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,
#10801
Diophantus
201 - 300 (99 years)
Diophantus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantus is considered "the father of algebra" by many mathematicians because of his contributions to number theory, mathematical equations, and the earliest known use of algebraic notation and symbolism in his works. In modern use, Diophantine equations are algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
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Leopold Kronecker
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Leopold Kronecker was a German mathematician who worked on number theory, algebra and logic. He criticized Georg Cantor's work on set theory, and was quoted by as having said, "" . Kronecker was a student and life-long friend of Ernst Kummer.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749 - 1827 (78 years)
Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, astronomy, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste . This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.
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Joseph Liouville
1809 - 1882 (73 years)
Joseph Liouville was a French mathematician and engineer. Life and work He was born in Saint-Omer in France on 24 March 1809. His parents were Claude-Joseph Liouville and Thérèse Liouville . Liouville gained admission to the École Polytechnique in 1825 and graduated in 1827. Just like Augustin-Louis Cauchy before him, Liouville studied engineering at École des Ponts et Chaussées after graduating from the Polytechnique, but opted instead for a career in mathematics. After some years as an assistant at various institutions including the École Centrale Paris, he was appointed as professor at the École Polytechnique in 1838.
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Hermann Minkowski
1864 - 1909 (45 years)
Hermann Minkowski was a German mathematician and professor at Königsberg, Zürich and Göttingen. He created and developed the geometry of numbers and used geometrical methods to solve problems in number theory, mathematical physics, and the theory of relativity.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736 - 1813 (77 years)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange , also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
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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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Mauro Picone
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Mauro Picone was an Italian mathematician. He is known for the Picone identity, the Sturm-Picone comparison theorem and being the founder of the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, presently named after him, the first applied mathematics institute ever founded. He was also an outstanding teacher of mathematical analysis: some of the best Italian mathematicians were among his pupils.
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Luca Pacioli
1445 - 1517 (72 years)
Fra. Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and an early contributor to the field now known as accounting. He is referred to as the father of accounting and bookkeeping and he was the first person to publish a work on the double-entry system of book-keeping on the continent. He was also called Luca di Borgo after his birthplace, Borgo Sansepolcro, Tuscany.
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Bonaventura Cavalieri
1598 - 1647 (49 years)
Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri was an Italian mathematician and a Jesuate. He is known for his work on the problems of optics and motion, work on indivisibles, the precursors of infinitesimal calculus, and the introduction of logarithms to Italy. Cavalieri's principle in geometry partially anticipated integral calculus.
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Władysław Ślebodziński
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Władysław Ślebodziński was a Polish mathematician. Władysław Ślebodziński was born in Pysznica, Poland and educated at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where he subsequently held a teaching position until 1921. After 1921, he lectured at the State High School of Mechanical Engineering Poznań and in the thirties, he was a visiting lecturer at the Poznań University and Warsaw University until 1939. During the Second World War, he gave underground lectures, leading to his imprisonment. He survived three German concentration camps: Auschwitz , where he gave underground university-level lectures as prisoner no.
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Johann Friedrich Pfaff
1765 - 1825 (60 years)
Johann Friedrich Pfaff was a German mathematician. He was described as one of Germany's most eminent mathematicians during the 19th century. He was a precursor of the German school of mathematical thinking, under which Carl Friedrich Gauss and his followers largely determined the lines on which mathematics developed during the 19th century.
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Gino Fano
1871 - 1952 (81 years)
Gino Fano was an Italian mathematician, best known as the founder of finite geometry. He was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Mantua, in Italy and died in Verona, also in Italy. Fano made various contributions on projective and algebraic geometry. His work in the foundations of geometry predates the similar, but more popular, work of David Hilbert by about a decade.
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Aleksandr Korkin
1837 - 1908 (71 years)
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Korkin was a Russian mathematician. He made contribution to the development of partial differential equations, and was second only to Chebyshev among the founders of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical School. Among others, his students included Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev.
