The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#10651
William Kingdon Clifford
1845 - 1879 (34 years)
William Kingdon Clifford was an English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
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Jacob Bernoulli
1655 - 1705 (50 years)
Jacob Bernoulli was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Swiss Bernoulli family. He sided with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy and was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus, which he made numerous contributions to; along with his brother Johann, he was one of the founders of the calculus of variations. He also discovered the fundamental mathematical constant . However, his most important contribution was in the field of probability, where he derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi.
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Niels Henrik Abel
1802 - 1829 (27 years)
Niels Henrik Abel was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for over 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions. He made his discoveries while living in poverty and died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.
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Apollonius of Perga
262 BC - 190 BC (72 years)
Apollonius of Perga was an ancient Greek geometer and astronomer known for his work on conic sections. Beginning from the earlier contributions of Euclid and Archimedes on the topic, he brought them to the state prior to the invention of analytic geometry. His definitions of the terms ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are the ones in use today. With his predecessors Euclid and Archimedes, Apollonius is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity.
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Hermann Grassmann
1809 - 1877 (68 years)
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V.
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Oliver Heaviside
1850 - 1925 (75 years)
Oliver Heaviside FRS was an English self-taught mathematician and physicist who invented a new technique for solving differential equations , independently developed vector calculus, and rewrote Maxwell's equations in the form commonly used today. He significantly shaped the way Maxwell's equations are understood and applied in the decades following Maxwell's death. His formulation of the telegrapher's equations became commercially important during his own lifetime, after their significance went unremarked for a long while, as few others were versed at the time in his novel methodology. Altho...
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Christiaan Huygens
1629 - 1695 (66 years)
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made seminal contributions to optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented mathematician and physicist, his works contain the first idealization of a physical problem by a se...
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Siméon Denis Poisson
1781 - 1840 (59 years)
Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, elasticity, and fluid mechanics. Moreover, he predicted the Poisson spot in his attempt to disprove the wave theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, which was later confirmed.
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Andrey Markov
1856 - 1922 (66 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Russian mathematician best known for his work on stochastic processes. A primary subject of his research later became known as the Markov chain. He was also a strong, close to master-level chess player.
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Johannes Kepler
1571 - 1630 (59 years)
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, influencing among others Isaac Newton, providing one of the foundations for his theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders and fathers of modern astronomy, the scientific method, natural and modern science.
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Charles Hermite
1822 - 1901 (79 years)
Charles Hermite FRS FRSE MIAS was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra. Hermite polynomials, Hermite interpolation, Hermite normal form, Hermitian operators, and cubic Hermite splines are named in his honor. One of his students was Henri Poincaré.
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Camille Jordan
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan was a French mathematician, known both for his foundational work in group theory and for his influential Cours d'analyse. Biography Jordan was born in Lyon and educated at the École polytechnique. He was an engineer by profession; later in life he taught at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France, where he had a reputation for eccentric choices of notation.
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Brahmagupta
598 - 665 (67 years)
Brahmagupta was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. He is the author of two early works on mathematics and astronomy: the Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta , a theoretical treatise, and the Khaṇḍakhādyaka , a more practical text.
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Wilhelm Killing
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing was a German mathematician who made important contributions to the theories of Lie algebras, Lie groups, and non-Euclidean geometry. Life Killing studied at the University of Münster and later wrote his dissertation under Karl Weierstrass and Ernst Kummer at Berlin in 1872. He taught in gymnasia from 1868 to 1872. In 1875, he married Anna Commer, who was the daughter of a music lecturer. He became a professor at the seminary college Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg . He took holy orders in order to take his teaching position. He became rector of the college and chair of the town council.
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Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.
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Karl Pearson
1857 - 1936 (79 years)
Karl Pearson was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol.
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Blaise Pascal
1623 - 1662 (39 years)
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines , establishing him as one of the first two...
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Augustus De Morgan
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous. Biography Childhood Augustus De Morgan was born in Madurai, in the Carnatic region of India in 1806. His father was Lieut.-Colonel John De Morgan , who held various appointments in the service of the East India Company, and his mother, Elizabeth , was the daughter of John Dodson and granddaughter of James Dodson, who computed a table of anti-logarithms . Augustus De Morgan became blind in one eye a month or two after he was born.
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George Boole
1815 - 1864 (49 years)
George Boole Jnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age, alongside the work of Claude Shannon.
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Johann Bernoulli
1667 - 1748 (81 years)
Johann Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is known for his contributions to infinitesimal calculus and educating Leonhard Euler in the pupil's youth.
