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,
#10951
Levi L. Conant
1857 - 1916 (59 years)
Levi Leonard Conant was an American mathematician specializing in trigonometry. Education and career He attended Phillips Academy, Andover and Dartmouth College and later Syracuse University , studying mathematics.
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Susan Jane Cunningham
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Susan Jane Cunningham was an American mathematician instrumental in the founding and development of Swarthmore College. She was born in Maryland, and studied mathematics and astronomy with Maria Mitchell at Vassar College as a special student during 1866–67. She also studied those subjects during several summers at Harvard University, Princeton University, Newnham College, Cambridge, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and Williams College.
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Cooper Harold Langford
1895 - 1964 (69 years)
Cooper Harold Langford was an American analytic philosopher and mathematical logician who co-authored the book Symbolic Logic with C. I. Lewis. He is also known for introducing the Langford–Moore paradox.
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James Dickson Murray
#10955
Honda Toshiaki
1744 - 1821 (77 years)
Honda Toshiaki was a Japanese political economist in the late Edo period. Born in Echigo, Toshiaki went to Edo to study astronomy, mathematics and kendo. At the age of 24, he opened his own school. He wrote A Secret Plan of Government , in which he proposed lifting a ban of a foreign trade and colonization of Ezo, and Tales of the West , both in 1798.
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Mikhail Vaschenko-Zakharchenko
1825 - 1912 (87 years)
Mikhail Yegorovich Vaschenko-Zakharchenko was a Russian mathematician, member of Moscow Mathematical Society from 1866 and Privy Councillor of Russia from 1908. His major areas of research included the history of geometry in antiquity and Lobachevskian geometry.
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Peter Štefan
1941 - 1978 (37 years)
Peter Štefan was a Slovak mathematician who was known for his works on dynamical systems and mathematical entropy. He attended school in Bratislava, and then Charles University in Prague. In 1968, he was involved in politics in Czechoslovakia, supporting the political movement that sought to humanize Communist rule during the Prague Spring. As he was visiting the University of Warwick, though, the Soviet Union and several Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country, installing a Soviet-controlled regime. Štefan feared that he would be in danger if he returned, and he decided to stay in Britain. He remained in Warwick, where he studied for a Ph.D.
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William Smellie
1740 - 1795 (55 years)
William Smellie was a Scottish printer who edited the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was also a naturalist and antiquary. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, co-founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a friend of Robert Burns.
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Marie Georges Humbert
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Marie Georges Humbert was a French mathematician who worked on Kummer surfaces and the Appell–Humbert theorem and introduced Humbert surfaces. His son was the mathematician Pierre Humbert. He won the Poncelet Prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1891.
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Mahmut Bajraktarević
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Mahmut Bajraktarević was a Bosnian mathematician and academician. He graduated from the University of Belgrade in 1933 and received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1953 with the dissertation Sur certaines suites itérées. Bajraktarević was a professor at the University of Sarajevo and had a great influence on the development of mathematics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He contributed to the research areas of functional equations, iterative sequences and summability theory.
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Peter Carl Fabergé
1846 - 1920 (74 years)
Peter Carl Fabergé, also known as Karl Gustavovich Fabergé , was a Russian jeweller best known for the famous Fabergé eggs made in the style of genuine Easter eggs, but using precious metals and gemstones rather than more mundane materials. He was one of the sons of the founder of the famous jewelry legacy House of Fabergé.
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L. Gustave du Pasquier
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Louis-Gustave du Pasquier was a Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics and mathematical sciences. Education and career Du Pasquier studied at l'École Polytechnique, the University of Zurich, La Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales. He received his doctorate in 1906 from the University of Zurich with dissertation Zahlentheorie der Tettarionen under the supervision of Adolf Hurwitz. Du Pasquier then taught at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Kusnacht, Frauenfeld, Winterthur, and Zurich before he became in 1911 a professor at the University of Neuchâtel. Du Pasquier wrote more than 60 articles published in scientific journals.
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Roy C. Geary
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Robert Charles Geary was an Irish statistician and founder of both the Central Statistics Office and the Economic and Social Research Institute. He held degrees from University College Dublin and the Sorbonne. He lectured in mathematics at University College Southampton and in applied economics at Cambridge University . He was a statistician in the Department of Industry and Commerce between 1923 and 1957. The National University of Ireland conferred a Doctorate of Science on him in 1938. He was the founding director of the Central Statistics Office . He was head of the National Accounts Branch of the United Nations in New York from 1957 to 1960.
