien Brianchon
1783 - 1864 (81 years)
Charles Julien Brianchon was a French mathematician and chemist. Life He entered into the École Polytechnique in 1804 at the age of eighteen, and studied under Monge, graduating first in his class in 1808, after which he took up a career as a lieutenant in Napoleon's artillery. Later, in 1818, Brianchon became a professor in the Artillery School of the Royal Guard at Vincennes.
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Erastus L. De Forest
1834 - 1888 (54 years)
Erastus Lyman De Forest was an American mathematician, who studied at Yale University. Life and work Son of a Yale graduate, De Forest graduated himself at Yale University in 1854 and was awarded PhB in 1856. De Forest later vanished for two years while on a trip to New York, and his family feared the worst, but he eventually turned up in Australia, teaching in Melbourne. In 1861, he returned to New Haven and devoted himself to the study of mathematics.
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Al-Nayrizi
865 - 922 (57 years)
Abū’l-‘Abbās al-Faḍl ibn Ḥātim al-Nairīzī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer from Nayriz, now in Fars Province, Iran. Life Little is known of al-Nairīzī, though his nisba refers to the town of Neyriz. He mentioned al-Mu'tadid, the Abbasid caliph, in his works, and so scholars have assumed that al-Nairīzī flourished in Baghdad during this period. Al-Nairīzī wrote a book for al-Mu'tadid on atmospheric phenomena. He died in .
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Johann Faulhaber
1580 - 1635 (55 years)
Johann Faulhaber was a German mathematician, specifically, a Rechenmeister. Born in Ulm, Faulhaber was a trained weaver who later took the role of a surveyor of the city of Ulm. He collaborated with Johannes Kepler and Ludolph van Ceulen. In 1620, while in Ulm, Descartes probably corresponded with Faulhaber to discuss algebraic solutions of polynomial equations
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Abu'l-Hasan al-Uqlidisi
920 - 980 (60 years)
Abu'l Hasan Ahmad ibn Ibrahim Al-Uqlidisi was a Muslim Arab mathematician, who was active in Damascus and Baghdad. He wrote the earliest surviving book on the positional use of the Arabic numerals, Kitab al-Fusul fi al-Hisab al-Hindi around 952. It is especially notable for its treatment of decimal fractions, and that it showed how to carry out calculations without deletions.
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Gustav Conrad Bauer
1820 - 1906 (86 years)
Gustav Conrad Bauer was a German mathematician, known for the Bauer-Muir transformation and Bauer's conic sections. He earned a footnote in the history of science as the doctoral advisor of Heinrich Burkhardt, who became one of the two referees of Albert Einstein's doctoral dissertation.
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Henry Schultz
1893 - 1938 (45 years)
Henry Schultz was an American economist, statistician, and one of the founders of econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Schultz as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Life Henry Schultz was born on September 4, 1893, in a Polish Jewish family in Sharkawshchyna, in the Russian Empire . " Schultz's family - father, mother with their 2 sons - Henry and his brother Joseph moved to New York City in the United States. Henry Schultz completed his primary education, as well as undergraduate studies at the College of the City of New York, receiving a BA in 1916. For gradu...
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Jessie MacWilliams
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Florence Jessie Collinson MacWilliams was an English mathematician who contributed to the field of coding theory, and was one of the first women to publish in the field. MacWilliams' thesis "Combinatorial Problems of Elementary Group Theory" contains one of the most important combinatorial results in coding theory, and is now known as the MacWilliams Identity.
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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
#10468
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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Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar , commonly addressed as P. L. Bhatnagar, was an Indian mathematician known for his contribution to the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook operator used in Lattice Boltzmann methods . Early years and career He was born in Kota in Rajasthan and was the second of five sons. He did his schooling in Rampura and later at Herberter College in Kota. After schooling he went to Maharajah's College in Jaipur where in 1935 he completed BSc with first rank, followed by MSc.
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Giordano Vitale
1633 - 1711 (78 years)
Giordano Vitale or Vitale Giordano was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his theorem on Saccheri quadrilaterals. He may also be referred to as Vitale Giordani, Vitale Giordano da Bitonto, and simply Giordano.
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Alexandru Froda
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Alexandru Froda was a Romanian mathematician with contributions in the field of mathematical analysis, algebra, number theory and rational mechanics. In his 1929 thesis he proved what is now known as Froda's theorem.
