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
Edward Linfoot
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Edward Hubert Linfoot was a British mathematician, primarily known for his work on optics, but also noted for his work in pure mathematics. Early life and career Edward Linfoot was born in Sheffield, England, in 1905. He was the eldest child of George Edward Linfoot, a violinist and mathematician, and George's wife Laura, née Clayton. After attending King Edward VII School he won a scholarship to Balliol College at the University of Oxford.
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Elizabeth Scott
1917 - 1988 (71 years)
Elizabeth Leonard Scott was an American mathematician specializing in statistics. Scott was born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Her family moved to Berkeley, California when she was 4 years old. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she studied astronomy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1949 in astronomy, and received a permanent position in the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley in 1951.
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Gilbert Ames Bliss
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Gilbert Ames Bliss, , was an American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations. Life Bliss grew up in a Chicago family that eventually became affluent; in 1907, his father became president of the company supplying all of Chicago's electricity. The family was not affluent, however, when Bliss entered the University of Chicago in 1893 . Hence he had to support himself while a student by winning a scholarship, and by playing in a student professional mandolin quartet.
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Daniel Slotnick
1931 - 1985 (54 years)
Daniel Leonid Slotnick was an American mathematician and computer architect. Slotnick, in papers published with John Cocke in 1958, discussed the use of parallelism in numerical calculations for the first time. He later served as the chief architect of the ILLIAC IV supercomputer. He was the principal investigator on a DARPA contract in the early 1970s that produced the ILLIAC IV and the ARPANET. It was a fairly large operation, with its own building on the UIUC campus, originally called the Center for Advanced Computation but which is now the Astronomy Building. ILLIAC IV was constructed by Burroughs Corporation, using some special chips made by Fairchild Semiconductor.
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Kiyoshi Oka
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Kiyoshi Oka was a Japanese mathematician who did fundamental work in the theory of several complex variables. Biography Oka was born in Osaka. He went to Kyoto Imperial University in 1919, turning to mathematics in 1923 and graduating in 1924.
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Viktor Kupradze
1903 - 1985 (82 years)
Viktor Kupradze was a Georgian mathematician. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , professor . Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences . Biography Viktor Kupradze was born in the village Kela, Lanchkhuti Municipality on November 2, 1903 in the family of a railwayman. After graduating from the Kutaisi Technical School in 1922, he continued his studies at the faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Tbilisi State University. When still young, Kupradze participated actively in publle work. Kupradze published his first scientific work in 1929 at the age of 26. In 1935 he defended his doctor’s thesis.
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Oliver Dimon Kellogg
1878 - 1932 (54 years)
Oliver Dimon Kellogg was an American mathematician. His father, Day Otis Kellogg, was a professor of literature at the University of Kansas and editor of the American edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1895 Oliver Kellogg began his undergraduate study at Princeton University, where he earned his master's degree in 1900. With a John S. Kennedy stipend he first studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then in 1901/1902 at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. At Göttingen in 1902 he earned his PhD with a thesis Zur Theorie der Integralgleichungen und des Dirichlet'schen Prinzips under the direction of David Hilbert.
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Lionel Cooper
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper was a South African mathematician who worked in operator theory, transform theory, thermodynamics, functional analysis and differential equations. Development Cooper was born in Beaufort West, Western Cape, South Africa. Following the death of his father in 1919, the family moved to Cape Town where he attended the South African College School. His ability was soon recognized and he was encouraged to become a rabbi. However he rejected the Jewish faith and instead studied mathematics and physics at the University of Cape Town, where he won the Governor General's prize for pure mathematics.
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George Barker Jeffery
1891 - 1957 (66 years)
George Barker Jeffery FRS was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. He is probably best known to the scientifically literate public as the translator of papers by Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, and other fathers of relativity theory.
