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,
#10651
Hassan al-Jabarti
1698 - 1774 (76 years)
Hassan al-Jabarti was a Somali mathematician, theologian, astronomer and philosopher who lived in Cairo, Egypt during the 18th century. Biography Al-Jabarti was the father of the historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, and originated from the Somali city of Zeila. Hassan is considered one of the great scholars of the 18th century. He frequently conducted experiments in his own house, which was visited and observed by Western students.
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William Greenfield
1755 - 1827 (72 years)
William Greenfield FRSE was a Scottish minister, professor of rhetoric and belles lettres, literary critic, reviewer, and author whose clerical career ended in scandal, resulting in him being excommunicated from the Church of Scotland, having his university degrees withdrawn, and his family assuming his wife's patronymic Rutherfurd.
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N. C. Wyeth
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Newell Convers Wyeth , known as N. C. Wyeth, was an American painter and illustrator. He was a student of Howard Pyle and became one of America's most well-known illustrators. Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books — 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the body of work for which he is best known. The first of these, Treasure Island, was one of his masterpieces and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly.
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Lucy Toulmin Smith
1838 - 1911 (73 years)
Lucy Toulmin Smith was an Anglo-American antiquarian and librarian, known for her first publication of the York Mystery Plays and other early works. Life Toulmin Smith was born at Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on 21 November 1838, of English parents, Joshua Toulmin Smith and his wife Martha. She was the eldest child of a family of three daughters and two sons. In 1842 the Toulmin Smiths returned to England and settled in Highgate, Middlesex. She was educated at home, and went on to assist her father in editing his journal the Parliamentary Remembrancer . After his death she completed his volume...
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Joseph-Alfred Serret
1819 - 1885 (66 years)
Joseph-Alfred Serret was a French mathematician who was born in Paris, France, and died in Versailles, France. See also Frenet–Serret formulas Books by J.-A. Serret Traité de trigonométrie Cours de calcul differentiel et integral t. 1 Cours de calcul differentiel et integral t. 2 Cours d'algèbre supérieure. Tome I Cours d'algèbre supérieure. Tome II
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Ethel Hurlbatt
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Ethel Hurlbatt was Principal of Bedford College, University of London, and later Warden of Royal Victoria College, the women's college of McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which had opened in 1899.
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Howard Lindsay
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Howard Lindsay, born Herman Nelke, was an American playwright, librettist, director, actor and theatrical producer. He is best known for his writing work as part of the collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, and for his performance, with his wife Dorothy Stickney, in the long-running play Life with Father.
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Henry Erle Richards
1861 - 1922 (61 years)
Sir Henry Erle Richards, , also Erle Richards or H. Erle Richards, was the Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford University, the Legal Member of Council in British India. He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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Mary Annette Anderson
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Mary Annette Anderson was an American professor of grammar and history and the first African American woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Anderson was born in Shoreham, Vermont, to William and Philomine Anderson. Her father, a farmer, was a freed slave originally from Virginia, and her mother was a Canadian immigrant of French and Native American ancestry. Her younger brother, William John Anderson Jr., became the second African American to serve in the Vermont General Assembly. Anderson attended the Northfield School for Young Ladies in Northfield, Massachusetts, and entered Middlebury College in 1895.
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Olive Wheeler
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Dame Olive Annie Wheeler, DBE was a Welsh educationist and psychologist, and Professor of Education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, now Cardiff University. Early life Born at the High Street in Brecon, Olive Wheeler was the younger daughter of Annie Wheeler, Poole, and her husband, Henry Burford Wheeler. Henry Wheeler was a master printer and publisher. She attended Brecon County School for Girls. She received an Honours Central Welsh Board Certificate in 1904. She attended University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and graduated with a BSc in Chemistry in 1907, and a MSc in 1911.
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Stanley Anderson
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Alfred Charles Stanley Anderson was a British engraver, etcher and watercolour painter. Anderson was principally known for the series of highly detailed engravings of traditional British crafts that he completed over a twenty-year period beginning in 1933.
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Frederic Leighton
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, , known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.