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Carl Kostka
1846 - 1921 (75 years)
Carl Gottfried Franz Albert Kostka was a mathematician who introduced Kostka numbers in 1882. He lived and worked in Insterburg. See also Kostka polynomial
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Frank Vigor Morley
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Frank Vigor Morley was an American mathematician, author, editor and publishing executive. As had his two older brothers, Christopher and Felix, Morley attended Haverford College and then studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Morley worked in book publishing in London and New York and played a significant role in the early history of the publishing firm Faber and Faber, where he became a close friend of the poet T. S. Eliot.
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Frances Cope
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Frances Cope, also known as Frances Thorndike , was an American mathematician who published on irregular differential equations. The Thorndike nomogram, a two-dimensional diagram of the Poisson distribution, is named for her.
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Ivan Ivanov
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian-Soviet mathematician who worked in the field of number theory. Together with Georgy Voronoy he continued Pafnuty Chebyshev's work on the subject. Life and work Ivanov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He finished his studies in mathematics at Saint Petersburg University with his candidate thesis, "About prime numbers". In 1891 there followed his master thesis "integral complex numbers", and in 1901 his doctoral thesis, "About some questions in connection with the number of prime numbers".
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Evelyn Fix
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Evelyn Fix was a statistician. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned at M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965.
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Willem Abraham Wythoff
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
Willem Abraham Wythoff, born Wijthoff , was a Dutch mathematician. Biography Wythoff was born in Amsterdam to Anna C. F. Kerkhoven and Abraham Willem Wijthoff, who worked in a sugar refinery. He studied at the University of Amsterdam, and earned his Ph.D. in 1898 under the supervision of Diederik Korteweg.
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Franz Woepcke
1826 - 1864 (38 years)
Franz Woepcke was a German historian, Orientalist and mathematician. He is remembered for publishing editions and translations of medieval Arabic mathematical manuscripts and for his research on the propagation of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in the medieval era.
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Daniel Edwin Rutherford
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Daniel Edwin Rutherford FRSE was a Scottish mathematician, known for his work on the representation theory of symmetric groups. Biography Rutherford completed his secondary education at Perth Academy in 1924 and then, with the aid of a bursary, he went to the University of St Andrews, where he received his B.Sc. in 1927 and his M.A. in 1928 in mathematics. Upon the advice of Herbert Turnbull, Rutherford did his graduate work at the University of Amsterdam, where he wrote a doctorandus thesis under Roland Weitzenböck. Rutherford's dissertation was published in 1932 as Modular Invariants in the Cambridge Tracts.
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John Macnaghten Whittaker
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
John Macnaghten Whittaker FRS FRSE LLD was a British mathematician and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield from 1953 to 1965. Life Whittaker was born 7 March 1905 in Cambridge, the son of mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker and his wife, Mary Ferguson Macnaghten Boyd .
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André Tacquet
1612 - 1660 (48 years)
André Tacquet was a Brabantian mathematician and Jesuit priest. Tacquet adhered to the methods of the geometry of Euclid and the philosophy of Aristotle and opposed the method of indivisibles. Life André Tacquet was born in Antwerp, and entered the Jesuit Order in 1629. From 1631 to 1635, he studied mathematics, physics and logic at Leuven. Two of his teachers were Grégoire de Saint-Vincent and Francois d'Aguilon.
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Louis Couffignal
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Louis Pierre Couffignal was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer, born in Monflanquin. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School.
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Jean Prestet
1648 - 1690 (42 years)
Jean Prestet was a French Oratorian priest and mathematician who contributed to the fields of combinatorics and number theory. Prestet grew up poor. As a teenager, he worked as a servant of the Oratory of Jesus in Paris. He was promoted to scribe for Nicolas Malebranche, who taught him mathematics.
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Robert Tucker
1832 - 1905 (73 years)
Robert Tucker was an English mathematician, who was secretary of the London Mathematical Society for more than 30 years. Life and work Son of a soldier who fought in the Peninsular War, Tucker studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was 35th wrangler in 1855. He mastered mathematics at University College London from 1865 to 1899.
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Claude Mylon
1618 - 1660 (42 years)
Claude Mylon was a French mathematician and member of the Académie Parisienne and the Académie des Sciences.
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Gemma Frisius
1508 - 1555 (47 years)
Gemma Frisius was a Dutch physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker. He created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation. Gemma's rings, an astronomical instrument, are named after him. Along with Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, Frisius is often considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography, and significantly helped lay the foundations for the school's golden age .
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