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,
#10501
Werner Weber
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Werner Weber was a German mathematician. He was one of the Noether boys, the doctoral students of Emmy Noether. Considered scientifically gifted but a modest mathematician, he was also an extreme Nazi, who would later take part in driving Jewish mathematicians out of the University of Göttingen.
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Jacques Charles
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Jacques Alexandre César Charles was a French inventor, scientist, mathematician, and balloonist. Charles wrote almost nothing about mathematics, and most of what has been credited to him was due to mistaking him with another Jacques Charles, also a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, entering on 12 May 1785. He was sometimes called Charles the Geometer.
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Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja
1803 - 1869 (66 years)
Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was an Italian count and mathematician, who became known for his love and subsequent theft of ancient and precious manuscripts. After being appointed the Inspector of Libraries in France, Libri began stealing the books he was responsible for. He fled to England when the theft was discovered, along with 30,000 books and manuscripts inside 18 trunks. In France, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail in absentia; some of the stolen works were returned when he died, but many remained missing.
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Georges Giraud
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Georges Julien Giraud was a French mathematician, working in potential theory, partial differential equations, singular integrals and singular integral equations: he is mainly known for his solution of the regular oblique derivative problem and also for his extension to –dimensional singular integral equations of the concept of symbol of a singular integral, previously introduced by Solomon Mikhlin.
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John Pell
1611 - 1685 (74 years)
John Pell was an English mathematician and political agent abroad. Early life He was born at Southwick in Sussex. His father, also named John Pell, was from Southwick, and his mother was Mary Holland, from Halden in Kent. The second of two sons, Pell's older brother was Thomas Pell. By the time he was six, they were orphans, their father dying in 1616 and their mother the following year. John Pell the elder had a fine library, which proved valuable to the young Pell as he grew up. He was educated at Steyning Grammar School and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of 13. During his university career he became an accomplished linguist; even before taking a B.A.
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Julian Coolidge
1873 - 1954 (81 years)
Julian Lowell Coolidge was an American mathematician, historian, a professor and chairman of the Harvard University Mathematics Department. Biography Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University.
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Johann Georg Büsch
1728 - 1800 (72 years)
Johann Georg Büsch was a German mathematics teacher and writer on statistics and commerce. Biography He was educated at Hamburg and Göttingen, and in 1756 was made professor of mathematics in the Hamburg gymnasium, which post he held until his death. Besides suggesting many theoretical improvements in the carrying on of trade by the city, he brought about the establishment of an association for the promotion of art and industry , and the foundation of a school of trade, instituted in 1767, which became under his direction one of the most noted establishments of its class in the world. For som...
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William Schieffelin Claytor
1908 - 1967 (59 years)
William Schieffelin Claytor was an American mathematician specializing in topology. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, where his father was a dentist. He was the third African-American to get a Ph.D. in mathematics, and the first to publish in a mathematical research journal.
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Valery Glivenko
1896 - 1940 (44 years)
Valery Ivanovich Glivenko was a Soviet mathematician. He worked in foundations of mathematics, real analysis, probability theory, and mathematical statistics. He taught at Moscow Industrial Pedagogical Institute until his death at age 43. Most of Glivenko's work was published in French.
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Georg Helm
1851 - 1923 (72 years)
Georg Ferdinand Helm was a German mathematician. Helm graduated from high school from the Annenschule in Dresden in 1867. Thereafter he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the Dresden Polytechnical School, and then at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin from 1871 to 1873.
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Simon von Stampfer
1790 - 1864 (74 years)
Simon Ritter von Stampfer , in Windisch-Mattrai, Archbishopric of Salzburg today called Matrei in Osttirol, Tyrol – 10 November 1864 in Viennathe phenakistiscope Life Youth and education Simon Ritter von Stampfer was born in Matrei in Osttirol, and was the first son of Bartlmä Stampfer, a weaver. From 1801 he attended the local school and in 1804 and moved to the Franciscan Gymnasium in Lienz, where he studied until 1807. From there he went to the Lyceum in Salzburg, to study philosophy, however he was not assessed.
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Hasan Tahsini
1811 - 1881 (70 years)
Hoxhë Hasan Tahsini or simply Hoxha Tahsim was an Albanian alim, astronomer, mathematician and philosopher. He was the first rector of Istanbul University and one of the founders of the Central Committee for Defending Albanian Rights. Tahsini is regarded as one of the most prominent scholars of the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.
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Ugo Amaldi
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Ugo Amaldi was an Italian mathematician. He contributed to the field of analytic geometry and worked on Lie groups. His son Edoardo was a physicist. Biography He graduated in mathematics at the University of Bologna under the guidance of S. Pincherle. He taught at the University of Cagliari , Modena , Padova , Roma .
