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,
#10701
Thales of Miletus
650 BC - 548 BC (102 years)
Thales of Miletus was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. Thales was one of the Seven Sages, founding figures of Ancient Greece, and credited with the saying "know thyself" which was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
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Francis Sowerby Macaulay
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Francis Sowerby Macaulay FRS was an English mathematician who made significant contributions to algebraic geometry. He is known for his 1916 book The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems , which greatly influenced the later course of commutative algebra. Cohen–Macaulay rings, Macaulay duality, the Macaulay resultant and the Macaulay and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems are named for Macaulay.
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Edwin Bidwell Wilson
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Edwin Bidwell Wilson was an American mathematician, statistician, physicist and general polymath. He was the sole protégé of Yale University physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs and was mentor to MIT economist Paul Samuelson. Wilson had a distinguished academic career at Yale and MIT, followed by a long and distinguished period of service as a civilian employee of the US Navy in the Office of Naval Research. In his latter role, he was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the highest honorary award available to a civilian employee of the US Navy. Wilson made broad contributions to m...
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E. H. Moore
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Eliakim Hastings Moore , usually cited as E. H. Moore or E. Hastings Moore, was an American mathematician. Life Moore, the son of a Methodist minister and grandson of US Congressman Eliakim H. Moore, discovered mathematics through a summer job at the Cincinnati Observatory while in high school. He subsequently studied mathematics at Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and obtained a BA in 1883 and the PhD in 1885 with a thesis supervised by Hubert Anson Newton, on some work of William Kingdon Clifford and Arthur Cayley. Newton encouraged Moore to study in Germany, and thu...
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Jakob Steiner
1796 - 1863 (67 years)
Jakob Steiner was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily in geometry. Life Steiner was born in the village of Utzenstorf, Canton of Bern. At 18, he became a pupil of Heinrich Pestalozzi and afterwards studied at Heidelberg. Then, he went to Berlin, earning a livelihood there, as in Heidelberg, by tutoring. Here he became acquainted with A. L. Crelle, who, encouraged by his ability and by that of Niels Henrik Abel, then also staying at Berlin, founded his famous Journal .
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Farkas Bolyai
1775 - 1856 (81 years)
Farkas Bolyai was a Hungarian mathematician, mainly known for his work in geometry. Biography Bolyai was born in Bolya, a village near Hermannstadt, Grand Principality of Transylvania . His father was Gáspár Bolyai and his mother Krisztina Vajna. Farkas was taught at home by his father until the age of six when he was sent to the Calvinist school in Nagyszeben. His teachers recognized his talents in arithmetics and in learning languages. He learned Latin, Greek, Romanian, Hebrew and later also French, Italian and English. He easily multiplied, divided 13- or 14-digit numbers in his head, and was able to draw square and cubic roots from them.
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Rudolf Lipschitz
1832 - 1903 (71 years)
Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz was a German mathematician who made contributions to mathematical analysis and differential geometry, as well as number theory, algebras with involution and classical mechanics.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert
1717 - 1783 (66 years)
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was, together with Denis Diderot, a co-editor of the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert's formula for obtaining solutions to the wave equation is named after him. The wave equation is sometimes referred to as d'Alembert's equation, and the fundamental theorem of algebra is named after d'Alembert in French.
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Hero of Alexandria
10 - 75 (65 years)
Hero of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria in Egypt during the Roman era. He is often considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.
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Marcel Grossmann
1878 - 1936 (58 years)
Marcel Grossmann was a Swiss mathematician and a friend and classmate of Albert Einstein. Grossmann was a member of an old Swiss family from Zurich. His father managed a textile factory. He became a Professor of Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, specializing in descriptive geometry.
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Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro was an Italian mathematician. He is most famous as the discoverer of tensor calculus. With his former student Tullio Levi-Civita, he wrote his most famous single publication, a pioneering work on the calculus of tensors, signing it as Gregorio Ricci. This appears to be the only time that Ricci-Curbastro used the shortened form of his name in a publication, and continues to cause confusion.
