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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10551
Vasily Zubov
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
Vasily Pavlovich Zubov was a Russian and Soviet philosopher who wrote on architecture, art, and the history of science based on studies of texts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He received a posthumous George Sarton medal from the history of science society in 1963.
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José Sebastião e Silva
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
José Sebastião e Silva was a Portuguese mathematician. Silva graduated from the University of Lisbon in 1937, and in 1942 he received a grant from the Instituto de Alta Cultura allowing him to travel to Rome, where he studied mathematics with several members of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. After writing a thesis on geometric transformations that was rejected by Federigo Enriques, he wrote a second thesis, on functional analysis, and earned his doctorate in 1949 from the University of Lisbon. He became a professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia from 1951 to 1961, and then ...
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Mayme Logsdon
1881 - 1967 (86 years)
Mayme Farmer Irwin Logsdon was an American mathematician known for her research in algebraic geometry and mathematics education. She was the first woman to receive tenure in the University of Chicago mathematics department.
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Fernando de Helguero
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Fernando de Helguero was an Italian mathematician, statistician and pioneer of biostatistics. Fernando de Helguero was born near Florence. He studied mathematics at the University of Rome. After receiving his licentiate degree in 1903, he taught mathematics while he studied natural sciences, biology, statistics, and biometry. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Rome in April 1908. However, he died later the same year in the 1908 Messina earthquake.
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Giovanni Giambelli
1876 - 1953 (77 years)
Giovanni Zeno Giambelli was an Italian mathematician who is best known for Giambelli's formula. External links Giovanni Zeno Giambelli bio
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Teresa Cohen
1892 - 1992 (100 years)
Teresa Cohen was an American mathematician. Early life and education She was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Rebecca Sinsheimer and Benjamin Cohen. She graduated in 1909 from the Friends School of Baltimore whose teachers she credited with her interest in mathematics and teaching. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics at Goucher College in 1912. Cohen was resident fellow at Goucher from 1912 to 1913. In 1915, she earned a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University where she later earned her PhD in 1918. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Mathematics.
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Helen Popova Alderson
1924 - 1972 (48 years)
Helen Popova Alderson was a Soviet and British mathematician and mathematics translator known for her research on quasigroups and on higher reciprocity laws. Life Alderson was born on 14 May 1924 in Baku, then part of the Soviet Union, to a family of two academics from Moscow. Her father, a neurophysiologist, had been a student of Ivan Pavlov. She began studying mathematics at Moscow University in 1937, when she was only 13. She had to break off her studies because of World War II, moving to Paris as a refugee with her family.
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Edgar Krahn
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Edgar Krahn was an Estonian mathematician. Krahn was born in Sootaga , Governorate of Livonia, as a member of the Baltic German minority. He died in Rockville, Maryland, United States. Krahn studied at the University of Tartu and the University of Göttingen. He graduated at Tartu in 1918, received his doctoral degree at Göttingen in 1926, with Richard Courant as his advisor, and his habilitation took place at Tartu in 1928. He is co-author of the Rayleigh–Faber–Krahn inequality.
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Bibhutibhushan Datta
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Bibhutibhushan Datta was a historian of Indian mathematics. Datta came from a poor Bengali family. He was a student of Ganesh Prasad, studied at University of Calcutta and secured the master's degree in mathematics in 1914 and doctorate degree in 1920 in applied mathematics. He taught at Calcutta University where he was lecturer at University Science College, and from 1924 to 1929 he was Rhashbehari Ghosh Professor of Applied Mathematics. During the 1920s and 1930s he created a reputation as an authority on the history of Indian mathematics. He was also deeply interested in Indian philosophy and religion.
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David K. Rubins
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
David Kresz Rubins was an American sculptor and professor. He taught at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and his various works adorn the Indiana State House, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
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Alfreds Meders
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders was a German-Latvian mathematician, and a student of Leopold Kronecker. He was a professor at the Riga Technical University until his mandatory repatriation to Germany in 1939.
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Danilo Blanuša
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Danilo Blanuša was a Croatian Serb mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb. Biography Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary , into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957–58 school year.
