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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#1051
Michael G. Crandall
#12607
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Grain Crandall is an American mathematician, specializing in differential equations. Mathematical career In 1962 Crandall earned a baccalaureate in engineering physics from University of California, Berkeley, changed to mathematics, earning a master's in 1964 and a PhD in 1965 under Heinz Cordes at Berkeley, with a thesis that solved a problem in celestial mechanics posed by Carl Ludwig Siegel; the thesis title is Two families of plane solutions of the four body problem. In 1965 he was an instructor at Berkeley, in 1966 an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1969 at the University of California, Los Angeles , where he was a professor from 1973 to 1976.
Go to Profile#1052
Christophe Soulé
#17803
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Christophe Soulé is a French mathematician working in arithmetic geometry. Education Soulé started his studies in 1970 at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Paris in 1979 under the supervision of Max Karoubi and Roger Godement, with a dissertation titled K-Théorie des anneaux d'entiers de corps de nombres et cohomologie étale.
Go to Profile#1053
Steven Brams
#11814
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Steven J. Brams is an American game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting, as well as extensions of approval voting to multiple-winner elections to give proportional representation of different interests.
Go to Profile#1054
Thomas Banchoff
#19959
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Thomas Francis Banchoff is an American mathematician specializing in geometry. He is a professor at Brown University, where he has taught since 1967. He is known for his research in differential geometry in three and four dimensions, for his efforts to develop methods of computer graphics in the early 1990s, and most recently for his pioneering work in methods of undergraduate education utilizing online resources.
Go to Profile#1055
Israel Michael Sigal
#19087
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Israel Michael Sigal is a Canadian mathematician specializing in mathematical physics. He is a professor at the University of Toronto Department of Mathematics. He was an invited speaker at International Congress of Mathematicians, Kyoto—1990 and in International Congress on Mathematical Physics, Lausanne—1979, W. Berlin—1981, Marselle—1986.
Go to Profile#1056
Otto Forster
#22983
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Otto Forster is a German mathematician. Education and career Forster received his Diplom in 1960 from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he received in 1961 his doctorate. His thesis Banachalgebren stetiger Funktionen auf kompakten Rumen was supervised by Karl Stein. In 1965 Forster also completed his habilitation in Munich. After spending the academic year 1966–1967 at the Institute for Advanced Study and the academic year 1967–1968 as a substitute professor at the University of Göttingen, he became a full professor at the University of Regensburg in 1968. In 1968–1969 he was a visiting professor at the University of Geneva.
Go to Profile#1057
Grace Bates
#12015
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Grace Elizabeth Bates was an American mathematician and one of few women in the United States to be granted a Ph.D. in mathematics in the 1940s. She became an emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College. Bates specialized in algebra and probability theory, and she co-authored two textbooks: The Real Number System and Modern Algebra, Second Course. Throughout her own education, Bates overcame obstructions to her pursuit of knowledge, opening the way for future women learners.
Go to Profile#1058
Mariusz Wodzicki
#21398
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Mariusz Wodzicki is a Polish mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, whose works primarily focus on analysis, algebraic k-theory, noncommutative geometry, and algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#1059
Jeffrey H. Smith
#22826
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jeffrey Henderson Smith is a former professor of mathematics at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, under the supervision of Daniel Kan, and was promoted to full professor at Purdue in 1999. His primary research interest is algebraic topology; his best-cited work consists of two papers in the Annals of Mathematics on "nilpotence and stable homotopy".
Go to Profile#1060
Eric Friedlander
#24814
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Eric Mark Friedlander is an American mathematician who is working in algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, algebraic K-theory and representation theory. Friedlander graduated from Swarthmore College with bachelor's degree in 1965 and in 1970 received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Michael Artin, . He was a postdoctoral instructor at Princeton University: a lecturer in 1971 and assistant professor in 1972. From 1973 to 1974, he was, through the US exchange program, at France, in particular at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. In ...
Go to Profile#1061
Jerald Ericksen
#11263
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Jerald LaVerne Ericksen was an American mathematician specializing in continuum mechanics. Biography Ericksen was born in Portland, Oregon. His father Adolf worked at a Portland creamery and became adept at judging the quality of butter. Later his father acquired a small creamery in Vancouver, Washington where the family moved. Jerald's brother A. Erwin was born there, and Jerald helped out in the creamery.
Go to Profile#1062
Leo Harrington
#8698
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Leo Anthony Harrington is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who works in recursion theory, model theory, and set theory. Having retired from being a Mathematician, Professor Leo Harrington is now a Philosopher.