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Ferdinand von Lindemann
1852 - 1939 (87 years)
Carl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann was a German mathematician, noted for his proof, published in 1882, that is a transcendental number, meaning it is not a root of any polynomial with rational coefficients.
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Tullio Levi-Civita
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Tullio Levi-Civita, was an Italian mathematician, most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus and its applications to the theory of relativity, but who also made significant contributions in other areas. He was a pupil of Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, the inventor of tensor calculus. His work included foundational papers in both pure and applied mathematics, celestial mechanics , analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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Simon Stevin
1548 - 1620 (72 years)
Simon Stevin , sometimes called Stevinus, was a Flemish mathematician, scientist and music theorist. He made various contributions in many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it one of the few European languages in which the word for mathematics, wiskunde , was not a loanword from Greek but a calque via Latin. He also replaced the word chemie, the Dutch for chemistry, by scheikunde , made in analogy with wiskunde.
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Eduard Heine
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
Heinrich Eduard Heine was a German mathematician. Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics and Legendre functions . He also investigated basic hypergeometric series. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula.
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Dmitri Egorov
1869 - 1931 (62 years)
Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician known for contributions to the areas of differential geometry and mathematical analysis. He was President of the Moscow Mathematical Society .
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Ernst Sigismund Fischer
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Ernst Sigismund Fischer was a mathematician born in Vienna, Austria. He worked alongside both Mertens and Minkowski at the Universities of Vienna and Zurich, respectively. He later became professor at the University of Erlangen, where he worked with Emmy Noether.
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Gösta Mittag-Leffler
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Magnus Gustaf "Gösta" Mittag-Leffler was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions, which today is called complex analysis. He founded the most important mathematical periodical Acta Mathematica and was its editor for 40 years. He took great trouble and procured Sofia Kovalevskaya a position of full professor of mathematics in Stockholm University. Also Mittag-Leffler was responsible for inducing the Nobel committee to recognize and award Marie Curie as an equal contributor to the discoveries ‘on the radiation phenomena’ along ...
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Thomas Bayes
1702 - 1761 (59 years)
Thomas Bayes was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published posthumously by Richard Price.
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Edmond Halley
1656 - 1742 (86 years)
Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720. From an observatory he constructed on Saint Helena in 1676–77, Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun. He realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford.
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Dmitry Grave
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Dmitry Aleksandrovich Grave was a Russiann and Soviet mathematician. Naum Akhiezer, Nikolai Chebotaryov, Mikhail Kravchuk, and Boris Delaunay were among his students. Brief history Dmitry Grave was educated at the University of St Petersburg where he studied under Chebyshev and his pupils Korkin, Zolotarev and Markov. Grave began research while a student, graduating with his doctorate in 1896. He had obtained his master's degree in 1889 and, in that year, began teaching at the University of St Petersburg.
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Hermann Schubert
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Hermann Cäsar Hannibal Schubert was a German mathematician. Schubert was one of the leading developers of enumerative geometry, which considers those parts of algebraic geometry that involve a finite number of solutions. In 1874, Schubert won a prize for solving a question posed by Zeuthen. Schubert calculus was named after him.
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Paul Gordan
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Paul Albert Gordan was a Jewish-German mathematician, a student of Carl Jacobi at the University of Königsberg before obtaining his PhD at the University of Breslau , and a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Thomas Joannes Stieltjes
1856 - 1894 (38 years)
Thomas Joannes Stieltjes was a Dutch mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of moment problems and contributed to the study of continued fractions. The Thomas Stieltjes Institute for Mathematics at Leiden University, dissolved in 2011, was named after him, as is the Riemann–Stieltjes integral.
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Brook Taylor
1685 - 1731 (46 years)
Brook Taylor was an English mathematician best known for creating Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series, which are important for their use in mathematical analysis. Life and work Brook Taylor was born in Edmonton . Taylor was the son of John Taylor, MP of Patrixbourne, Kent and Olivia Tempest, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Tempest, Baronet of Durham.