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Con Conrad
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Con Conrad was an American songwriter and producer. Biography Conrad was born in Manhattan, New York, and published his first song, "Down in Dear Old New Orleans", in 1912. Conrad produced the Broadway show The Honeymoon Express, starring Al Jolson, in 1913. By 1918, Conrad was writing and publishing with Henry Waterson . He co-composed "Margie" in 1920 with J. Russel Robinson and lyricist Benny Davis, which became his first major hit. He went on to compose hits that became standards, including:"Palesteena" with co-composer and co-lyricist J. Russel Robinson "Singin' the Blues" with co-composer J.
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Jean Piveteau
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Jean Piveteau was a distinguished French vertebrate paleontologist. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1956 and served as the institute's president in 1973. Legacy Two genera of Triassic fish, the actinopterygian Piveteaunotus and the actinistian Piveteauia, and a genus of Middle Jurassic theropod dinosaur, Piveteausaurus, are named in his honor.
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Johann Nepomuk Schaller
1777 - 1842 (65 years)
Johann Nepomuk Schaller was an Austrian sculptor. His most famous work is a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven at age 55, created at the request of the composer's secretary Karl Holz in 1825. It was later presented to the Royal Philharmonic Society, London, on the occasion of the Beethoven Centennial.
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Gottfried Baist
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Gottfried Baist was a German Hispanist and Romance studies scholar. Selected works Die spanische Sprache, in: Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, ed. by Gustav Gröber vol. 1, Strassburg 1888, S. 689–714, 2. Aufl. 1904, S. 878 - 915Die spanische Literatur, in: Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, ed. by Gustav Gröber, 1. volume, 2. Abt., Strassburg 1897, S. 383–466, 2nd edition, Strassburg 1904-06Grammatik der Spanischen Sprache, 2nd edition, Strassburg 1906 Juan Manuel, El libro de la caza, Halle a.S. 1880, Hildesheim 1984 Antonio Muñoz, Aventuras en verso y prossa, Halle a.S. 1907
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Ella Eaton Kellogg
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Ella Eaton Kellogg was an American dietitian known for her work on home economics and vegetarian cooking. She was educated at Alfred University ; and the American School Household Economics . In 1875, Kellogg visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became interested in the subjects of sanitation and hygiene, and a year later enrolled in the Sanitarium School of Hygiene. Later on, she joined the editorial staff of Good Health magazine, and in 1879, married Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
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František Josef Studnička
1836 - 1903 (67 years)
František Josef Studnička was a Czech mathematician and popular pedagogue at Charles University in Prague. He was also an active contributor to astronomy and meteorology. He was known as the author of several textbooks and popular articles.
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Robert Smirke
1753 - 1845 (92 years)
Robert Smirke was an English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings showing subjects taken from literature. He was a member of the Royal Academy. Life Smirke was born at Wigton near Carlisle, the son of a travelling artist. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a heraldic painter in London, and at the age of twenty began to study at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1775 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, with which he began to exhibit by sending five works; he showed works there again in 1777 and 1778. In 1786 he exhibited Narcissus and The Lady and...
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W. R. Scott
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
William Robert Scott was a political economist who was Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow from 1915 to 1940. Career Born in Omagh, County Tyrone, on 31 August 1868, William Robert Scott was the son of Charles Scott, JP, of Lisnamallard in Omagh. He attended Trinity College, Dublin; graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1889, Scott won the Wray Prize and was First Senior Moderator in Logics and Ethics. He proceeded to a Master of Arts degree two years later, and joined the University of St Andrews in 1896 as assistant to the Professor of Moral Philosophy .
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Johannes Bjerg
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Johannes Clausen Bjerg was a Danish sculptor who worked primarily in the El Greco-style. Early life Born in Ødis near Kolding, Bjerg attended the Latin School in Kolding before serving an apprenticeship with A.L. Johansen & Son in 1907 during which he created an oak bust of his father. Thereafter he spent an extended period in Copenhagen during which he created a silver medal for a bronze bust of his father. In 1911, he went to Paris to associate with progressive artists of the times such as Picasso, leading to his Cubic bronze bust of the Finnish sculptor Bertil Nilsson .
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Niels Simonsen
1807 - 1885 (78 years)
Niels Simonsen was a Danish painter, lithographer and sculptor. Biography Simonsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Simnon Rasmusson and Bolette Nielsdatter. His parents were shopkeepers. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a master decorative painter and began to take drawing lessons at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he took private lessons from Johan Ludwig Lund.