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Fritz Gesztesy
#23076
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Gesztesy is a well-known Austrian-American mathematical physicist and Professor of Mathematics at Baylor University, known for his important contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics , ordinary and partial differential operators, and completely integrable systems . He has authored more than 300 publications on mathematics and physics.
Go to Profile#1064
Zvonimir Janko
#21155
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
Zvonimir Janko was a Croatian mathematician who was the eponym of the Janko groups, sporadic simple groups in group theory. The first few sporadic simple groups were discovered by Émile Léonard Mathieu, which were then called the Mathieu groups. It was after 90 years of the discovery of the last Mathieu group that Zvonimir Janko constructed a new sporadic simple group in 1964. In his honour, this group is now called J1. This discovery launched the modern theory of sporadic groups and it was an important milestone in the classification of finite simple groups.
Go to Profile#1065
Xinyi Yuan
#22645
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Xinyi Yuan is a Chinese mathematician who is currently a professor of mathematics at Peking University working in number theory, arithmetic geometry, and automorphic forms. In particular, his work focuses on arithmetic intersection theory, algebraic dynamics, Diophantine equations and special values of L-functions.
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Arnaud Beauville
#21610
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Arnaud Beauville is a French mathematician, whose research interest is algebraic geometry. Beauville earned his doctorate from Paris Diderot University in 1977, with a thesis regarding Prym varieties and the Schottky problem, under supervision of Jean-Louis Verdier.
Go to Profile#1067
Ngaiming Mok
#19614
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Ngaiming Mok is a Hong Kong mathematician specializing in complex differential geometry and algebraic geometry. He is currently a professor at the University of Hong Kong. After graduating from St. Paul's Co-educational College in Hong Kong in 1975, Mok studied at the University of Chicago and Yale University, obtaining his M.A. in Mathematics from Yale in 1978. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University under the guidance of Yum-Tong Siu. He taught at Princeton University, Columbia University and the University of Paris-Saclay before joining the faculty of the University of Hong Kong in 1994.
Go to Profile#1068
Stefan Müller
#16647
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Stefan Müller is a German mathematician and currently a professor at the University of Bonn. He has been one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in 1996 and was acting there until 2008.
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Nicholas Higham
#17875
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Nicholas John Higham FRS is a British numerical analyst. He is Royal Society Research Professor and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.
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Don Coppersmith
#7284
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Don Coppersmith is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis. He also improved the quantum Fourier transform discovered by Peter Shor in the same year . He has also worked on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms, the cryptanalysis of RSA, methods for rapid matrix multiplication and IBM's MARS cipher. He is also a co-designer of the SEAL and Scream ciphers.
Go to Profile#1071
Alexander Varchenko
#22175
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alexander Nikolaevich Varchenko is a Soviet and Russian mathematician working in geometry, topology, combinatorics and mathematical physics. Education and career From 1964 to 1966 Varchenko studied at the Moscow Kolmogorov boarding school No. 18 for gifted high school students, where Andrey Kolmogorov and Ya. A. Smorodinsky were lecturing mathematics and physics. Varchenko graduated from Moscow State University in 1971. He was a student of Vladimir Arnold. Varchenko defended his Ph.D. thesis Theorems on Topological Equisingularity of Families of Algebraic Sets and Maps in 1974 and Doctor of S...
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Joseph A. Wolf
#25027
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Joseph Albert Wolf was an American mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley. Life and career Wolf graduated from at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and with his master's degree in 1957 and his Ph.D. under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern in 1959 . From 1960 to 1962, as a post-doctoral researcher, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . In 1962 he was assistant professor and since 1966 he has been professor at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#1073
Evgenii Landis
#11386
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Evgenii Mikhailovich Landis was a Soviet mathematician who worked mainly on partial differential equations. Life Landis was born in Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. He was Jewish. He studied and worked at the Moscow State University, where his advisor was Alexander Kronrod, and later Ivan Petrovsky. In 1946, together with Kronrod, he rediscovered Sard's lemma, unknown in USSR at the time.
Go to Profile#1074
George Nemhauser
#12929
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.