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Robert Wedderburn
1947 - 1975 (28 years)
Robert William Maclagan Wedderburn was a Scottish statistician who worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station. He was co-developer, with John Nelder, of the generalized linear model methodology, and then expanded this subject to develop the idea of quasi-likelihood.
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Bartholomew Price
1818 - 1898 (80 years)
Reverend Bartholomew Price was an English mathematician, clergyman and educator. Life He was born at Coln St Denis, Gloucestershire, in 1818. He was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, of which college he became fellow in 1844 and tutor and mathematical lecturer in 1845. He at once took a leading position in the mathematical teaching of the university, and published treatises on the Differential calculus and the Infinitesimal calculus , which for long were the recognized textbooks there. This latter work included the differential and integral calculus, the calculus of variations, the theo...
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Leif Erikson
970 - 1020 (50 years)
Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky , was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being coastal North America. There is ongoing speculation that the settlement made by Leif and his crew corresponds to the remains of a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland, Canada, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which was occupied approximately 1,000 years ago.
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Sarada Devi
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Sri Sarada Devi , born Kshemankari / Thakurmani / Saradamani Mukhopadhyay, was the wife and spiritual consort of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a nineteenth-century Hindu mystic. Sarada Devi is also reverentially addressed as the Holy Mother by the followers of the Sri Ramakrishna monastic order. The Sri Sarada Math and Ramakrishna Sarada Mission situated at Dakshineshwar is based on the ideals and life of Sarada Devi. She played an important role in the growth of the Ramakrishna Movement.
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Jacques Saly
1717 - 1776 (59 years)
Jacques François Joseph Saly, also known as Jacques Saly , French-born sculptor who worked in France, Italy and Malta. He is commonly associated with his time in Denmark he served as Director of the Royal Danish Academy of Art . His most noteworthy work is the equestrian statue Frederik V on Horseback at Amalienborg.
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Kazimierz Jelski
1782 - 1867 (85 years)
Kazimierz Jelski was a Polish-Lithuanian Classicist architect and sculptor active in Lithuania. Jelski was born in Ejsymonty near Grodno, today in Belarus. He was the son of Karol Jelski who was a Polish sculptor, painter and stucco artist. He first studied under his father. Between 1800 and 1808 he studied painting and architecture at the Vilnius University. For painting he studied under Laurynas Gucevičius and Franciszek Smuglewicz, architecture with Michała Szulca and sculpture with Andrzej Le Brun. From 1809 he studied sculpture at the Imperial Academy of Arts. From 1811 to 1826, Jelski worked as a professor of the University of Vilnius, where he trained many renowned sculptors.
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Richard Swineshead
Richard Swineshead was an English mathematician, logician, and natural philosopher. He was perhaps the greatest of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, where he was a fellow certainly by 1344 and possibly by 1340. His magnum opus was a series of treatises known as the Liber calculationum , written c. 1350, which earned him the nickname of The Calculator.
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Hermann Vermeil
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Hermann Vermeil was a German mathematician who produced the first published proof that the scalar curvature is the only absolute invariant among those of prescribed type suitable for Albert Einstein’s theory. The theorem was proved by him in 1917 when he was Hermann Weyl's assistant.
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Joseph Betts
1701 - Present (325 years)
Joseph Betts was an English mathematician. He held the Savilian Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford in 1765. Betts was an undergraduate and Fellow of University College, Oxford, where he was a tutor of William Jones. He had previously sought election as Savilian Professor of Astronomy with the support of the Earl of Lichfield, the Earl of Halifax, and the Earl of Bute. He thanked his patrons for that failed attempt in the dedication to an engraving of the annular solar eclipse of 1 April 1764.
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W. H. Besant
1828 - 1917 (89 years)
William Henry Besant was a British mathematician, brother of novelist Walter Besant. Another brother, Frank, was the husband of Annie Besant. Parentage William was born in Portsea, Portsmouth on 1 November 1828. According to William's brother Walter, their father "tried many things. For some time he was in very low water; then he got up again and settled in a quiet office. He was not a pushing man, nor did he know how to catch at opportunities. Mostly he waited. Meanwhile, he was a studious man, whose chief delight was in reading... He was never in the least degree moved by the Calvinistic fanaticism of the time...
