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
Konstantinos Negris
1804 - 1880 (76 years)
Konstantinos Negris was an author, mathematician, physicist, and professor. He fought in the Greek War of Independence. Konstantinos was a member of the prominent Phanariots family Negris. He was one of the first professors at the newly founded University of Athens and introduced the works of Legendre and Hachette to Greek education, also he was one of the first professors to study abroad; consequently, Greek students continued their studies in France and Germany. He personally intervened in the education of Greek mathematician Ioannis Papadakis. Both Papadakis and Negris influenced the educational path of Nikolaos Ch.
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Abu'l-Hasan ibn Ali al-Qalasadi
1412 - 1486 (74 years)
Abū'l-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Qurashī al-Qalaṣādī was a Muslim Arab mathematician from Al-Andalus specializing in Islamic inheritance jurisprudence. Franz Woepcke stated that al-Qalaṣādī was known as one of the most influential voices in algebraic notation for taking "the first steps toward the introduction of algebraic. He wrote numerous books on arithmetic and algebra, including al-Tabsira fi'lm al-hisab .
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Lucjan Zarzecki
1873 - 1925 (52 years)
Lucjan Zarzecki was a Polish pedagogue and mathematician, a co-originator of national education concept. His area of study was general didactics and didactics of mathematics. Member of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, professor and director of Pedagogics Department of the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in Warsaw.
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Jamshid al-Kashi
1380 - 1429 (49 years)
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Jamshīd Masʿūd al-Kāshī was an astronomer and mathematician during the reign of Tamerlane. Much of al-Kāshī's work was not brought to Europe and still, even the extant work, remains unpublished in any form.
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Yakov Geronimus
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Yakov Lazarevich Geronimus, sometimes spelled J. Geronimus was a Russian mathematician known for contributions to theoretical mechanics and the study of orthogonal polynomials. The Geronimus polynomials are named after him.
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William Ruggles
1797 - 1877 (80 years)
William Ruggles was a professor at George Washington University. Biography William Ruggles was born in Rochester, Massachusetts, about fifty miles south of present-day Boston, on Tuesday September 5, 1797. He was the son of Elisha Ruggles and Mary Clap who also parented six other children: Nathaniel, Micah, Henry, Charles, James, and Lucy. William was the second youngest child in his family. Not much is known about his childhood growing up in Massachusetts until he enrolled in Brown University; where he later graduated from, at the age of twenty-three, in the class of 1820. Two years after graduating from Brown University, Ruggles became a tutor at Columbian College.
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Johann Caspar Horner
1774 - 1834 (60 years)
Johann Caspar Horner was a Swiss physicist, mathematician and astronomer. Life At the beginning, he wanted to be a priest, but later he went to Göttingen, where he learnt astronomy. Then he traveled throughout the world for three years on behalf of the Russians. After the journey he took two years in Saint Petersburg with the cataloging the items he had found. He discovered a method for approaching the roots of equation with unknown factor in a higher power. His findings were published under the titles Über die Curven zweiten Grades and Die fünf regelmässigen Körper. He wrote some other works...
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Abdias Treu
1597 - 1669 (72 years)
Abdias Treu was a German mathematician and academic. He was the professor of mathematics and physical science at the University of Altdorf from 1636-1669. He is best known for his contributions to the field of astronomy. He also contributed writings on the mathematical nature of music theory. He is the grandfather of physician and botanist Christoph Jacob Treu.
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Aristide Maillol
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Biography Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art. After several applications and several years of living in poverty, his enrollment in the École des Beaux-Arts was accepted in 1885, and he studied there under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. His early paintings show the influence of his contemporaries Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin.
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Karl Heinrich Gräffe
1799 - 1873 (74 years)
Karl Heinrich Gräffe was a German mathematician, who was professor at the University of Zurich. Life and work Gräffe's father migrated to North America, leaving the family business of jewelry in his hands. Even so, Gräffe succeeded, studying at night, entering the Carolineum of Brunswick in 1821. From 1823, he studied at the University of Göttingen with professors Gauss and Thibaut, doctorate in 1825.
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Vladimir Potapov
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Vladimir Petrovich Potapov was a Soviet mathematician. He was born in Odesa and died in Kharkiv. External links Vladimir Petrovich Potapov at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
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George Murray Burnett
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
George Murray Burnett FRSE FRSA FRIC LLD was a Scottish mathematician and chemist. He served as both Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University from 1974 until 1980. He is largely remembered for his work on polymer reactions.
