The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10501
Eudoxus of Cnidus
408 BC - 355 BC (53 years)
Eudoxus of Cnidus was an ancient Greek astronomer, mathematician, doctor, and lawmaker. He was a student of Archytas and Plato. All of his original works are lost, though some fragments are preserved in Hipparchus' Commentaries on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus. Spherics by Theodosius of Bithynia may be based on a work by Eudoxus.
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Harold Jeffreys
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS was a British geophysicist who made significant contributions to mathematics and statistics. His book, Theory of Probability, which was first published in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the objective Bayesian view of probability.
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René-Louis Baire
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
René-Louis Baire was a French mathematician most famous for his Baire category theorem, which helped to generalize and prove future theorems. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Sur les fonctions de variables réelles in 1899.
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Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
1849 - 1917 (68 years)
Ferdinand Georg Frobenius was a German mathematician, best known for his contributions to the theory of elliptic functions, differential equations, number theory, and to group theory. He is known for the famous determinantal identities, known as Frobenius–Stickelberger formulae, governing elliptic functions, and for developing the theory of biquadratic forms. He was also the first to introduce the notion of rational approximations of functions , and gave the first full proof for the Cayley–Hamilton theorem. He also lent his name to certain differential-geometric objects in modern mathematical...
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Pappus of Alexandria
290 - 350 (60 years)
Pappus of Alexandria was one of the last great Greek mathematicianss of antiquity; he is known for his Synagoge or Collection , and for Pappus's hexagon theorem in projective geometry. Nothing is known of his life, other than what can be found in his own writings: that he had a son named Hermodorus, and was a teacher in Alexandria.
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Aleksandr Lyapunov
1857 - 1918 (61 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov was a Russian mathematician, mechanician and physicist. His surname is variously romanized as Ljapunov, Liapunov, Liapounoff or Ljapunow. He was the son of the astronomer Mikhail Lyapunov and the brother of the pianist and composer Sergei Lyapunov.
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Nikolai Lobachevsky
1792 - 1856 (64 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was a Russian mathematician and geometer, known primarily for his work on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry, and also for his fundamental study on Dirichlet integrals, known as the Lobachevsky integral formula.
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Arend Heyting
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Arend Heyting was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to the formalisation of certain intuitionistic principles .
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Nicolaus Copernicus
1473 - 1543 (70 years)
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
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Liu Hui
225 - 295 (70 years)
Liu Hui was a Chinese mathematician who published a commentary in 263 CE on Jiu Zhang Suan Shu . He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Eastern Han dynasty and lived in the state of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of China.
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Max Dehn
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Max Wilhelm Dehn was a German mathematician most famous for his work in geometry, topology and geometric group theory. Dehn's early life and career took place in Germany. However, he was forced to retire in 1935 and eventually fled Germany in 1939 and emigrated to the United States.
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Johann Heinrich Lambert
1728 - 1777 (49 years)
Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.
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Jacques Charles François Sturm
1803 - 1855 (52 years)
Jacques Charles François Sturm was a French mathematician, who made a significant addition to equation theory with his work, the Sturm's theorem. Early life Sturm was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1803. The family of his father, Jean-Henri Sturm, had emigrated from Strasbourg around 1760—about 50 years before Charles-François's birth. His mother's name was Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Gremay.
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Christian Goldbach
1690 - 1764 (74 years)
Christian Goldbach was a Prussian mathematician connected with some important research mainly in number theory; he also studied law and took an interest in and a role in the Russian court. After traveling around Europe in his early life, he landed in Russia in 1725 as a professor at the newly founded Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Goldbach jointly led the Academy in 1737. However, he relinquished duties in the Academy in 1742 and worked in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until his death in 1764. He is remembered today for Goldbach's conjecture and the Goldbach–Euler Theorem. He...
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François Viète
1540 - 1603 (63 years)
François Viète, Seigneur de la Bigotière , commonly known by his mononym, Vieta, was a French mathematician whose work on new algebra was an important step towards modern algebra, due to his innovative use of letters as parameters in equations. He was a lawyer by trade, and served as a privy councillor to both Henry III and Henry IV of France.
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Gaspard Monge
1746 - 1818 (72 years)
Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry. During the French Revolution he served as the Minister of the Marine, and was involved in the reform of the French educational system, helping to found the École Polytechnique.
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Bhāskara II
1114 - 1185 (71 years)
Bhāskara II , also known as Bhāskarāchārya , and as Bhāskara II to avoid confusion with Bhāskara I, was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. From verses, in his main work, Siddhānta Shiromani , it can be inferred that he was born in 1114 in Vijjadavida and living in the Satpuda mountain ranges of Western Ghats, believed to be the town of Patana in Chalisgaon, located in present-day Khandesh region of Maharashtra by scholars. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been immortalized on a monument. In a temple in Maharashtra, an inscription supposedly created by his grandson Changadeva...