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Mileva Marić
1875 - 1948 (73 years)
Mileva Marić , sometimes called Mileva Marić-Einstein , was a Serbian physicist and mathematician and the first wife of Albert Einstein from 1903 to 1919. She was the only woman among Einstein's fellow students at Zürich Polytechnic and was the second woman to finish a full program of study at the Department of Mathematics and Physics. Marić and Einstein were collaborators and lovers and had a daughter Lieserl in 1902, who likely died of scarlet fever at one and a half years old. They later had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.
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Max Noether
1844 - 1921 (77 years)
Max Noether was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and the theory of algebraic functions. He has been called "one of the finest mathematicians of the nineteenth century". He was the father of Emmy Noether.
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Colin Maclaurin
1698 - 1746 (48 years)
Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. He is also known for being a child prodigy and holding the record for being the youngest professor. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, is named after him.
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Leopold Löwenheim
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Leopold Löwenheim [ˈle:o:pɔl̩d ˈlø:vɛnhaɪm] was a German mathematician doing work in mathematical logic. The Nazi regime forced him to retire because under the Nuremberg Laws he was considered only three quarters Aryan. In 1943 much of his work was destroyed during a bombing raid on Berlin. Nevertheless, he survived the Second World War, after which he resumed teaching mathematics.
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Ernst Schröder
1841 - 1902 (61 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schröder was a German mathematician mainly known for his work on algebraic logic. He is a major figure in the history of mathematical logic, by virtue of summarizing and extending the work of George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Hugh MacColl, and especially Charles Peirce. He is best known for his monumental Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik , in three volumes, which prepared the way for the emergence of mathematical logic as a separate discipline in the twentieth century by systematizing the various systems of formal logic of the day.
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Kazimierz Żorawski
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Paulin Kazimierz Stefan Żorawski was a Polish mathematician. His work earned him an honored place in mathematics alongside such Polish mathematicians as Wojciech Brudzewski, Jan Brożek , Nicolas Copernicus, Samuel Dickstein, Stefan Banach, Stefan Bergman, Marian Rejewski, Wacław Sierpiński, Stanisław Zaremba and Witold Hurewicz.
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Delfino Codazzi
1824 - 1873 (49 years)
Delfino Codazzi was an Italian mathematician. He made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces, such as the Codazzi–Mainardi equations. Biography He graduated in mathematics at the University of Pavia, where he was a pupil of Antonio Bordoni. For a long period Codazzi taught first at the Ginnasio Liceale of Lodi, then at the liceo of Pavia. Meanwhile, he devoted himself to research in differential geometry.
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Émile Picard
1856 - 1941 (85 years)
Charles Émile Picard was a French mathematician. He was elected the fifteenth member to occupy seat 1 of the Académie française in 1924. Life He was born in Paris on 24 July 1856 and educated there at the Lycée Henri-IV. He then studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure.
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Archytas
428 BC - 347 BC (81 years)
Archytas was an Ancient Greek mathematician, music theorist, statesman, and strategist from the ancient city of Taras in Southern Italy. He was a scientist and philosopher affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.
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Mikhail Ostrogradsky
1801 - 1861 (60 years)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky was a Ukrainian-Russian mathematician, mechanician, and physicist of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry. Ostrogradsky was a student of Timofei Osipovsky and is considered to be a disciple of Leonhard Euler, who was known as one of the leading mathematicians of Imperial Russia.
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Sergei Fomin
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Sergei Vasilyevich Fomin was a Soviet mathematician who was co-author with Andrey Kolmogorov of Introductory real analysis, and co-author with Israel Gelfand of Calculus of Variations , both books that are widely read in Russian and in English.
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Andrzej Mostowski
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Andrzej Mostowski was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma. Biography Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Mostowski entered University of Warsaw in 1931. He was influenced by Kuratowski, Lindenbaum, and Tarski. His Ph.D. came in 1939, officially directed by Kuratowski but in practice directed by Tarski who was a young lecturer at that time.
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Florian Cajori
1859 - 1930 (71 years)
Florian Cajori was a Swiss-American historian of mathematics. Biography Florian Cajori was born in Zillis, Switzerland, as the son of Georg Cajori and Catherine Camenisch. He attended schools first in Zillis and later in Chur. In 1875, Florian Cajori emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, and attended the State Normal school in Whitewater, Wisconsin. After graduating in 1878, he taught in a country school, and then later began studying mathematics at University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Andrew Forsyth
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Andrew Russell Forsyth, FRS, FRSE was a British mathematician. Life Forsyth was born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of John Forsyth, a marine engineer, and his wife Christina Glen. Forsyth studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881. He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895.
