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,
#10551
John Machin
1680 - 1751 (71 years)
John Machin was a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London. He is best known for developing a quickly converging series for pi in 1706 and using it to compute pi to 100 decimal places. History John Machin served as secretary of the Royal Society from 1718 to 1747. He was also a member of the commission which decided the Calculus priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton in 1712.
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Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre
1749 - 1822 (73 years)
Jean Baptiste Joseph, chevalier Delambre was a French mathematician, astronomer, historian of astronomy, and geodesist. He was also director of the Paris Observatory, and author of well-known books on the history of astronomy from ancient times to the 18th century.
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Poul Heegaard
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Poul Heegaard was a Danish mathematician active in the field of topology. His 1898 thesis introduced a concept now called the Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold. Heegaard's ideas allowed him to make a careful critique of work of Henri Poincaré. Poincaré had overlooked the possibility of the appearance of torsion in the homology groups of a space.
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Alfred Kempe
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Sir Alfred Bray Kempe FRS was a mathematician best known for his work on linkages and the four colour theorem. Biography Kempe was the son of the Rector of St James's Church, Piccadilly, the Rev. John Edward Kempe. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Arthur Cayley was one of his teachers. He graduated BA in 1872. Despite his interest in mathematics he became a barrister, specialising in the ecclesiastical law. He was knighted in 1913, the same year he became the Chancellor for the Diocese of London. He was also Chancellor of the dioceses of Newcastle, Southwell, St Albans, Peterborough, Chichester, and Chelmsford.
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Carl Hindenburg
1741 - 1808 (67 years)
Carl Friedrich Hindenburg was a German mathematician born in Dresden. His work centered mostly on combinatorics and probability. Education Hindenburg did not attend school but was educated at home by a private tutor as arranged by his merchant father. He went to the University of Leipzig in 1757 and took courses in medicine, philosophy, Latin, Greek, physics, mathematics, and aesthetics. Hindenburg later published on philology in 1763 and 1769.
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Sylvestre François Lacroix
1765 - 1843 (78 years)
Sylvestre François Lacroix was a French mathematician. Life He was born in Paris, and was raised in a poor family who still managed to obtain a good education for their son. Lacroix's path to mathematics started with the novel Robinson Crusoe. That gave him an interest in sailing and thus navigation too. At that point geometry captured his interest and the rest of mathematics followed. He had courses with Antoine-René Mauduit at College Royale de France and Joseph-Francois Marie at Collége Mazaine of University of Paris. In 1779 he obtained some lunar observations of Pierre Charles Le Monnier and began to calculate the variables of lunar theory.
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Oskar Bolza
1857 - 1942 (85 years)
Oskar Bolza was a German mathematician, and student of Felix Klein. He was born in Bad Bergzabern, Palatinate, then a district of Bavaria, known for his research in the calculus of variations, particularly influenced by Karl Weierstrass' 1879 lectures on the subject.
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William Jones
1675 - 1749 (74 years)
William Jones, FRS was a Welsh mathematician, most noted for his use of the symbol to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. He was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley. In November 1711, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was later its vice-president.
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Nathaniel Bowditch
1773 - 1838 (65 years)
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel. In 2001, an elementary and middle school in Salem was named in his honor.
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William Spottiswoode
1825 - 1883 (58 years)
William H. Spottiswoode HFRSE LLD was an English mathematician, physicist and partner in the printing and publishing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode. He was president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883.
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Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev
1847 - 1878 (31 years)
Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev was a Russian mathematician. Biography Yegor was born as a son of Agafya Izotovna Zolotareva and the merchant Ivan Vasilevich Zolotarev in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia. In 1857 he began to study at the fifth St Petersburg gymnasium, a school which centred on mathematics and natural science. He finished it with the silver medal in 1863. In the same year he was allowed to be an auditor at the physico-mathematical faculty of St Petersburg university.
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Joseph Petzval
1807 - 1891 (84 years)
Joseph Petzval was a mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics. He was born in the town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary . Petzval studied and later lectured at the Institutum Geometricum in Buda . He headed the Institute of Practical Geometry and Hydrology/Architecture between 1841 and 1848. Later in life, he accepted an appointment to a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna. Petzval became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1873.