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Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
1804 - 1851 (47 years)
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was a German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to elliptic functions, dynamics, differential equations, determinants, and number theory. His name is occasionally written as Carolus Gustavus Iacobus Iacobi in his Latin books, and his first name is sometimes given as Karl.
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Bernard Bolzano
1781 - 1848 (67 years)
Bernard Bolzano was a Bohemian mathematician, logician, philosopher, theologian and Catholic priest of Italian extraction, also known for his liberal views. Bolzano wrote in German, his native language. For the most part, his work came to prominence posthumously.
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Elwin Bruno Christoffel
1829 - 1900 (71 years)
Elwin Bruno Christoffel was a German mathematician and physicist. He introduced fundamental concepts of differential geometry, opening the way for the development of tensor calculus, which would later provide the mathematical basis for general relativity.
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Pafnuty Chebyshev
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician and considered to be the founding father of Russian mathematics. Chebyshev is known for his fundamental contributions to the fields of probability, statistics, mechanics, and number theory. A number of important mathematical concepts are named after him, including the Chebyshev inequality , the Bertrand–Chebyshev theorem, Chebyshev polynomials, Chebyshev linkage, and Chebyshev bias.
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Gerolamo Cardano
1501 - 1576 (75 years)
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian polymath whose interests and proficiencies ranged through those of mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astrologer, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler. He became one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance and one of the key figures in the foundation of probability; he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the Western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.
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August Ferdinand Möbius
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. Early life and education Möbius was born in Schulpforta, Electorate of Saxony, and was descended on his mother's side from religious reformer Martin Luther. He was home-schooled until he was 13, when he attended the college in Schulpforta in 1803, and studied there, graduating in 1809. He then enrolled at the University of Leipzig, where he studied astronomy under the mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. In 1813, he began to study astronomy under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen, while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory.
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Daniel Bernoulli
1700 - 1782 (82 years)
Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family from Basel. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli's principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
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Edmund Landau
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Edmund Georg Hermann Landau was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Biography Edmund Landau was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. His father was Leopold Landau, a gynecologist, and his mother was Johanna Jacoby. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation in 1901. His doctoral thesis was 14 pages long.
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James Joseph Sylvester
1814 - 1897 (83 years)
James Joseph Sylvester was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was a professor at Oxford University.
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Vito Volterra
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
Vito Volterra was an Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology and integral equations, being one of the founders of functional analysis. Biography Born in Ancona, then part of the Papal States, into a very poor Jewish family: his father was Abramo Volterra and his mother, Angelica Almagià. Abramo Volterra died in 1862 when Vito was two years old. The family moved to Turin, and then to Florence, where he studied at the Dante Alighieri Technical School and the Galileo Galilei Technical Institute.
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Adolf Hurwitz
1859 - 1919 (60 years)
Adolf Hurwitz was a German mathematician who worked on algebra, analysis, geometry and number theory. Early life He was born in Hildesheim, then part of the Kingdom of Hanover, to a Jewish family and died in Zürich, in Switzerland. His father Salomon Hurwitz, a merchant, was not wealthy. Hurwitz's mother, Elise Wertheimer, died when he was three years old. Family records indicate that he had siblings and cousins, but their names have yet to be confirmed except for an older brother, Julius, with whom he developed an arithmetical theory for complex continued fractions circa 1890. Hurwitz entered the in Hildesheim in 1868.
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Galileo Galilei
1564 - 1642 (78 years)
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei , commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei or simply Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
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Eudoxus of Cnidus
408 BC - 355 BC (53 years)
Eudoxus of Cnidus was an ancient Greek astronomer, mathematician, doctor, and lawmaker. He was a student of Archytas and Plato. All of his original works are lost, though some fragments are preserved in Hipparchus' Commentaries on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus. Spherics by Theodosius of Bithynia may be based on a work by Eudoxus.
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Harold Jeffreys
1891 - 1989 (98 years)
Sir Harold Jeffreys, FRS was a British geophysicist who made significant contributions to mathematics and statistics. His book, Theory of Probability, which was first published in 1939, played an important role in the revival of the objective Bayesian view of probability.
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René-Louis Baire
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
René-Louis Baire was a French mathematician most famous for his Baire category theorem, which helped to generalize and prove future theorems. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Sur les fonctions de variables réelles in 1899.