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Gustav Herglotz
1881 - 1953 (72 years)
Gustav Herglotz was a German Bohemian physicist best known for his works on the theory of relativity and seismology. Biography Gustav Ferdinand Joseph Wenzel Herglotz was born in Volary num. 28 to a public notary Gustav Herglotz and his wife Maria née Wachtel. The family were Sudeten Germans. He studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Vienna in 1899, and attended lectures by Ludwig Boltzmann. In this time of study, he had a friendship with his colleagues Paul Ehrenfest, Hans Hahn and Heinrich Tietze. In 1900 he went to the LMU Munich and achieved his Doctorate in 1902 under Hugo von Seeliger.
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Philipp Ludwig von Seidel
1821 - 1896 (75 years)
Philipp Ludwig von Seidel was a German mathematician. He was the son of Julie Reinhold and Justus Christian Felix Seidel. Lakatos credits von Seidel with discovering, in 1847, the crucial analytic concept of uniform convergence, while analyzing an incorrect proof of Cauchy's.
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Zygmunt Janiszewski
1888 - 1920 (32 years)
Zygmunt Janiszewski was a Polish mathematician. Early life and education He was born to mother Julia Szulc-Chojnicka and father, Czeslaw Janiszewski who was a graduate of the University of Warsaw and served as the director of the Société du Crédit Municipal in Warsaw.
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Franz Mertens
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
Franz Mertens was a Polish mathematician. He was born in Schroda in the Grand Duchy of Posen, Kingdom of Prussia and died in Vienna, Austria. The Mertens function M is the sum function for the Möbius function, in the theory of arithmetic functions. The Mertens conjecture concerning its growth, conjecturing it bounded by x1/2, which would have implied the Riemann hypothesis, is now known to be false . The Meissel–Mertens constant is analogous to the Euler–Mascheroni constant, but the harmonic series sum in its definition is only over the primes rather than over all integers and the logarithm is taken twice, not just once.
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Stanisław Leśniewski
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Stanisław Leśniewski was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and mother Helena . Leśniewski went to a high school in Irkutsk. Later he attended lectures by Hans Cornelius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and lectures by Wacław Sierpiński at Lviv University.
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Henryk Zygalski
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Henryk Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma ciphers before and during World War II. Life Zygalski was born on 15 July 1908 in Posen, German Empire . He was, from September 1932, a civilian cryptologist with the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów , housed in the Saxon Palace in Warsaw. He worked there with fellow Poznań University alumni and Cipher Bureau cryptology-course graduates Marian Rejewski and Jerzy Różycki. Together they developed methods and equipment for breaking Enigma messages. In late 1938, in response to growing complexit...
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Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus
1651 - 1708 (57 years)
Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus was a German mathematician, physicist, physician, and philosopher. He introduced the Tschirnhaus transformation and is considered by some to have been the inventor of European porcelain, an invention long accredited to Johann Friedrich Böttger but others claim porcelain had been made by English manufacturers at an even earlier date.
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John Charles Fields
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
John Charles Fields, FRS, FRSC was a Canadian mathematician and the founder of the Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics. Career Born in Hamilton, Canada West, to a leather shop owner, Fields graduated from Hamilton Collegiate Institute in 1880 and the University of Toronto in 1884 before leaving for the United States to study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Fields received his Ph.D. in 1887. His thesis, entitled Symbolic Finite Solutions and Solutions by Definite Integrals of the Equation dny/dxn = xmy, was published in the American Journal of Mathematic...
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Abu Kamil
850 - 930 (80 years)
Abū Kāmil Shujāʿ ibn Aslam ibn Muḥammad Ibn Shujāʿ was a prominent Egyptian mathematician during the Islamic Golden Age. He is considered the first mathematician to systematically use and accept irrational numbers as solutions and coefficients to equations. His mathematical techniques were later adopted by Fibonacci, thus allowing Abu Kamil an important part in introducing algebra to Europe.
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Édouard Lucas
1842 - 1891 (49 years)
François Édouard Anatole Lucas was a French mathematician. Lucas is known for his study of the Fibonacci sequence. The related Lucas sequences and Lucas numbers are named after him. Biography Lucas was born in Amiens and educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He worked in the Paris Observatory and later became a professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint Louis and the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris.