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Hannah Fry
#8021
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Hannah Fry is a British mathematician, author, and radio and television presenter. She is Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. She studies the patterns of human behaviour, such as interpersonal relationships and dating, and how mathematics can apply to them. Fry delivered the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
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Masatake Kuranishi
#12818
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Masatake Kuranishi was a Japanese mathematician who worked on several complex variables, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. Education and career Kuranishi received in 1952 his Ph.D. from Nagoya University. He became a lecturer there in 1951, an associate professor in 1952, and a full professor in 1958. From 1955 to 1956 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1956 to 1961 he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. He became a professo...
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János Pach
#15744
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
János Pach is a mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of combinatorics and discrete and computational geometry. Biography Pach was born and grew up in Hungary. He comes from a noted academic family: his father, was a well-known historian, and his mother Klára was a university mathematics teacher; his maternal aunt Vera T. Sós and her husband Pál Turán are two of the best-known Hungarian mathematicians.
Go to Profile#1078
Rose Whelan Sedgewick
#9617
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Rose Whelan Sedgewick was an American mathematician. She was the first person to earn a PhD in mathematics from Brown University, in 1929. Her subsequent career in mathematics included assistant professorships at the University of Rochester, the University of Connecticut, Hillyer College, and the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#1079
Marcelo Viana
#19883
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Marcelo Miranda Viana da Silva is a Brazilian mathematician working in dynamical systems theory. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1993. He received the TWAS Prize in 1998 and in 2005 he was awarded the inaugural ICTP Ramanujan Prize for his research achievements.
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Jean-Louis Nicolas
#17826
Overall Influence
Jean-Louis Nicolas is a French number theorist. He is the namesake of the Erdős–Nicolas numbers, and was a frequent co-author of Erdős, who would take over the desk of Nicolas' wife Anne-Marie whenever he would visit. Nicolas is also known for his research on partitions, and for his unusual proof that there exist infinitely many n for which is Euler's totient function and γ is Euler's constant: he proved this bound unconditionally by providing two different proofs, one in the case that the Riemann hypothesis holds and another in the case that it fails.
Go to Profile#1081
Vladimir A. Zorich
#20543
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Vladimir Antonovich Zorich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He was the author of the textbook "Mathematical Analysis" for students of mathematical and physical specialties of higher education, which was reprinted several times and translated into many languages.
Go to Profile#1082
Paulo Ribenboim
#17776
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Paulo Ribenboim is a Brazilian-Canadian mathematician who specializes in number theory. Biography Ribenboim was born into a Jewish family in Recife, Brazil. He received his BSc in mathematics from the University of São Paulo in 1948, and won a fellowship to study with Jean Dieudonné in France at the University of Nancy in the early 1950s, where he became a close friend of Alexander Grothendieck. He has contributed to the theory of ideals and of valuations.
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Michael Hutchings
#22611
Overall Influence
Michael Lounsbery Hutchings is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for proving the double bubble conjecture on the shape of two-chambered soap bubbles, and for his work on circle-valued Morse theory and on embedded contact homology, which he defined.
Go to Profile#1084
Olga Holtz
#15064
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Olga Holtz is a Russian mathematician specializing in numerical analysis. She received the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award in 2006 and the European Mathematical Society Prize . Since 2008, she is a member of the Young Academy of Germany.
Go to Profile#1085
Miklós Simonovits
#22590
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Miklós Simonovits is a Hungarian mathematician who currently works at the Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest and is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is on the advisory board of the journal Combinatorica. He is best known for his work in extremal graph theory and was awarded Széchenyi Prize in 2014. Among other things, he discovered the method of progressive induction which he used to describe graphs which do not contain a predetermined graph and the number of edges is close to maximal. With Lovász, he gave a randomized algorithm using O separation calls to approximate...
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David B. A. Epstein
#13754
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David Bernard Alper Epstein FRS is a mathematician known for his work in hyperbolic geometry, 3-manifolds, and group theory, amongst other fields. He co-founded the University of Warwick mathematics department with Christopher Zeeman and is founding editor of the journal Experimental Mathematics.
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Mark Haiman
#24397
Overall Influence
Mark David Haiman is a mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley who proved the Macdonald positivity conjecture for Macdonald polynomials. He received his Ph.D in 1984 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the direction of Gian-Carlo Rota. Previous to his appointment at Berkeley, he held positions at the University of California, San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Ole Barndorff-Nielsen
#14162
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Ole Eiler Barndorff-Nielsen was a Danish statistician who has contributed to many areas of statistical science. Education and career He was born in Copenhagen, and became interested in statistics when, as a student of actuarial mathematics at the University of Copenhagen, he worked part-time at the Department of Biostatistics of the Danish State Serum Institute. He graduated from the University of Aarhus in 1960, where he has spent most of his academic life, and where he became professor of statistics in 1973. However, in 1962-1963 and 1963-1964 he stayed at the University of Minnesota and S...