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John Bird
1709 - 1776 (67 years)
John Bird was a British mathematical instrument maker. He was born at Bishop Auckland. He came to London in 1740 where he worked for Jonathan Sisson and George Graham. By 1745 he had his own business in the Strand. Bird was commissioned to make a brass quadrant 8 feet across for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where it was mounted on 16 February 1750, and where it is still preserved. Soon after, duplicates were ordered for France, Spain and Russia. He was known for inventing the sextant
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Christine Hamill
1923 - 1956 (33 years)
Christine Mary Hamill was an English mathematician who specialised in group theory and finite geometry. Education Hamill was one of the four children of English physiologist Philip Hamill. She attended St Paul's Girls' School and the Perse School for Girls. In 1942, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, becoming a wrangler in 1945.
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Joseph Delboeuf
1831 - 1896 (65 years)
Joseph Rémi Léopold Delbœuf was a Belgian experimental psychologist who studied visual illusions including his work on the Delboeuf illusion. He studied and taught philosophy, mathematics, and psychophysics. He published works across a diverse range of subjects including the curative effects of hypnotism.
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William Whyburn
1901 - 1972 (71 years)
William Marvin Whyburn was an American mathematician who worked on ordinary differential equations. His work focussed on a multitude of topics including, boundary value problems, properties of Green’s function and properties of Green’s matrix.
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Blasius of Parma
1355 - 1416 (61 years)
Blasius of Parma was an Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer. He popularised English and French philosophical work in Italy, where he associated both with scholastics and with early Renaissance humanists.
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
1864 - 1901 (37 years)
Comte Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa , known as Toulouse Lautrec , was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the sometimes decadent affairs of those times.
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Suzan Rose Benedict
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Suzan Rose Benedict was the first woman awarded a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and had a long teaching career at Smith College. Early life and education Suzan Benedict was born in Norwalk, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of David DeForrest Benedict, MD and Harriott Melvina Benedict . Dr. Benedict had been a Union Surgeon in the American Civil War. She was a niece of oil magnate and philanthropist, Louis Severance.
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Ellen Burrell
1850 - 1938 (88 years)
Ellen Louisa Burrell was an American mathematics professor, head of the Department of Pure Mathematics at Wellesley College from 1897 to 1916. Early life Burrell was born in Lockport, New York, the daughter of Myron Louis Burrell and Mary Jones Burrell. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1880, in the same class as her future colleagues Katharine Lee Bates and Charlotte Fitch Roberts. She went to Germany for further studies at Göttingen in 1896 and 1897.
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Robert Allan Smith
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Robert Allan Smith CBE FRS PRSE was a British mathematician and physicist. Biography Smith was born in Kelso on 14 May 1909, the elder of two sons of George J T Smith, a tailor, and his wife, Elisabeth , a ladies' dressmaker. His education was initially at local village schools, followed by Kelso High School. In 1926 he entered the University of Edinburgh to study mathematics and natural philosophy, and gained his MA with first-class honours in 1930. He was also awarded a scholarship that took him to Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he read for the Maths Tripos Part II, obtaining his MA in ...
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Helen Almira Shafer
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
Helen Almira Shafer was an American educator and president of Wellesley College. Life Helen Almira Shafer was born Newark, New Jersey on the 23 September 1839. Her father was a clergyman of the Congregational Church. She was educated in a seminary in Albion, New York, afterwards attending Oberlin College.
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Johannes Werner
1468 - 1522 (54 years)
Johann Werner was a German mathematician. He was born in Nuremberg, Germany, where he became a parish priest. His primary work was in astronomy, mathematics, and geography, although he was also considered a skilled instrument maker.
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Eugenius Nulty
1790 - 1871 (81 years)
Eugenius Nulty was an Irish born American mathematician of the 19th century. He served on the faculty of Dickinson College from 1814 to 1816, and later taught and tutored prominent Philadelphians, including the brothers Mathew Carey Lea and Henry Charles Lea.
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Nikolai Nikolaevich Yanenko
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
#10987
Frederick John Kiesler
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Frederick Jacob Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, theoretician, theater designer, artist and sculptor. Biography Kiesler was born Friedrich Jacob Kiesler in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire .
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Ignatz Mühlwenzel
1690 - 1766 (76 years)
Ignatz Heinrich Mühlwenzel was a Bohemian mathematician. Life Ignatz Heinrich Mühlwenzel was a member of the Jesuit order and a professor of mathematics at the University of Prague. He was of minority German ethnicity in western Czech border. He was a skilled optician who ground lenses for his own telescopes. Mühlwenzel is notable because his mathematical "descendants," which include Johann Radon, number more than 10,000.