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Ralph Fox
1913 - 1973 (60 years)
Ralph Hartzler Fox was an American mathematician. As a professor at Princeton University, he taught and advised many of the contributors to the Golden Age of differential topology, and he played an important role in the modernization of knot theory and of bringing it into the mainstream.
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Frank Ramsey
1903 - 1930 (27 years)
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
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Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin was a French mathematician, the second woman to obtain a doctorate in pure mathematics in France, the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France, the president of the French Mathematical Society, and an expert on fluid mechanics and abstract algebra.
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Wilhelm Ackermann
1896 - 1962 (66 years)
Wilhelm Friedrich Ackermann was a German mathematician and logician best known for his work in mathematical logic and the Ackermann function, an important example in the theory of computation. Biography Ackermann was born in Herscheid, Germany, and was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Göttingen in 1925 for his thesis Begründung des "tertium non datur" mittels der Hilbertschen Theorie der Widerspruchsfreiheit, which was a consistency proof of arithmetic apparently without Peano induction . This was one of two major works in proof theory in the 1920s and the only one following Hilbert's school of thought.
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Lao Genevra Simons
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Lao Genevra Simons also referred to as Lao G. Simons, was an American mathematician, writer, and historian of mathematics known for her influential book Fabre and Mathematics and Other Essays. Simons was head of the mathematics department at Hunter College in New York.
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Carl Benjamin Boyer
1906 - 1976 (70 years)
Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."
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Paul I. Richards
1923 - 1978 (55 years)
Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.
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Paul Koebe
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Paul Koebe was a 20th-century German mathematician. His work dealt exclusively with the complex numbers, his most important results being on the uniformization of Riemann surfaces in a series of four papers in 1907–1909. He did his thesis at Berlin, where he worked under Hermann Schwarz. He was an extraordinary professor at Leipzig from 1910 to 1914, then an ordinary professor at the University of Jena before returning to Leipzig in 1926 as an ordinary professor. He died in Leipzig.
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Frank Lauren Hitchcock
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Frank Lauren Hitchcock was an American mathematician and physicist known for his formulation of the transportation problem in 1941. Academic life Frank did his preparatory study at Phillips Andover Academy. He entered Harvard University and completed his bachelor's degree in 1896. Then he began teaching, first in Paris and at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. From 1904 to 1906 he taught chemistry at North Dakota State University, Fargo.
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David van Dantzig
1900 - 1959 (59 years)
David van Dantzig was a Dutch mathematician, well known for the construction in topology of the dyadic solenoid. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1900, Van Dantzig started to study Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam in 1917, where Gerrit Mannoury lectured. He received his PhD at the University of Groningen in 1931 with a thesis entitled "" under supervision of Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.
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Robert H. Coats
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Robert Hamilton Coats was Canada's first Dominion Statistician. He was born in Clinton, Huron County, Ontario in 1874, the son of Robert Coats, who came to Canada from Scotland. In 1896, Coats received a B.A. from the University College in Toronto. He worked as a journalist for The Toronto World and then the Toronto Globe until 1902 when, at the request of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he became editor of the Labour Gazette; King himself had been the first editor of this publication which included statistical information related to labour.
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Joseph Ritt
1893 - 1951 (58 years)
Joseph Fels Ritt was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century. He was born and died in New York. After beginning his undergraduate studies at City College of New York, Ritt received his B.A. from George Washington University in 1913. He then earned a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University in 1917 under the supervision of Edward Kasner. After doing calculations for the war effort in World War I, he joined the Columbia faculty in 1921. He served as department chair from 1942 to 1945, and in 1945 became the Davies Professor of Mathematics. In 1932, Ge...
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Robert Edouard Moritz
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Robert Edouard Moritz was a German-American mathematician. He published about 75 books and papers. For over 30 years he was head of the mathematics department at the University of Washington. Biography Moritz was born in Schleswig-Holstein to Karl R. and Maria Stahlhut Moritz, and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve where the family settled on a farm in Nebraska. From 1885 to 1892 he attended Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, and then studied another year at the University of Chicago. After two summer quarters in the next years he received his MA in mathematics in 1896.