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Isaac Barrow
1630 - 1677 (47 years)
Isaac Barrow was an English Christian theologian and mathematician who is generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal calculus; in particular, for proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus. His work centered on the properties of the tangent; Barrow was the first to calculate the tangents of the kappa curve. He is also notable for being the inaugural holder of the prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, a post later held by his student, Isaac Newton.
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Ashutosh Mukherjee
1864 - 1924 (60 years)
Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was a prolific Bengali educator, jurist, barrister and mathematician. He was the first student to be awarded a dual degree from Calcutta University. Perhaps the most emphatic figure of Indian education, he was a man of great personality, high self-respect, courage and towering administrative ability. The second Indian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta for four consecutive two-year terms and a fifth two-year term , Mukherjee was responsible for the foundation of the Bengal Technical Institute in 1906, which was later known as Jadavpur University and the U...
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Edward Routh
1831 - 1907 (76 years)
Edward John Routh was an English mathematician, noted as the outstanding coach of students preparing for the Mathematical Tripos examination of the University of Cambridge in its heyday in the middle of the nineteenth century. He also did much to systematise the mathematical theory of mechanics and created several ideas critical to the development of modern control systems theory.
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Otto Hesse
1811 - 1874 (63 years)
Ludwig Otto Hesse was a German mathematician. Hesse was born in Königsberg, Prussia, and died in Munich, Bavaria. He worked mainly on algebraic invariants, and geometry. The Hessian matrix, the Hesse normal form, the Hesse configuration, the Hessian group, Hessian pairs, Hesse's theorem, Hesse pencil, and the Hesse transfer principle are named after him. Many of Hesse's research findings were presented for the first time in Crelle's Journal or Hesse's textbooks.
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Vladimir Smirnov
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov was a mathematician who made significant contributions in both pure and applied mathematics, and also in the history of mathematics. Smirnov worked on diverse areas of mathematics, such as complex functions and conjugate functions in Euclidean spaces. In the applied field his work includes the propagation of waves in elastic media with plane boundaries and the oscillations of elastic spheres. His pioneering approach to solving the initial-boundary value problem to the wave equation formed the basis of the spacetime triangle diagram technique for wave motion devel...
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Mary Everest Boole
1832 - 1916 (84 years)
Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.
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Salvatore Pincherle
1853 - 1936 (83 years)
Salvatore Pincherle was an Italian mathematician. He contributed significantly to the field of functional analysis, established the Italian Mathematical Union , and was president of the Third International Congress of Mathematicians. The Pincherle derivative is named after him.
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Gordon Welchman
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
William Gordon Welchman OBE was a British mathematician. During World War II, he worked at Britain's secret decryption centre at Bletchley Park, where he was one of the most important contributors.
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Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was a Soviet mathematician, who made numerous contributions in algebraic topology, geometry, measure theory, probability theory, ergodic theory and entropy theory. Life Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to a wealthy Jewish family. His mother, Henrietta Emmanuilovna Levenson, had studied medicine in France . His maternal grandmother, Clara Levenson, had been one of the first female doctors in Russia. His maternal grandfather Emmanuil Levenson was a wealthy businessman . Vladimir Rokhlin's father Abram Veniaminovich Rokhlin was a well-known ...
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Stanisław Zaremba
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Stanisław Zaremba was a Polish mathematician and engineer. His research in partial differential equations, applied mathematics and classical analysis, particularly on harmonic functions, gained him a wide recognition. He was one of the mathematicians who contributed to the success of the Polish School of Mathematics through his teaching and organizational skills as well as through his research. Apart from his research works, Zaremba wrote many university textbooks and monographies.
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Karl Georg Christian von Staudt
1798 - 1867 (69 years)
Karl Georg Christian von Staudt was a German mathematician who used synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for arithmetic. Life and influence Karl was born in the Free Imperial City of Rothenburg, which is now called Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. From 1814 he studied in Gymnasium in Ausbach. He attended the University of Göttingen from 1818 to 1822 where he studied with Gauss who was director of the observatory. Staudt provided an ephemeris for the orbits of Mars and the asteroid Pallas. When in 1821 Comet Nicollet-Pons was observed, he provided the elements of its orbit. These ac...
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