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Eugène Rouché
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Eugène Rouché was a French mathematician. Career He was an alumnus of the École Polytechnique, which he entered in 1852. He went on to become professor of mathematics at the Charlemagne lyceum then at the École Centrale, and admissions examiner at his alma mater. He is best known for Rouché's theorem in complex analysis, which he published in his alma mater's institutional journal in 1862, and for the Rouché–Capelli theorem in linear algebra.
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Carl Hierholzer
1840 - 1871 (31 years)
Carl Hierholzer was a German mathematician. Biography Hierholzer studied mathematics in Karlsruhe, and he got his Ph.D. from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1865. His Ph.D. advisor was Ludwig Otto Hesse . In 1870 Hierholzer wrote his habilitation about conic sections in Karlsruhe, where he later became a Privatdozent.
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Sun Guangyuan
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Sun Guangyuan , also known as Sun Tang , was a Chinese mathematician. He studied projective geometry under Ernest Preston Lane at the University of Chicago. Later Sun became a professor in Tsinghua University, Beijing.
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Nicolaus I Bernoulli
1687 - 1759 (72 years)
Nicolaus Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. Biography Nicolaus Bernoulli was born on in Basel. He was the son of Nicolaus Bernoulli, painter and Alderman of Basel. In 1704 he graduated from the University of Basel under Jakob Bernoulli and obtained his PhD five years later with a work on probability theory in law. His thesis was titled Dissertatio Inauguralis Mathematico-Juridica de Usu Artis Conjectandi in Jure.
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Isaac Todhunter
1820 - 1884 (64 years)
Isaac Todhunter FRS , was an English mathematician who is best known today for the books he wrote on mathematics and its history. Life and work The son of George Todhunter, a Nonconformist minister, and Mary née Hume, he was born at Rye, Sussex. He was educated at Hastings, where his mother had opened a school after the death of his father in 1826. He was at first at a school run by Robert Carr, moving then to one opened by John Baptist Austin.
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Hjalmar Mellin
1854 - 1933 (79 years)
Robert Hjalmar Mellin was a Finnish mathematician and function theorist. Biography Mellin studied at the University of Helsinki and later in Berlin under Karl Weierstrass. He is chiefly remembered as the developer of the integral transform known as the Mellin transform. He studied related gamma functions, hypergeometric functions, Dirichlet series and the Riemann ζ function. He was appointed professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Helsinki, which later became Helsinki University of Technology with Mellin as first rector.
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Tibor Szele
1918 - 1955 (37 years)
Tibor Szele Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics and abstract algebra. After graduating at the Debrecen University, he became a researcher at the Szeged University in 1946, then he went back at the Debrecen University in 1948 where he became full professor in 1952. He worked especially in the theory of Abelian groups and ring theory. He generalized Hajós's theorem. He founded the Hungarian school of algebra. Tibor Szele received the Kossuth Prize in 1952.
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G. N. Watson
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
George Neville Watson was an English mathematician, who applied complex analysis to the theory of special functions. His collaboration on the 1915 second edition of E. T. Whittaker's A Course of Modern Analysis produced the classic "Whittaker and Watson" text. In 1918 he proved a significant result known as Watson's lemma, that has many applications in the theory on the asymptotic behaviour of exponential integrals.
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Antoine Arnauld
1612 - 1694 (82 years)
Antoine Arnauld was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Contemporaries called him le Grand to distinguish him from his father.
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Aurelio Baldor
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Aurelio Ángel Baldor de la Vega was a Cuban mathematician, educator and lawyer. Baldor is the author of a secondary school algebra textbook, titled Álgebra, used throughout the Spanish-speaking world and published for the first time in 1941.
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Seki Takakazu
1642 - 1708 (66 years)
Seki Takakazu, also known as Seki Kōwa, was a Japanese mathematician and author of the Edo period. Seki laid foundations for the subsequent development of Japanese mathematics, known as wasan. He has been described as "Japan's Newton".
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S. R. Ranganathan
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.
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Ashraf Huseynov
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Ashraf Iskandar oglu Huseynov was an Azerbaijani mathematician . His area of contributions embraced nonlinear singular integral equations, differential equations, potential theory and functional analysis.