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Charles Babbage
1791 - 1871 (80 years)
Charles Babbage was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered by some to be "father of the computer". Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom. Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his 1832 book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery.
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János Bolyai
1802 - 1860 (58 years)
János Bolyai or Johann Bolyai, was a Hungarian mathematician who developed absolute geometry—a geometry that includes both Euclidean geometry and hyperbolic geometry. The discovery of a consistent alternative geometry that might correspond to the structure of the universe helped to free mathematicians to study abstract concepts irrespective of any possible connection with the physical world.
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Jean Gaston Darboux
1842 - 1917 (75 years)
Jean-Gaston Darboux FAS MIF FRS FRSE was a French mathematician. Life According to his birth certificate, he was born in Nîmes in France on 14 August 1842, at 1 am. However, probably due to the midnight birth, Darboux himself usually reported his own birthday as 13 August, e.g. in his filled form for Légion d'Honneur.
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Aryabhata
476 - 550 (74 years)
Aryabhata or Aryabhata I was the first of the major mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His works include the Āryabhaṭīya and the Arya-siddhanta.
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Teiji Takagi
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Teiji Takagi was a Japanese mathematician, best known for proving the Takagi existence theorem in class field theory. The Blancmange curve, the graph of a nowhere-differentiable but uniformly continuous function, is also called the Takagi curve after his work on it.
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Gotthold Eisenstein
1823 - 1852 (29 years)
Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein was a German mathematician. He specialized in number theory and analysis, and proved several results that eluded even Gauss. Like Galois and Abel before him, Eisenstein died before the age of 30. He was born and died in Berlin, Prussia.
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Ibn al-Haytham
965 - 1038 (73 years)
Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was a medieval mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from present-day Iraq. Referred to as "the father of modern optics", he made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception in particular. His most influential work is titled Kitāb al-Manāẓir , written during 1011–1021, which survived in a Latin edition. The works of Alhazen were frequently cited during the scientific revolution by Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, and Galileo Galilei.
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Marin Mersenne
1588 - 1648 (60 years)
Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those written in the form for some integer . He also developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string , and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics". Mersenne, an ordained Catholic priest, had many contacts in the scientific world and has been called "the center of the world of science and mathematics during the first half of ...
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John Wallis
1616 - 1703 (87 years)
John Wallis was an English clergyman and mathematician, who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. He similarly used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal. John Wallis was a contemporary of Newton and one of the greatest intellectuals of the early renaissance of mathematics.
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Alfréd Haar
1885 - 1933 (48 years)
Alfréd Haar was a Hungarian mathematician. In 1904 he began to study at the University of Göttingen. His doctorate was supervised by David Hilbert. The Haar measure, Haar wavelet, and Haar transform are named in his honor. Between 1912 and 1919 he taught at Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Together with Frigyes Riesz, he made the University of Szeged a centre of mathematics. He also founded the Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum journal together with Riesz.
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Abraham de Moivre
1667 - 1754 (87 years)
Abraham de Moivre FRS was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
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Hermann Schwarz
1843 - 1921 (78 years)
Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis. Life Schwarz was born in Hermsdorf, Silesia . In 1868 he married Marie Kummer, who was the daughter to the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer and Ottilie née Mendelssohn . Schwarz and Kummer had six children, including his daughter Emily Schwarz.
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Thales of Miletus
650 BC - 548 BC (102 years)
Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece, and credited with the saying "know thyself" which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
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Francis Sowerby Macaulay
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Francis Sowerby Macaulay FRS was an English mathematician who made significant contributions to algebraic geometry. He is known for his 1916 book The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems , which greatly influenced the later course of commutative algebra. Cohen–Macaulay rings, Macaulay duality, the Macaulay resultant and the Macaulay and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems are named for Macaulay.
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Edwin Bidwell Wilson
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Edwin Bidwell Wilson was an American mathematician, statistician, physicist and general polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale University physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson. Wilson had a distinguished academic career at Yale and MIT, followed by a long and distinguished period of service as a civilian employee of the US Navy in the Office of Naval Research. In his latter role, he was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest honorary award available to a civilian employee of the US Navy. Wilson made broad contributions to m...
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E. H. Moore
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Eliakim Hastings Moore , usually cited as E. H. Moore or E. Hastings Moore, was an American mathematician. Life Moore, the son of a Methodist minister and grandson of US Congressman Eliakim H. Moore, discovered mathematics through a summer job at the Cincinnati Observatory while in high school. He subsequently studied mathematics at Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and obtained a BA in 1883 and the PhD in 1885 with a thesis supervised by Hubert Anson Newton, on some work of William Kingdon Clifford and Arthur Cayley. Newton encouraged Moore to study in Germany, and thu...