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Ernst G. Straus
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Ernst Gabor Straus was a German-American mathematician of Jewish origin who helped found the theories of Euclidean Ramsey theory and of the arithmetic properties of analytic functions. His extensive list of co-authors includes Albert Einstein, Paul Erdős, Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, Lee Albert Rubel, Mathukumalli V Subbarao, László Lovász, Carl Pomerance, Moshe Goldberg, and George Szekeres.
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Stefan Mazurkiewicz
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning . His students included Karol Borsuk, Bronisław Knaster, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Stanisław Saks, and Antoni Zygmund. For a time Mazurkiewicz was a professor at the University of Paris; however, he spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Warsaw.
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Emanuel Sperner
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Emanuel Sperner was a German mathematician, best known for two theorems. He was born in Waltdorf , and died in Sulzburg-Laufen, West Germany. He was a student at Carolinum in Nysa and then Hamburg University where his advisor was Wilhelm Blaschke. He was appointed Professor in Königsberg in 1934, and subsequently held posts in a number of universities until 1974.
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Paul Bernays
1888 - 1977 (89 years)
Paul Isaac Bernays was a Swiss mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He was an assistant and close collaborator of David Hilbert.
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Leo Katz
1914 - 1976 (62 years)
Leo Katz was an American statistician. Katz largely contributed to the area of Social Network Analysis. In 1953, he introduced a centrality measure named Katz centrality that computes the degree of influence of an actor in a social network. The computation already outlined the algorithm today known as PageRank.
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W. V. D. Hodge
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Sir William Vallance Douglas Hodge was a British mathematician, specifically a geometer. His discovery of far-reaching topological relations between algebraic geometry and differential geometry—an area now called Hodge theory and pertaining more generally to Kähler manifolds—has been a major influence on subsequent work in geometry.
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Heinrich Wieleitner
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.
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Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski FRS was a German mathematician. Life Rogosinski was born in Breslau, into a Jewish family. His father, Hermann Rogosinski was Counsel in Wroclaw. Rogosinski studied at Mary Magdalen School from 1900 until 1913. He attended the University of Breslau, University of Freiburg and University of Göttingen, with Edmund Landau. His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which Rogosinski served as a medic.
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L. E. J. Brouwer
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer , usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as the founder of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.
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Joseph Miller Thomas
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Joseph Miller Thomas was an American mathematician, known for the Thomas decomposition of algebraic and differential systems. Thomas received his Ph.D., supervised by Frederick Wahn Beal, from the University of Pennsylvania with thesis Congruences of Circles, Studied with reference to the Surface of Centers. He was a mathematics professor at Duke University for many years. His graduate students include Mabel Griffin and Ruth W. Stokes. In 1935, he was one of the founders of the Duke Mathematical Journal. For the academic year 1936–1937, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced...
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George Gallup
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...
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Temple Rice Hollcroft
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Temple Rice Hollcroft, Sr. was an American mathematician and local historian. Hollcroft received B.S. in 1912 and A.B. in 1914 from Hanover College and then A.M. in 1915 from the University of Kentucky. He received in 1917 his Ph.D. from Cornell University under Virgil Snyder and during WW I served in France as a second lieutenant in the Field Artillery. Hollcroft was a mathematics professor at Wells College from 1918 to 1954, when he retired as professor emeritus. He served for 14 years as associate secretary of the American Mathematical Society. In 1932 in Zurich he was an Invited Speaker o...
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Mary Cartwright
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known as chaos theory. Along with J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.
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Hans Petersson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Hans Petersson was a German mathematician. He introduced the Petersson inner product and is also known for the Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture. See also Weil–Petersson metric
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Taira Honda
1932 - 1975 (43 years)
was a Japanese mathematician working on number theory who proved the Honda–Tate theorem classifying abelian varieties over finite fields.