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Thomas Kirkman
1806 - 1895 (89 years)
Thomas Penyngton Kirkman FRS was a British mathematician and ordained minister of the Church of England. Despite being primarily a churchman, he maintained an active interest in research-level mathematics, and was listed by Alexander Macfarlane as one of ten leading 19th-century British mathematicians. In the 1840s, he obtained an existence theorem for Steiner triple systems that founded the field of combinatorial design theory, while the related Kirkman's schoolgirl problem is named after him.
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Philipp Furtwängler
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
Friederich Pius Philipp Furtwängler was a German number theorist. Biography Furtwängler wrote an 1896 doctoral dissertation at the University of Göttingen on cubic forms , under Felix Klein. Most of his academic life, from 1912 to 1938, was spent at the University of Vienna, where he taught for example Kurt Gödel, who later said that Furtwängler's lectures on number theory were the best mathematical lectures that he ever heard; Gödel had originally intended to become a physicist but turned to mathematics partly as a result of Furtwängler's lectures. From 1916, Furtwängler became increasingly ...
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James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
James Whitbread Lee Glaisher FRS FRSE FRAS , son of James Glaisher and Cecilia Glaisher, was a prolific English mathematician and astronomer. His large collection of English ceramics was mostly left to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
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Alicia Boole Stott
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
Alicia Boole Stott was a British mathematician. She made a number of contributions to the field and earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen. She grasped four-dimensional geometry from an early age, and introduced the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four or more dimensions.
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Georg Rasch
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Georg William Rasch was a Danish mathematician, statistician, and psychometrician, most famous for the development of a class of measurement models known as Rasch models. He studied with R.A. Fisher and also briefly with Ragnar Frisch, and was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute in 1948.
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Dmitry Mirimanoff
1861 - 1945 (84 years)
Dmitry Semionovitch Mirimanoff became a doctor of mathematical sciences in 1900, in Geneva, and taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne. Mirimanoff made notable contributions to axiomatic set theory and to number theory . In 1917, he introduced, though not as explicitly as John von Neumann later, the cumulative hierarchy of sets and the notion of von Neumann ordinals; although he introduced a notion of regular he did not consider regularity as an axiom, but also explored what is now called non-well-founded set theory and had an emergent idea of what is now called bisimulation.
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William Edward Story
1850 - 1930 (80 years)
William Edward Story was an American mathematician who taught at Johns Hopkins University and Clark University. William was born in Boston to Isaac Marion Story and Elizabeth Bowen Woodberry . He attended high school in Somerville, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard University in the fall of 1867. He graduated with honors in mathematics and began graduate study in Germany in September 1871. In Berlin he attended lectures of Weierstrass, Ernst Kummer, Helmholtz and Dove. In Leipzig he heard Karl Neumann, Bruhns, Mayer, Van der Müll, and Engelmann. He earned a Ph.D. in Leipzig in 1875 with a d...
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Caleb Gattegno
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Caleb Gattegno was an Egyptian educator, psychologist, and mathematician. He is considered one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educatorss of the twentieth century. He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics , foreign languages and reading . Gattegno also developed pedagogical materials for each of these approaches, and was the author of more than 120 books and hundreds of articles largely on the topics of education and human development.
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József Kürschák
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
József Kürschák was a Hungarian mathematician noted for his work on trigonometry and for his creation of the theory of valuations. He proved that every valued field can be embedded into a complete valued field which is algebraically closed. In 1918 he proved that the sum of reciprocals of consecutive natural numbers is never an integer. Extending Hilbert's argument, he proved that everything that can be constructed using a ruler and a compass, can be constructed by using a ruler and the ability of copying a fixed segment. He was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1897. H...
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William Oughtred
1574 - 1660 (86 years)
William Oughtred , also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
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Gustav von Escherich
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Gustav Ritter von Escherich was an Austrian mathematician. Biography Born in Mantua, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. From 1876 to 1879 he was professor at the University of Graz. In 1882 he went to the Graz University of Technology and in 1884 he went to the University of Vienna, where he also was president of the university in 1903/04.
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Menelaus of Alexandria
70 - 140 (70 years)
Menelaus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and astronomer, the first to recognize geodesics on a curved surface as natural analogs of straight lines. Life and works Although very little is known about Menelaus's life, it is supposed that he lived in Rome, where he probably moved after having spent his youth in Alexandria. He was called Menelaus of Alexandria by both Pappus of Alexandria and Proclus, and a conversation of his with Lucius, held in Rome, is recorded by Plutarch.