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Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
1849 - 1917 (68 years)
Ferdinand Georg Frobenius was a German mathematician, best known for his contributions to the theory of elliptic functions, differential equations, number theory, and to group theory. He is known for the famous determinantal identities, known as Frobenius–Stickelberger formulae, governing elliptic functions, and for developing the theory of biquadratic forms. He was also the first to introduce the notion of rational approximations of functions , and gave the first full proof for the Cayley–Hamilton theorem. He also lent his name to certain differential-geometric objects in modern mathematical...
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Pappus of Alexandria
290 - 350 (60 years)
Pappus of Alexandria was one of the last great Greek mathematicianss of antiquity; he is known for his Synagoge or Collection , and for Pappus's hexagon theorem in projective geometry. Nothing is known of his life, other than what can be found in his own writings: that he had a son named Hermodorus, and was a teacher in Alexandria.
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Aleksandr Lyapunov
1857 - 1918 (61 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov was a Russian mathematician, mechanician and physicist. His surname is variously romanized as Ljapunov, Liapunov, Liapounoff or Ljapunow. He was the son of the astronomer Mikhail Lyapunov and the brother of the pianist and composer Sergei Lyapunov.
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Nikolai Lobachevsky
1792 - 1856 (64 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was a Russian mathematician and geometer, known primarily for his work on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry, and also for his fundamental study on Dirichlet integrals, known as the Lobachevsky integral formula.
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Arend Heyting
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Arend Heyting was a Dutch mathematician and logician. Biography Heyting was a student of Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer at the University of Amsterdam, and did much to put intuitionistic logic on a footing where it could become part of mathematical logic. Heyting gave the first formal development of intuitionistic logic in order to codify Brouwer's way of doing mathematics. The inclusion of Brouwer's name in the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation is largely honorific, as Brouwer was opposed in principle to the formalisation of certain intuitionistic principles .
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Nicolaus Copernicus
1473 - 1543 (70 years)
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
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Liu Hui
225 - 295 (70 years)
Liu Hui was a Chinese mathematician who published a commentary in 263 CE on Jiu Zhang Suan Shu . He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Eastern Han dynasty and lived in the state of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of China.
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Max Dehn
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Max Wilhelm Dehn was a German mathematician most famous for his work in geometry, topology and geometric group theory. Dehn's early life and career took place in Germany. However, he was forced to retire in 1935 and eventually fled Germany in 1939 and emigrated to the United States.
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Johann Heinrich Lambert
1728 - 1777 (49 years)
Johann Heinrich Lambert was a polymath from the Republic of Mulhouse, generally identified as either Swiss or French, who made important contributions to the subjects of mathematics, physics , philosophy, astronomy and map projections.
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Jacques Charles François Sturm
1803 - 1855 (52 years)
Jacques Charles François Sturm was a French mathematician, who made a significant addition to equation theory with his work, the Sturm's theorem. Early life Sturm was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1803. The family of his father, Jean-Henri Sturm, had emigrated from Strasbourg around 1760—about 50 years before Charles-François's birth. His mother's name was Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Gremay.
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Christian Goldbach
1690 - 1764 (74 years)
Christian Goldbach was a Prussian mathematician connected with some important research mainly in number theory; he also studied law and took an interest in and a role in the Russian court. After traveling around Europe in his early life, he landed in Russia in 1725 as a professor at the newly founded Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Goldbach jointly led the Academy in 1737. However, he relinquished duties in the Academy in 1742 and worked in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs until his death in 1764. He is remembered today for Goldbach's conjecture and the Goldbach–Euler Theorem. He...
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François Viète
1540 - 1603 (63 years)
François Viète, Seigneur de la Bigotière , commonly known by his mononym, Vieta, was a French mathematician whose work on new algebra was an important step towards modern algebra, due to his innovative use of letters as parameters in equations. He was a lawyer by trade, and served as a privy councillor to both Henry III and Henry IV of France.
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Gaspard Monge
1746 - 1818 (72 years)
Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry. During the French Revolution he served as the Minister of the Marine, and was involved in the reform of the French educational system, helping to found the École Polytechnique.
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Bhāskara II
1114 - 1185 (71 years)
Bhāskara II , also known as Bhāskarāchārya , and as Bhāskara II to avoid confusion with Bhāskara I, was an Indian mathematician and astronomer. From verses, in his main work, Siddhānta Shiromani , it can be inferred that he was born in 1114 in Vijjadavida and living in the Satpuda mountain ranges of Western Ghats, believed to be the town of Patana in Chalisgaon, located in present-day Khandesh region of Maharashtra by scholars. He is the only ancient mathematician who has been immortalized on a monument. In a temple in Maharashtra, an inscription supposedly created by his grandson Changadeva...
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