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Béla Kerékjártó
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Béla Kerékjártó was a Hungarian mathematician who wrote numerous articles on topology. Kerékjártó earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Budapest in 1920. He taught at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Szeged starting in 1922. In 1921 he introduced his program with a talk "On topological fundamentals of analysis and geometry" where he advocated that "complex analysis should be built with instruments of topology without metric elements such as length and area."
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Thomas Fiske
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Thomas Scott Fiske was an American mathematician. He was born in New York City and graduated in 1885 from Columbia University, where he was a fellow, assistant, tutor, instructor, and adjunct professor until 1897, when he became professor of mathematics. In 1899 he was acting dean of Barnard College. He was president in 1902–04 of the American Mathematical Society, and he also edited the Bulletin and Transactions of this society. In 1902 he became secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board. In 1905–06 he also served as president of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics of the Middle States and Maryland.
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John Everett Millais
1829 - 1896 (67 years)
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street . Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophel...
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Ramchundra
1821 - 1880 (59 years)
Ramchundra was a British Indian mathematician. His book, Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima, was promoted by mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Writing in his preface to the treatise, De Morgan states that Ramchundra was born in 1821 in Panipat to Sunder Lal, a Kayasth of Delhi. He came to De Morgan’s attention when, in 1850, a friend sent him Ramchundra’s work on maxima and minima. The 29-year-old self-taught mathematician had published the book at his own expense in Calcutta in that year. De Morgan was so impressed that he arranged for the book to be republished in London under his ...
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Ferdinand Gonseth
1890 - 1975 (85 years)
Ferdinand Gonseth was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher. He was born on 22 September 1890 at Sonvilier, the son of Ferdinand Gonseth, a clockmaker, and his wife Marie Bourquin. He studied at La Chaux-de-Fonds, and read physics and mathematics at ETH Zurich, from 1910 to 1914.
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Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Gabriel Xavier Paul Koenigs was a French mathematician who worked on analysis and geometry. He was elected as Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union after the first world war, and used his position to exclude countries with whom France had been at war from the mathematical congresses.
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Marino Ghetaldi
1568 - 1626 (58 years)
Marino Ghetaldi was a Ragusan scientist. A mathematician and physicist who studied in Italy, England and Belgium, his best results are mainly in physics, especially optics, and mathematics. He was one of the few students of François Viète and friend of Giovanni Camillo Glorioso.
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Edmund Hess
1843 - 1903 (60 years)
Edmund Hess was a German mathematician who discovered several regular polytopes. See also Schläfli–Hess polychoronHess polytope
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Charles Graves
1812 - 1899 (87 years)
Charles Graves was an Irish mathematician, academic, and clergyman. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin , and was president of the Royal Irish Academy . He served as dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, and later as Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. He was the brother of both the jurist and mathematician John Graves, and the writer and clergyman Robert Perceval Graves.
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Johann III Bernoulli
1744 - 1807 (63 years)
Johann III Bernoulli , grandson of Johann Bernoulli and son of Johann II Bernoulli, was a Swiss mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and geographer, known around the world as a child prodigy. Biography He studied at Basel and at Neuchâtel, and when thirteen years of age took the degree of doctor in philosophy. When he was fourteen, he got the degree of master of jurisprudence. At nineteen he was appointed astronomer royal of Berlin. A year later, he reorganized the astronomical observatory at the Berlin Academy. Some years after, he visited Germany, France and England, and subsequently Italy, Courland, Russia and Poland.
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Jean-Charles de Borda
1733 - 1799 (66 years)
Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda was a French mathematician, physicist, and Navy officer. Biography Borda was born in the city of Dax to Jean‐Antoine de Borda and Jeanne‐Marie Thérèse de Lacroix. In 1756, Borda wrote Mémoire sur le mouvement des projectiles, a product of his work as a military engineer. For that, he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1764.
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Eugen Jahnke
1863 - 1921 (58 years)
Paul Rudolf Eugen Jahnke was a German mathematician. Jahnke studied mathematics and physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he graduated in 1886. In 1889 he received his doctorate from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg under Albert Wangerin on the integration of first-order ordinary differential equations. After that, he was a teacher at secondary schools in Berlin, where he simultaneously in 1901 taught at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and in 1905 he became a professor at the Mining Academy in Berlin, which merged in 1916 with the Berlin Institute of Technology.
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Ahmad ibn Yusuf
835 - 912 (77 years)
Abu Ja'far Ahmad ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Tammam al-Siddiq Al-Baghdadi , known in the West by his Latinized name Hametus, was a Muslim Arab mathematician, like his father Yusuf ibn Ibrahim . Life Ahmad ibn Yusuf was born in Baghdad and moved with his father to Damascus in 839. He later moved to Cairo, but the exact date is unknown: since he was also known as al-Misri, which means the Egyptian, this probably happened at an early age. Eventually, he also died in Cairo. He probably grew up in a strongly intellectual environment: his father worked on Mathematics, Astronomy and Medicine, produced astronomical tables and was a member of a group of scholars.