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Edward Carey Francis
1897 - 1966 (69 years)
Edward Carey Francis OBE, was a British mathematician and Anglican missionary to Kenya, where he became "arguably the most influential educationist in Kenya's modern history". He was born in Hampstead, London. He was educated first at William Ellis School, becoming head-boy of the school and captain of the cricket, football, tennis and athletics teams. After school he enlisted in the British Army, serving in the First World War with the Royal Artillery and being mentioned in despatches. On completion of the war he took up a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Adrian Krzyżanowski
1788 - 1852 (64 years)
Adrian Krzyżanowski was a Polish mathematician and translator of German literature. Life From 1805 to 1810 he taught in a school in Warsaw, then was a professor of mathematics in Radzyń and Płock before studying from 1817 to 1820 in Paris. He was also a professor at the Warsaw Lyceum, which had been founded by Prussia, and at the University of Warsaw.
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Dieter Rödding
1937 - 1984 (47 years)
Dieter Rödding was a German mathematician who main research interest was mathematical logic. Dieter Rödding was born on 24 August 1937 in Hattingen, Ruhr, Germany. In 1956, Rödding began his studies at the Westphalian Wilhelms-University in Münster, Germany. In 1961, he received his doctorate with the dissertation "Representative sentences about elementary functions", supervised by Gisbert Hasenjaeger. In 1964, he completed his habilitation at Münster with the thesis "Theory of recursivity over the domain of finite sets of finite rank". In 1966, he succeeded Hans Hermes as the Chair and Dire...
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Vladimir Vranić
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Vladimir Vranić was a Croatian mathematician. He was one of the most renowned professors at the University of Zagreb. The amount of his scientific work was very large, and his most important work was in probability and statistics.
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Emily Kathryn Wyant
1897 - 1942 (45 years)
Emily Kathryn Wyant was an American mathematician known as the founder of Kappa Mu Epsilon, a mathematical honor society focusing on undergraduate education. Early life and education Wyant was born on January 16, 1897, in Ipava, Illinois. Her father was a student in Illinois and later a shopkeeper in Bolivar, Missouri, where she graduated from high school in 1914. She attended the University of Missouri on a part time and summer basis while supporting herself as a school teacher, finally completing a bachelor's degree in education in 1921.
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Georgia Caldwell Smith
1909 - 1961 (52 years)
Georgia Caldwell Smith was one of the first African-American women to gain a bachelor's degree in mathematics. When she was 51, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, one of the earliest by an African-American woman, awarded posthumously in 1961. Smith was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College.
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Giovanni Camillo Glorioso
1572 - 1643 (71 years)
Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. He was a friend of Marino Ghetaldi and successor of Galileo Galilei in Pisa, then in Padua. Life Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was born in the village of Mercato or Santa Maria a Vico of Giffoni Valle Piana. He had a correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1604 and he replaced him at the University of Padua, with an income of 350 florins per year, in 1613. He led observations on the 1618 comet, on Mars, and on some aspects of Saturn. He came closer to Antonio Santini and he had contrasts with Scipione Chiaramonti and his successor at the university of Pisa, Barthélemy Souvey, student of Fortunio Liceti.
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Alphonse Mucha
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Alfons Maria Mucha , known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
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Frances Hardcastle
1866 - 1941 (75 years)
Frances Hardcastle was an English mathematician, in 1894 one of the founding members of the American Mathematical Society. Her work included contributions to the theory of point groups. Biography Born in Writtle, just outside Chelmsford, Essex, Hardcastle was a daughter of Henry Hardcastle, a barrister, by his marriage in 1865 to Maria Sophia Herschel, daughter of the astronomer, mathematician, and chemist Sir John Herschel.
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Pierre Humbert
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Pierre Humbert was a French mathematician who worked on the theory of elliptic functions and introduced Humbert polynomials. He was the son of the mathematician Georges Humbert and married the daughter of Henri Andoyer.
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Andries Mac Leod
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Andries Hugo Donald Mac Leod was a Belgian-Swedish philosopher and mathematician. Andries Mac Leod was born in Ledeberg, a suburb of Ghent, as a son of Julius Mac Leod, a botanist and professor at Ghent University, and of Fanny Mac Leod born Maertens, who was translator from English into Dutch of two books by Kropotkin.
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Giulio Pittarelli
1852 - 1934 (82 years)
Giulio Pittarelli was an Italian mathematician, specializing in descriptive geometry and algebraic geometry. Pittarelli received from the University of Naples his laurea in mathematics in 1874 and in engineering in 1876. For many years he was a professor of descriptive geometry at the Sapienza University of Rome. In addition to his mathematical career, he was a painter, an excellent pianist, and an author, who wrote a biography of Luigi Cremona.
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