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Jakob Steiner
1796 - 1863 (67 years)
Jakob Steiner was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily in geometry. Life Steiner was born in the village of Utzenstorf, Canton of Bern. At 18, he became a pupil of Heinrich Pestalozzi and afterwards studied at Heidelberg. Then, he went to Berlin, earning a livelihood there, as in Heidelberg, by tutoring. Here he became acquainted with A. L. Crelle, who, encouraged by his ability and by that of Niels Henrik Abel, then also staying at Berlin, founded his famous Journal .
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Farkas Bolyai
1775 - 1856 (81 years)
Farkas Bolyai was a Hungarian mathematician, mainly known for his work in geometry. Biography Bolyai was born in Bolya, a village near Hermannstadt, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His father was Gáspár Bolyai and his mother Krisztina Vajna. Farkas was taught at home by his father until the age of six when he was sent to the Calvinist school in Nagyszeben. His teachers recognized his talents in arithmetics and in learning languages. He learned Latin, Greek, Romanian, Hebrew and later also French, Italian and English. He easily multiplied, divided 13- or 14-digit numbers in his head, and was able to draw square and cubic roots from them.
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Rudolf Lipschitz
1832 - 1903 (71 years)
Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz was a German mathematician who made contributions to mathematical analysis and differential geometry, as well as number theory, algebras with involution and classical mechanics.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is sometimes referred to as d'Alembert's equation, and the fundamental theorem of algebra is named after d'Alembert in French.
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Hero of Alexandria
10 - 75 (65 years)
Hero of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria in Egypt during the Roman era. He is often considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.
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Marcel Grossmann
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Marcel Grossmann was a Swiss mathematician and a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein. Grossmann was a member of an old Swiss family from Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.
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Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro was an Italian mathematician. He is most famous as the discoverer of tensor calculus. With his former student Tullio Levi-Civita, he wrote his most famous single publication, a pioneering work on the calculus of tensors, signing it as Gregorio Ricci. This appears to be the only time that Ricci-Curbastro used the shortened form of his name in a publication, and continues to cause confusion.
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Ferdinand von Lindemann
1852 - 1939 (87 years)
Carl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann was a German mathematician, noted for his proof, published in 1882, that is a transcendental number, meaning it is not a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients.
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Tullio Levi-Civita
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Tullio Levi-Civita, was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics , analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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Simon Stevin
1548 - 1620 (72 years)
Simon Stevin , sometimes called Stevinus, was a Flemish mathematician, scientist and music theorist. He made various contributions in many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it one of the few European languages in which the word for mathematics, wiskunde , was not a loanword from Greek but a calque via Latin. He also replaced the word chemie, the Dutch for chemistry, by scheikunde , made in analogy with wiskunde.
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Eduard Heine
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Heinrich Eduard Heine was a German mathematician. Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics and Legendre functions . He also investigated basic hypergeometric series. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula.
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Dmitri Egorov
1869 - 1931 (62 years)
Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician known for contributions to the areas of differential geometry and mathematical analysis. He was President of the Moscow Mathematical Society .
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Ernst Sigismund Fischer
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Ernst Sigismund Fischer was a mathematician born in Vienna, Austria. He worked alongside both Mertens and Minkowski at the Universities of Vienna and Zurich, respectively. He later became professor at the University of Erlangen, where he worked with Emmy Noether.
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Gösta Mittag-Leffler
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Magnus Gustaf "Gösta" Mittag-Leffler was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions, which today is called complex analysis. He founded the most important mathematical periodical Acta Mathematica and was its editor for 40 years. He took great trouble and procured Sofia Kovalevskaya a position of full professor of mathematics in Stockholm University. Also Mittag-Leffler was responsible for inducing the Nobel committee to recognize and award Marie Curie as an equal contributor to the discoveries ‘on the radiation phenomena’ along ...
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Thomas Bayes
1702 - 1761 (59 years)
Thomas Bayes was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published posthumously by Richard Price.
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Edmond Halley
1656 - 1742 (86 years)
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford.
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Dmitry Grave
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Grave was a Russiann and Soviet mathematician. Naum Akhiezer, Nikolai Chebotaryov, Mikhail Kravchuk, and Boris Delaunay were among his students. Brief history Dmitry Grave was educated at the University of St Petersburg where he studied under Chebyshev and his pupils Korkin, Zolotarev and Markov. Grave began research while a student, graduating with his doctorate in 1896. He had obtained his master's degree in 1889 and, in that year, began teaching at the University of St Petersburg.
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