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Moritz Schröter
1851 - 1925 (74 years)
Maximilian Moritz Schröter was a German industrial engineer and university professor of thermodynamics and the theory of machines. Life and career Moritz Schröter was the son of Moritz Schröter, who himself was a university professor. After his father′s death in 1867, Gustav Zeuner became the guardian of 16-year-old Schröter. After finishing the Gymnasium in Zürich, Schröter studied at the Polytechnikum Zürich, where he was awarded a diploma in engineering. From 1873 to 1876 he worked in the locomotive factory Georg Sigl in Wiener Neustadt. He then returned to Zürich, to become the university assistant of Georg Veith.
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Walter Georgi
1871 - 1924 (53 years)
Walter Georgi was a German painter and illustrator; known for his female portraits. Life and work His father, the jurist , was elected Mayor of Leipzig when Walter was five years old. From 1882 to 1888, he attended the . In 1890, he took lessons at the local Academy of Fine Arts, then transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Leon Pohle. Finally, in 1893, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His primary instructor there was Paul Hoecker.
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Hans Hartmann-McLean
1862 - 1946 (84 years)
Hans Hartmann-McLean was a German sculptor. He studied from 1879 to 1885 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his tutors included Johannes Schilling.
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Caspar Scheuren
1810 - 1887 (77 years)
Caspar Johann Nepomuk Scheuren was a German painter and illustrator. Biography His father, was also an artist. After receiving his initial training at home, he studied landscape painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, from 1829 to 1835. His Romantic tendencies were encouraged by his admiration for the works of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Carl Friedrich Lessing. He was also inspired by the writings of Sir Walter Scott.
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Vladimir Markov
1871 - 1897 (26 years)
Vladimir Andreyevich Markov was a mathematician, known for proving the Markov brothers' inequality with his older brother Andrey Markov. He was from the Russian Empire. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.
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Joseph Wedderburn
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra.
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David H. Wheeler
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
David Hilton Wheeler was a 19th-century American academic, newspaperman and college president, and also served as the US ambassador to Italy under the Lincoln administration. Active in politics, he was a fierce advocate of public education, which was then a core part of the Republican party platform. In the 1850s, he taught at Cornell College in Iowa and Shimer College in Illinois. He later taught at Northwestern University, where he served as interim president from 1867 to 1869. He subsequently became president of Allegheny College, serving from 1883 to 1888 and again from 1890 to 1893. ...
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John Myhill
1923 - 1987 (64 years)
John R. Myhill Sr. was a British mathematician. Education Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.
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Joseph Slepian
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Joseph Slepian was an American electrical engineer known for his contributions to the developments of electrical apparatus and theory. Born in Boston, MA of Jewish Russian immigrants, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, from which he was awarded a B.Sc. , a M.Sc. and Ph.D. on the thesis On the Functions of a Complex Variable Defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order and First Degree advised by George Birkhoff . Meanwhile, he also worked at Boston Elevated Railway.
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Stefan E. Warschawski
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Stefan Emanuel "Steve" Warschawski was a mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.
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Cyrus Colton MacDuffee
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Cyrus Colton MacDuffee from Oneida, New York was a professor of mathematics at University of Wisconsin. He wrote a number of influential research papers in abstract algebra. MacDuffee served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society , was editor of the Transactions of the A.M.S., and served as president of the Mathematical Association of America .
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Ivan S. Sokolnikoff
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Ivan Stephan Sokolnikoff was a Russian-American applied mathematician, who specialized in elasticity theory and wrote several mathematical textbooks for engineers and physicists. Biography Born to a wealthy family in Tsarist Russia, Ivan Sokolnikoff was educated by private tutors and at Anders Classical Gymnasium in Kiev. During the Russian Revolution, as a Tsarist naval officer, he was wounded in combat off the Kuril Islands. With the victory of the Reds, he became a refugee in China. There he worked for a subsidiary of an American electrical firm until 1922 when he became an American immigrant in Seattle.