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Arthur Preston Mellish
1905 - 1930 (25 years)
Arthur Preston Mellish was a Canadian mathematician, known for his generalization of Barbier's theorem. Arthur Mellish received in 1928 an M.A. in mathematics from the University of British Columbia with thesis An illustrative example of the ellipsoid pendulum. He died at age 24 and had no mathematical publications during his lifetime. After his death, his colleagues at Brown University examined his notes on mathematics. Jacob Tamarkin prepared a paper based upon the notes and published it in the Annals of Mathematics in 1931.
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Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was an Indian mathematician who introduced the four-vertex theorem and Mukhopadhyaya's theorem in plane geometry. Biography Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was born at Haripal, Hooghly district, in Bengal Presidency, British India. He graduated from Hooghly College, received his M.A. degree from Presidency College in Calcutta, and his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1910. He also took classes from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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N. G. W. H. Beeger
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger was a Dutch mathematician. His 1916 doctorate was on Dirichlet series. He worked for most of his life as a teacher, working on mathematics papers in his spare evenings. After his retirement as a teacher at 65, he began corresponding with many contemporary mathematicians and dedicated himself to his work. Tilburg University still hold biennial lectures entitled the Beeger lectures in his honour.
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Norman Macleod Ferrers
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Norman Macleod Ferrers was a British mathematician and university administrator and editor of a mathematical journal. Career and research Ferrers was educated at Eton College before studying at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1851. He was appointed to a Fellowship at the college in 1852, was called to the bar in 1855 and was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860. In 1880, he was appointed Master of the college, and served as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1884 to 1885.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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Gerald Warner Brace
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
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Yutaka Taniyama
1927 - 1958 (31 years)
Yutaka Taniyama was a Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. Contribution Taniyama was best known for conjecturing, in modern language, automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field. A partial and refined case of this conjecture for elliptic curves over rationals is called the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture or the modularity theorem whose statement he subsequently refined in collaboration with Goro Shimura. The names Taniyama, Shimura and Weil have all been attached to this conjecture, but the idea is essentially due to Taniyama.
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Charles Napoleon Moore
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Charles Napoleon Moore was an American mathematician at Bowling Green State University who worked on convergence factors. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1932 in Zürich. Publications External links
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Friedrich Bachmann
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Friedrich Bachmann was a German mathematician who specialised in geometry and group theory. Life Bachmann was the son of a Lutheran minister Hans Bachmann. Bachmann came from an intellectual family, his paternal grandfather was the number theorist Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann. Bachmann took his early education at the Gymnasium in Münster. After attending the Gymnasium, he attended the University of Münster and the Humboldt University of Berlin and graduated in 1927. While there he was a member of the Münster Wingolfs.
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Cristóbal de Losada y Puga
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Cristóbal de Losada y Puga was a Peruvian mathematician and mining engineer. He was Minister of Education of Peru in the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero and Director of the National Library of Peru between 1948 and 1961.
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Clara Latimer Bacon
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Dr Clara Latimer Bacon was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. Biography Bacon was the daughter of Larkin Crouch Bacon and Louisa Latimer. She was born in Knox, Illinois, the eldest of her parents four children. She also had four other half siblings. Bacon attended North Abingdon High School and begun her college life at Hedding Collegiate Seminary.
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Gianfranco Cimmino
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Gianfranco Cimmino was an Italian mathematician, working mathematical analysis, numerical analysis, and theory of elliptic partial differential equations: he is known for being the first mathematician generalizing in a weak sense the notion of boundary value in a boundary value problem, and for doing an influential work in numerical analysis.
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Ernest Wedderburn
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Sir Ernest MacLagan Wedderburn was a Scottish lawyer, and a significant figure both in the civic life of Edinburgh and in the legal establishment. He held the posts of Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh , Deputy Keeper of the Signet , and Chairman of the General Council of Solicitors , the forerunner to the Law Society of Scotland, and chaired the latter 1949/50. He was also an enthusiastic amateur scientist, and first Treasurer then Vice President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Tord Hall
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Tord Hall was a Swedish mathematician, university professor and bestselling author. Life He was born in 1910 in Jönköping, Sweden, and died in 1987. Career He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala University. His PhD advisor was Arne Beurling. The title of his PhD thesis was On Polynomials bounded at an Infinity of Points.