Go to Profile#1089
Bernard Teissier
#21100
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Bernard Teissier is a French mathematician and a member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group. He has made major contributions to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, specifically to singularity theory, multiplicity theory and valuation theory.
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Paul Cohn
#23085
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Paul Moritz Cohn FRS was Astor Professor of Mathematics at University College London, 1986–1989, and author of many textbooks on algebra. His work was mostly in the area of algebra, especially non-commutative rings.
Go to Profile#1091
Frans Oort
#26740
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Frans Oort is a Dutch mathematician who specializes in algebraic geometry. Career Oort studied from 1952 to 1958 at Leiden University, where he graduated with a thesis on elliptic curves. He received his doctorate in 1961 in Leiden from and Jaap Murre with thesis Reducible and Multiple Algebraic Curves, but had previously studied under Jean-Pierre Serre in Paris and Aldo Andreotti in Pisa. Oort was from 1961 at the University of Amsterdam, where he became a professor in 1967. In 1977, until his retirement in 2000, he was a professor at Utrecht University.
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Roger Heath-Brown
#19774
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Rodney "Roger" Heath-Brown is a British mathematician working in the field of analytic number theory. Education He was an undergraduate and graduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge; his research supervisor was Alan Baker.
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Jean Taylor
#22170
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jean Ellen Taylor is an American mathematician who is a professor emerita at Rutgers University and visiting faculty at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Biography Taylor was born in Northern California. She did her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, graduating summa cum laude with an A.B. in 1966. She began her graduate studies in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, but after receiving an M.Sc. she switched to mathematics under the mentorship of Shiing-Shen Chern and then transferred to the University of Warwick and received a second M.Sc.
Go to Profile#1094
Laurent C. Siebenmann
#24392
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Laurent Carl Siebenmann is a Canadian mathematician based at the Université de Paris-Sud at Orsay, France. After working for several years as a Professor at Orsay he became a Directeur de Recherches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1976. He is a topologist who works on manifolds and who co-discovered the Kirby–Siebenmann class.
Go to Profile#1095
Victor J. Katz
#19932
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Victor Joseph Katz is an American mathematician, historian of mathematics, and teacher known for using the history of mathematics in teaching mathematics. Biography Katz received in 1963 from Princeton University a bachelor's degree and in 1968 from Brandeis University a Ph.D. in mathematics under Maurice Auslander with thesis The Brauer group of a regular local ring. He became at Federal City College an assistant professor and then in 1973 an associate professor and, after the merger of Federal City College into the University of the District of Columbia in 1977, a full professor there in 1980.
Go to Profile#1096
Gopinath Kallianpur
#11587
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Gopinath Kallianpur was an Indian American mathematician and statistician who became the first director of the Indian Statistical Institute under its new Memorandum of Association. During his tenure as the director the new centre of ISI at Bangalore, Karnataka was founded.
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Jan Denef
#19697
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jan Denef is a Belgian mathematician. He is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven . Denef obtained his PhD from KU Leuven in 1975 with a thesis on Hilbert's tenth problem; his advisors were Louis Philippe Bouckaert and Willem Kuijk.
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Jean-Marie Souriau
#15367
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Jean-Marie Souriau was a French mathematician. He was one of the pioneers of modern symplectic geometry. Education and career Souriau started studying mathematics in 1942 at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1946 he was a research fellow of CNRS and an engineer at ONERA. His PhD thesis, defended in 1952 under the supervision of Joseph Pérès and André Lichnerowicz, was entitled "Sur la stabilité des avions" .
Go to Profile#1099
Edward L. Kaplan
#17643
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Edward Lynn Kaplan was a mathematician most famous for the Kaplan–Meier estimator, developed together with Paul Meier. Biography Edward Lynn Kaplan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1920. His parents were Eugene V. Kaplan and Frances Rhodes Kaplan . He graduated from Swissvale High School in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, in 1937. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1937 to 1941 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941. Three times—in 1939, 1940, and 1941—he was one of the five honorees in the nationwide William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition conducted by the American Mathematical Association.
Go to Profile#1100
Matilde Marcolli
#19274
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Matilde Marcolli is an Italian and American mathematical physicist. She has conducted research work in areas of mathematics and theoretical physics; obtained the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Marcolli has authored and edited numerous books in the field. She is currently the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
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