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Grigore Moisil
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Grigore Constantin Moisil was a Romanian mathematician, computer pioneer, and titular member of the Romanian Academy. His research was mainly in the fields of mathematical logic , algebraic logic, MV-algebra, and differential equations. He is viewed as the father of computer science in Romania.
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Cesare Burali-Forti
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Cesare Burali-Forti was an Italian mathematician, after whom the Burali-Forti paradox is named. Biography Burali-Forti was born in Arezzo, and was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered a theorem which Bertrand Russell later realised contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor. The contradiction came to be called the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.
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Alexander von Brill
1842 - 1935 (93 years)
Alexander Wilhelm von Brill was a German mathematician. Born in Darmstadt, Hesse, Brill was educated at the University of Giessen, where he earned his doctorate under supervision of Alfred Clebsch. He held a chair at the University of Tübingen, where Max Planck was among his students. In 1933, he joined the National Socialist Teachers League as one of the first members from Tübingen.
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Boris Galerkin
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Boris Grigoryevich Galerkin was a Soviet mathematician and an engineer. Biography Early life Galerkin was born on in Polotsk, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now part of Belarus, to Jewish parents, Girsh-Shleym Galerkin and Perla Basia Galerkina. His parents owned a house in the town, but the home-craft they made did not bring in enough money, so at the age of 12, Boris started working as a calligrapher in the court. He had finished school in Polotsk but still needed the exams from an additional year to grant him the right to continue education at a higher level. He passed those in Minsk in 1893 as an external student.
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Gabriel Cramer
1704 - 1752 (48 years)
Gabriel Cramer was a Genevan mathematician. He was the son of physician Jean Cramer and Anne Mallet Cramer. Biography Cramer showed promise in mathematics from an early age. At 18 he received his doctorate and at 20 he was co-chair of mathematics at the University of Geneva.
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Joseph Bertrand
1822 - 1900 (78 years)
Joseph Louis François Bertrand was a French mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics. Biography Joseph Bertrand was the son of physician Alexandre Jacques François Bertrand and the brother of archaeologist Alexandre Bertrand. His father died when Joseph was only nine years old, but that did not stand in his way of learning and understanding algebraic and elementary geometric concepts, and he also could speak Latin fluently, all when he was of the same age of nine. At eleven years old he attended the course of the École Polytechnique as an auditor .
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Eugen Slutsky
1880 - 1948 (68 years)
Evgeny "Eugen" Evgenievich Slutsky was a Russian and Soviet mathematical statistician, economist and political economist. Work in economics Slutsky is principally known for work in deriving the relationships embodied in the very well known Slutsky equation which is widely used in microeconomic consumer theory for separating the substitution effect and the income effect of a price change on the total quantity of a good demanded following a price change in that good, or in a related good that may have a cross-price effect on the original good quantity. There are many Slutsky analogs in producer...
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Carl Neumann
1832 - 1925 (93 years)
Carl Gottfried Neumann was a German mathematician. Biography Neumann was born in Königsberg, Prussia, as the son of the mineralogist, physicist and mathematician Franz Ernst Neumann , who was professor of mineralogy and physics at Königsberg University. Carl Neumann studied in Königsberg and Halle and was a professor at the universities of Halle, Basel, Tübingen, and Leipzig.
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Gaston Julia
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Gaston Maurice Julia was a French Algerian mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set. His works were popularized by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; the Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely related. He founded, independently with Pierre Fatou, the modern theory of holomorphic dynamics.
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Paul Tannery
1843 - 1904 (61 years)
Paul Tannery was a French mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was the older brother of mathematician Jules Tannery, to whose Notions Mathématiques he contributed an historical chapter. Though Tannery's career was in the tobacco industry, he devoted his evenings and his life to the study of mathematicians and mathematical development.
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