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Alfred Tauber
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Alfred Tauber was an Austrian Empire-born Austrian mathematician, known for his contribution to mathematical analysis and to the theory of functions of a complex variable: he is the eponym of an important class of theorems with applications ranging from mathematical and harmonic analysis to number theory. He was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
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Saly Ruth Ramler
1894 - 1993 (99 years)
Saly Ruth Ramler , also known as Saly Ruth Struik, was the first woman to receive a mathematics PhD from the German University in Prague, now known as Charles University. Her 1919 dissertation, on the axioms of affine geometry, was supervised by Gerhard Kowalewski and Georg Alexander Pick. She married the Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics Dirk Jan Struik in 1923. Between 1924 and 1926, the pair traveled Europe and met many prominent mathematicians, using Dirk Struik's Rockefeller fellowship. In 1926, they emigrated to the United States, and Dirk Struik accepted a position at MI...
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John Keill
1671 - 1721 (50 years)
John Keill FRS was a Scottish mathematician, natural philosopher, and cryptographer who was an important defender of Isaac Newton. Biography Keill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 1 December 1671. His father was Robert Keill, an Edinburgh lawyer. His mother was Sarah Cockburn. His brother, James Keill, became a noted physician.
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Iosif Gikhman
1918 - 1985 (67 years)
Iosif Ilyich Gikhman was a Soviet mathematician. Gikhman is well known for a comprehensive treatise on the theory of stochastic processes, co-authored with Skorokhod. In the words of mathematician and probability theorist Daniel W. Stroock "Gikhman and Skorokhod have done an excellent job of presenting the theory in its present state of rich imperfection.”
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Francesco Tricomi
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Francesco Giacomo Tricomi was an Italian mathematician famous for his studies on mixed type partial differential equations. He was also the author of a book on integral equations. Biography Tricomi was born in Naples. He first enrolled in the University of Bologna, where he took chemistry courses. However, Tricomi realized that he preferred physics rather than chemistry; he moved to the University of Naples in 1915. He graduated at the University of Naples in 1918 and later was assistant to Francesco Severi, first in Padua and then in Rome. Later he was professor at Turin, called by Giuseppe...
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Samuel Vince
1749 - 1821 (72 years)
Samuel Vince FRS was an English clergyman, mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cambridge. Life He was born in Fressingfield. The son of a plasterer, he had laboured with his father up to the age of 12, but came to the attention of a clergyman who saw to it that he entered higher education. Vince was admitted as a sizar to Caius College, Cambridge in 1771. In 1775 he was Senior Wrangler, and Winner of the Smith Prize at Cambridge. Migrating to Sidney Sussex College in 1777, he gained his M.A. in 1778 and was ordained a clergyman in 1779. He was among seven men of that college who...
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Georg Mohr
1640 - 1697 (57 years)
Jørgen Mohr was a Danish mathematician, known for being the first to prove the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem, which states that any geometric construction which can be done with compass and straightedge can also be done with compasses alone.
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Dudley Weldon Woodard
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Dudley Weldon Woodard was a Galveston-born American mathematician and professor, and the second African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics; the first was Woodard's mentor Elbert Frank Cox, who earned a PhD from Cornell in 1925
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Konstantin Andreev
1848 - 1921 (73 years)
Konstantin Alekseevich Andreev was a Russian mathematician, best known for his work on geometry, especially projective geometry. He was one of the founders of the Kharkov Mathematical Society. This society is one of the early mathematics societies in Russia and was founded in 1879.
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Kinnosuke Ogura
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Kinnosuke Ogura was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. He graduated in 1905 from Tokyo College of Science , and was a lecturer there from 1910 to 1911. He was assistant at the Department of Mathematics of the new Tohoku Imperial University from 1911 to 1917, and received his Ph.D. in 1916 with a thesis on trajectories in the conservative field of force. He did research in France for two years, from 1919 to 1922. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1920 at Strasbourg.
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Hermann Schapira
1840 - 1898 (58 years)
Zvi Hermann Schapira , or Hermann Hirsch Schapira, was a Lithuanian rabbi, mathematician at the University of Heidelberg, and Zionist. He was the first to suggest founding a Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land in Palestine.
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James Cullen
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
Father James Cullen, S.J. was born at Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland. He was born at 89 West Street, Drogheda, to Michael Cullen, a baker, and Catherine McDonough. Initially, he was educated privately, then by the Christian Brothers,. He studied pure and applied mathematics at the Trinity College, Dublin, then at Mungret College, Limerick, before deciding to become a Jesuit. He studied in England in Mansera House, and St. Mary's, and was ordained as a priest on 31 July 1901.
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Gerhard Hessenberg
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Gerhard Hessenberg was a German mathematician who worked in projective geometry, differential geometry, and set theory. Career Hessenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1899 under the guidance of Hermann Schwarz and Lazarus Fuchs.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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August Derleth
1909 - 1971 (62 years)
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House . Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
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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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