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André Sainte-Laguë
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
André Sainte-Laguë was a French mathematician who was a pioneer in the area of graph theory. His research on seat allocation methods led to one being named after him, the Sainte-Laguë method. Also named after him is the Sainte-Laguë Index for measuring the proportionality of an electoral outcome.
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Ferdinand Rudio
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Ferdinand Rudio was a German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Rudio's father and maternal grandfather were both public officials in the independent Duchy of Nassau, which was annexed by Prussia when Rudio was 10. He was educated at the local gymnasium and Realgymnasium in Wiesbaden, and then in 1874 began studying at ETH Zurich, then known as the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich. His initial courses in Zurich were in civil engineering, but in his second year he switched to mathematics and physics. Finishing at Zurich in 1877, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1877 to 1880, earning his Ph.D.
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Gheorghe Mihoc
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Gheorghe Mihoc was a Romanian mathematician and statistician. He was born in Brăila, the son of Ecaterina and Gheorghe Mihoc, both originally from the Banat. In 1908, his father moved the family to Bucharest. Here he attended elementary school and the Gheorghe Șincai High School. In 1925 Mihoc enrolled at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sciences, and was awarded his degree in mathematics in June 1928.
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Carlos Benjamin de Lyra
1927 - 1974 (47 years)
Carlos Benjamin de Lyra was a prominent Brazilian mathematician, a pioneer in algebraic topology in Brazil and professor at the University of São Paulo. Born in Recife, Pernambuco, he came from a family of sugarcane plantation owners and his dad was the owner of the Diário de Pernambuco, a newspaper that was known nationwide. Lyra was an important mathematician in his area, his course Introdução à Topologia Algébrica was taught in the first Colóquio Brasileiro de Matemática and would become the first text in this field written in Brazilian Portuguese.
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David Enskog
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
David Enskog was a Swedish mathematical physicist. Enskog helped develop the kinetic theory of gases by extending the Maxwell–Boltzmann equations. Biography After undergraduate studies at Uppsala University he received a licentiate degree in physics in 1911, working on gas diffusion under professor Gustaf Granqvist, who was an experimentalist. Enskog did not wish to continue with experimental physics, however, and transferred to professor Carl Wilhelm Oseen for his Ph.D. From 1913, Enskog worked as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics to support himself and his family, while continuing his research and thesis writing in his free time.
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Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
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Jessie Marie Jacobs
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Jessie Marie Jacobs Muller Offermann was an American mathematician who also made contributions to the field of genetics. Jessie M. Jacobs completed her undergraduate degree at McPherson College. After a year spent teaching high school she was awarded one of the first two fellowships to study graduate-level mathematics at the University of Kansas, where she earned her master's degree in 1916. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1919 under the supervision of Arthur Byron Coble. She became an associate professor at Rockford College and then,...
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Traian Lalescu
1882 - 1929 (47 years)
Traian Lalescu was a Romanian mathematician. His main focus was on integral equations and he contributed to work in the areas of functional equations, trigonometric series, mathematical physics, geometry, mechanics, algebra, and the history of mathematics.
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May Beenken
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
May Margaret Beenken was an American mathematician. Life Beenken was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Sophie Kirn and Henry Beenken . and she had at least three older siblings. Career Beenken completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1928. Her doctoral advisor was Ernest Preston Lane and her thesis was titled Surfaces in Five-Dimensional Space. She later became an instructor at Oshkosh Teacher's College. She also served as a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1945, as well as an associate professor at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 to 19...
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Anatoly Shirshov
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Anatoly Illarionovich Shirshov was a Soviet mathematician, known for his research on free Lie algebras. He proved the Shirshov–Witt theorem, which states that any Lie subalgebra of a free Lie algebra is itself a free Lie algebra.
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Anna Zofia Krygowska
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Anna Zofia Krygowska was a Polish mathematician, known for her work in mathematics education. Krygowska was born in Lwów, at that time the capital of Austrian Poland, on 19 September 1904. She grew up in Zakopane, and attended the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she graduated in mathematics in 1927. From 1927 to 1950 she was a primary and secondary school mathematics teacher in Poland, including a time spent underground during World War II. In 1950 she earned a doctorate from the Jagiellonian University, under the supervision of Tadeusz Ważewski, and joined the faculty of the Pedagogical University of Kraków.