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Hitoshi Kumano-Go
1935 - 1982 (47 years)
Hitoshi Kumano-Go was a Japanese mathematician who specialized in partial differential equations. He is especially recognized for his work on pseudo-differential operators and Fourier integral operators.
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Heinz Rutishauser
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...
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Aleksandr Khinchin
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin was a Soviet mathematician and one of the most significant contributors to the Soviet school of probability theory. Due to romanization conventions, his name is sometimes written as "Khinchin" and other times as "Khintchine".
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Erhard Schmidt
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Erhard Schmidt was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu , in the Governorate of Livonia .
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Henri Lebesgue
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Henri Léon Lebesgue was a French mathematician known for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th-century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Intégrale, longueur, aire at the University of Nancy during 1902.
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Alexander Weinstein
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Alexander Weinstein was a mathematician who worked on boundary value problems in fluid dynamics. Early life, family and personal life Weinstein was born to Judel Jejb Weinstein and Praskovya Levkovich, his family were Jewish, and his father was a doctor. His family moved to Astrakhan, but later decided to emigrate to Germany, there Weinstein completed his schooling, having studied first in Würzburg, then at the University of Göttingen during 1913/14.
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Alfred Brauer
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Alfred Theodor Brauer was a German-American mathematician who did work in number theory. He was born in Charlottenburg, and studied at the University of Berlin. As he served Germany in World War I, even being injured in the war, he was able to keep his position longer than many other Jewish academics who had been forced out after Hitler's rise to power. In 1935 he lost his position and in 1938 he tried to leave Germany, but was not able to until the following year. He initially worked in the Northeast, but in 1942 he settled into a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A good deal of his works, and the Alfred T.
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Alfred Errera
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Alfred Errera was a Belgian mathematician. Errera studied at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he received his Ph.D. in 1921 with dissertation Du coloriage des cartes et de quelques questions d'analysis situs. In his dissertation he introduced what is now called the Errera graph, which is a counterexample to the validity of the alleged proof of the four color theorem by Alfred Kempe. From 1928 to 1956 he was a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
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Wanda Szmielew
1918 - 1976 (58 years)
Wanda Szmielew née Montlak was a Polish mathematical logician who first proved the decidability of the first-order theory of abelian groups. Life Wanda Montlak was born on 5 April 1918 in Warsaw. She completed high school in 1935 and married, taking the name Szmielew. In the same year she entered the University of Warsaw, where she studied logic under Adolf Lindenbaum, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Alfred Tarski. Her research at this time included work on the axiom of choice, but it was interrupted by the 1939 Invasion of Poland.
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Arthur Milgram
1912 - 1961 (49 years)
Arthur Norton Milgram was an American mathematician. He made contributions in functional analysis, combinatorics, differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations, and Galois theory. Perhaps one of his more famous contributions is the Lax–Milgram theorem—a theorem in functional analysis that is particularly applicable in the study of partial differential equations. In the third chapter of Emil Artin's book Galois Theory, Milgram also discussed some applications of Galois theory. Milgram also contributed to graph theory, by co-authoring the article Verallgemeinerung eines graphe...
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Elisha Netanyahu
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Elisha Netanyahu was an Israeli mathematician specializing in complex analysis. Over the course of his work at the Technion he was the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and established the separate Department of Mathematics. Historian Benzion Netanyahu was his brother, while current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is his nephew.
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Leonidas Alaoglu
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Leonidas Alaoglu was a mathematician, known for his result, called Alaoglu's theorem on the weak-star compactness of the closed unit ball in the dual of a normed space, also known as the Banach–Alaoglu theorem.
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Horace Yomishi Mochizuki
1937 - 1989 (52 years)
Horace Yomishi Mochizuki was an American mathematician known for his contributions to group theory. Mochizuki received a special award from the National Science Foundation for his work on the Burnside problem.
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