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Max Deuring
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Max Deuring was a German mathematician. He is known for his work in arithmetic geometry, in particular on elliptic curves in characteristic p. He worked also in analytic number theory. Deuring graduated from the University of Göttingen in 1930, then began working with Emmy Noether, who noted his mathematical acumen even as an undergraduate. When she was forced to leave Germany in 1933, she urged that the university offer her position to Deuring. In 1935 he published a report entitled Algebren , which established his notability in the world of mathematics. He went on to serve as Ordinarius at ...
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Constantine Gatsonis
Constantine Achilleos Gatsonis is a Greek-born biostatistician, currently the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics, Chair of Biostatistics and Founding Director for the Center for Statistical Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. He is well known for his work with evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests.
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Eugene Lukacs
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Eugene Lukacs was a Hungarian-American statistician notable for his work in characterization of distributions, stability theory, and being the author of Characteristic Functions, a classic textbook in the field.
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Ott-Heinrich Keller
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of geometry, topology and algebraic geometry. He formulated the celebrated problem which is now called the Jacobian conjecture in 1939.
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Beniamino Segre
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Beniamino Segre was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to algebraic geometry and one of the founders of finite geometry. Life and career He was born and studied in Turin. Corrado Segre, his uncle, also served as his doctoral advisor.
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Leonard Blumenthal
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Leonard Mascot Blumenthal was a Jewish American mathematician. Career He received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Johns Hopkins University, under the supervision of Frank Morley; his dissertation was titled Lagrange Resolvents in Euclidean Geometry. He taught for the majority of his professional career at the University of Missouri and was the author of A Modern View of Geometry.
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Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr.
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr. was an American mathematician, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis working on analysis. Life Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform. Hirschman spent most of his career at Washington University, where he published mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey. While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem.
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Emil Grosswald
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Emil Grosswald was a mathematician who worked primarily in number theory. Life and education Grosswald was born on December 15, 1912, in Bucharest, Romania. He received a master's degree in both mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Bucharest in 1933, spent six months in Italy and then received a Diplôme from École supérieure d'électricité in Paris.
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William Caspar Graustein
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
William Caspar Graustein was an American mathematician. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1910 and later became an instructor at Harvard University. In 1921, he married Mary Curtis Graustein , who was the first American woman to earn a mathematics Ph.D. from Radcliffe College.
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Barnet Woolf
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.
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Gerhard Gentzen
1909 - 1945 (36 years)
Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.
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Thoralf Skolem
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Thoralf Albert Skolem was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and set theory. Life Although Skolem's father was a primary school teacher, most of his extended family were farmers. Skolem attended secondary school in Kristiania , passing the university entrance examinations in 1905. He then entered Det Kongelige Frederiks Universitet to study mathematics, also taking courses in physics, chemistry, zoology and botany.
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Otto Toeplitz
1881 - 1940 (59 years)
Otto Toeplitz was a German mathematician working in functional analysis. Life and work Toeplitz was born to a Jewish family of mathematicians. Both his father and grandfather were Gymnasium mathematics teachers and published papers in mathematics. Toeplitz grew up in Breslau and graduated from the Gymnasium there. He then studied mathematics at the University of Breslau and was awarded a doctorate in algebraic geometry in 1905. In 1906 Toeplitz arrived at Göttingen University, which was then the world's leading mathematical center, and he remained there for seven years. The mathematics faculty included David Hilbert, Felix Klein, and Hermann Minkowski.
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Lawrence Wager
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Lawrence Rickard Wager, commonly known as Bill Wager, was a British geologist, explorer and mountaineer, described as "one of the finest geological thinkers of his generation" and best remembered for his work on the Skaergaard intrusion in Greenland, and for his attempt on Mount Everest in 1933.
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Charles Loewner
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Charles Loewner was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sigmund Löwner was a store owner.
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Heinrich Behnke
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Heinrich Adolph Louis Behnke was a German mathematician and rector at the University of Münster. Life and career He was born into a Lutheran family in Horn, a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the University of Göttingen and submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg. He was noted for work on complex analysis with Henri Cartan and Peter Thullen. His first wife, Aenne Albersheim, was Jewish, but she died soon after the birth of their son. He was concerned about his son's ethnicity during the Nazi period. In 1936 he was elected a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Le...
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