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Felice Casorati
1835 - 1890 (55 years)
Felice Casorati was an Italian mathematician who studied at the University of Pavia. He was born in Pavia and died in Casteggio. He is best known for the Casorati–Weierstrass theorem in complex analysis. The theorem, named for Casorati and Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass, describes the remarkable behaviour of holomorphic functions near essential singularities, which is that every holomorphic function gets values from any complex neighbourhood, in any neighbourhood of the singularity.
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Karl F. Sundman
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Karl Frithiof Sundman was a Finnish mathematician who used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in two papers published in 1907 and 1909. His results gained fame when they were reproduced in Acta Mathematica in 1912. He also published a paper on regularization methods in mechanics in 1912.
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Giordano Bruno
1548 - 1600 (52 years)
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets , and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.
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François Arago
1786 - 1853 (67 years)
Dominique François Jean Arago , known simply as François Arago , was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician. Early life and work Arago was born at Estagel, a small village of 3,000 near Perpignan, in the of Pyrénées-Orientales, France, where his father held the position of Treasurer of the Mint. His parents were François Bonaventure Arago and Marie Arago .
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Étienne-Louis Malus
1775 - 1812 (37 years)
Étienne-Louis Malus was a French officer, engineer, physicist, and mathematician. Malus was born in Paris, France. He participated in Napoleon's expedition into Egypt and was a member of the mathematics section of the Institut d'Égypte. Malus became a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1810. In 1810 the Royal Society of London awarded him the Rumford Medal.
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Antoni Łomnicki
1881 - 1941 (60 years)
Antoni Marian Łomnicki was a Polish mathematician. He contributed to applied mathematics and cartography. He was the author of several textbooks of mathematics and was an influential mathematics teacher at the University of Lwów.
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James R. Newman
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
James Roy Newman was an American mathematician and mathematical historian. He was also a lawyer, practicing in the state of New York from 1929 to 1941. During and after World War II, he held several positions in the United States government, including Chief Intelligence Officer at the US Embassy in London, Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of War, and Counsel to the US Senate Committee on Atomic Energy. In the latter capacity, he helped to draft the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. He became a member of the board of editors for Scientific American beginning in 1948. He is also credited for co...
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Elbert Frank Cox
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Elbert Frank Cox was an American mathematician. He was the first Black person in history to receive a PhD in mathematics, which he earned at Cornell University in 1925. Early life Cox was born in Evansville, Indiana to Johnson D. Cox, a Kentucky-born teacher active in the church, and Eugenia Talbot Cox. He grew up with his parents, maternal grandmother and two brothers in a racially mixed neighborhood; in 1900, in his block, there were three Black and five white families.
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Paul Painlevé
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Paul Painlevé was a French mathematician and statesman. He served twice as Prime Minister of the Third Republic: 12 September – 13 November 1917 and 17 April – 22 November 1925. His entry into politics came in 1906 after a professorship at the Sorbonne that began in 1892.
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Charles Hutton
1737 - 1823 (86 years)
Charles Hutton FRS FRSE LLD was an English mathematician and surveyor. He was professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich from 1773 to 1807. He is remembered for his calculation of the density of the earth from Nevil Maskelyne's measurements collected during the Schiehallion experiment.
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Julius Weingarten
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Julius Weingarten was a German mathematician. He received his doctorate in 1864 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, such as the Weingarten equations.
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Stepan Rumovsky
1734 - 1812 (78 years)
Stepan Yakovlevich Rumovsky was a Russian astronomer and mathematician, considered to be the first Russian astronomer of renown. Biography Rumovsky studied in Berlin under Leonhard Euler. He taught mathematics and astronomy at the University of St. Petersburg from 1756 to 1812 and held numerous important positions in the St. Petersburg Academy, including director of the geography department from 1766 to 1786 and director of the observatory and professor of astronomy from 1763 until his death. At some point, he became a vice-president of the Academy of Sciences. He was appointed an honorary fo...
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