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Robert Rumsey Webb
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Robert Rumsey Webb , known as R. R. Webb, was a successful coach for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Webb coached 100 students to place in the top ten wranglerss from 1865 to 1909, a record second only to Edward Routh.
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Marcel Brillouin
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Louis Marcel Brillouin was a French physicist and mathematician. Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy. There he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting. There he spent time teaching himself from his grandfather's philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878. He became a physics assistant to Éleuthère Mascart at the Collège de...
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Karl Mikhailovich Peterson
1828 - 1881 (53 years)
Karl Mikhailovich Peterson was a Russian mathematician, known by an earlier formulation of the Gauss–Codazzi equations. Life and work Peterson was born in a peasant family. He studied at the Gymnasium of Riga and, after, in the university of Dorpat
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Ludwig Schlesinger
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Ludwig Schlesinger , was a German mathematician known for the research in the field of linear differential equations. Biography Schlesinger attended the high school in Pressburg and later studied physics and mathematics in Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1887 he received his PhD His thesis advisors were Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs and Leopold Kronecker. In 1889 he became an associate professor at Berlin; in 1897 an invited professor in Bonn and in the same year, a full professor at the University of Kolozsvár, Hungary . From 1911 he was professor at the University of Giessen, where he taught until 1930.
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Kurt Heegner
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Kurt Heegner was a German private scholar from Berlin, who specialized in radio engineering and mathematics. He is famous for his mathematical discoveries in number theory and, in particular, the Stark–Heegner theorem.
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Jacques Feldbau
1914 - 1945 (31 years)
Jacques Feldbau was a French mathematician, born on 22 October 1914 in Strasbourg, of an Alsatian Jewish traditionalist family. He died on 22 April 1945 at the Ganacker Camp, annex of the concentration camp of Flossenbürg in Germany. As a mathematician he worked on differential geometry and topology. He was the first student of Charles Ehresmann.
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Zhu Shijie
1249 - 1314 (65 years)
Zhu Shijie , courtesy name Hanqing , pseudonym Songting , was a Chinese mathematician and writer. He was a Chinese mathematician during the Yuan Dynasty. Zhu was born close to today's Beijing. Two of his mathematical works have survived. Introduction to Computational Studies , and Jade Mirror of the Four Unknowns.
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Jenő Egerváry
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Jenő Elek Egerváry was a Hungarian mathematician. Biography Egerváry was born in Debrecen in 1891. In 1914, he received his doctorate at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he studied under the supervision of Lipót Fejér. He then worked as an assistant at the Seismological Observatory in Budapest, and since 1918 as a professor at the Superior Industrial School in Budapest. In 1938 he was appointed Privatdozent at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest.
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Pandrosion
400 - Present (1625 years)
Pandrosion of Alexandria was a mathematician in fourth-century-AD Alexandria, discussed in the Mathematical Collection of Pappus of Alexandria and known for developing an approximate method for doubling the cube. Although there is disagreement on the subject, Pandrosion is believed by many current scholars to have been female. If so, she would be an earlier female contributor to mathematics than Hypatia.
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Georg Ohm
1789 - 1854 (65 years)
Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist and mathematician. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm found that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relation is called Ohm's law, and the ohm, the unit of electrical resistance, is named after him.
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Paul Epstein
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Paul Epstein was a German mathematician. He was known for his contributions to number theory, in particular the Epstein zeta function. Epstein was born and brought up in Frankfurt, where his father was a professor. He received his PhD in 1895 from the University of Strasbourg. From 1895 to 1918 he was a Privatdozent at the University in Strasbourg, which at that time was part of the German Empire. At the end of World War I the city of Strasbourg reverted to France, and Epstein, being German, had to return to Frankfurt.
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Morgan Crofton
1826 - 1915 (89 years)
Morgan Crofton was an Irish mathematician who contributed to the field of geometric probability theory. He also worked with James Joseph Sylvester and contributed an article on probability to the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Crofton's formula is named in his honour.
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Jules Richard
1862 - 1956 (94 years)
Jules Richard was a French mathematician who worked mainly in geometry but his name is most commonly associated with Richard's paradox. Life and works Richard was born in Blet, in the Cher département.
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