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Thomas Bewick
1753 - 1828 (75 years)
Thomas Bewick was an English wood-engraver and natural history author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving cutlery, making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds.
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Ioannis Papadakis
1825 - 1876 (51 years)
Ioannis G. Papadakis was an author, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, meteorologist, and professor. He was the second director of the National Observatory of Athens. He temporarily succeeded Georgios Konstantinos Vouris until Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt replaced him as the third director of the observatory. His most notable work was the observation of the Moons of Jupiter and other meteorological observations in the 1850s. He was also a Scottish rite freemason.
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Sergey Degayev
1857 - 1921 (64 years)
Sergey Petrovich Degayev was a Russian revolutionary terrorist, Okhrana agent, and the murderer of inspector of secret police Georgy Sudeykin. After emigrating to the United States, Degayev took the name Alexander Pell and became a prominent American mathematician, the founder of school of Engineering at the University of South Dakota. The Dr. Alexander Pell scholarship is named in his honor.
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Thomas W. Sederberg
#10967
Adolphe Buhl
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Adolphe Buhl was a French mathematician and astronomer. Biography At the age of 14, he was paralyzed, immobilizing him for a few years and forcing him to walk on crutches all his life. He became interested in mathematics and reached a high level of expertise as a self-taught mathematician. He obtained a PhD in 1901 at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris with thesis Sur les équations différentielles simultanées et la forme aux dérivées partielles adjointe and with second thesis La théorie de Delaunay sur le mouvement de la lune. The thesis committee was composed of Gaston Darbo...
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Viktoras Biržiška
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Viktoras Biržiška was a Lithuanian mathematician, engineer, journalist, and encyclopedist of noble extraction. His brothers were Mykolas Biržiška and Vaclovas Biržiška. Biography He was the youngest of the three Biržiška brothers, sons of Antanas and Elžbieta Biržiska, all who contributed significantly to the Lithuanian National Revival. He studied mathematics and engineering at the University of St. Petersburg in Russia between 1904 and 1908, and later at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology from 1909 to 1914.
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William Arthur
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
William Arthur FRSE MC was a Scottish mathematician. Life He was born on 12 January 1894 at Fergushill near Kilwinning in Ayrshire. He studied at Queen's Park High School in Glasgow then studied Mathematics at Glasgow University graduating MA in 1915. As most, his career was interrupted by the First World War during which he served in the Welsh Guards. He won the Military Cross for his bravery.
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Johannes Praetorius
1537 - 1616 (79 years)
Johannes Praetorius or Johann Richter was a Bohemian German mathematician and astronomer. Life Praetorius was born in Jáchymov, Bohemia. From 1557 he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and from 1562 to 1569 he lived in Nuremberg. His astronomical and mathematical instruments are kept at Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
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Louis Puissant
1769 - 1843 (74 years)
Louis Puissant was a French topographical engineer, geodesist, and mathematician. He was appointed an officer in the corps of topographical engineers of l'armée des Pyrénées occidentales in 1792 and then a professor in l’école centrale d'Agen in 1796. From October 1802 to August 1803, he was in charge of geodesic triangulations on the island of Elba and then in 1803–1804 in Lombardy. He was elected a member of l'Société Philomathique de Paris in 1810 and a member of l'Académie des sciences in 1828.
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Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis
1792 - 1843 (51 years)
Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He is best known for his work on the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference, leading to the Coriolis effect. He was the first to apply the term travail for the transfer of energy by a force acting through a distance, and he prefixed the factor ½ to Leibniz's concept of vis viva, thus specifying today's kinetic energy.
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Robert Hues
1553 - 1632 (79 years)
Robert Hues was an English mathematician and geographer. He attended St. Mary Hall at Oxford, and graduated in 1578. Hues became interested in geography and mathematics, and studied navigation at a school set up by Walter Raleigh. During a trip to Newfoundland, he made observations which caused him to doubt the accepted published values for variations of the compass. Between 1586 and 1588, Hues travelled with Thomas Cavendish on a circumnavigation of the globe, performing astronomical observations and taking the latitudes of places they visited. Beginning in August 1591, Hues and Cavendish again set out on another circumnavigation of the globe.
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Fabrizio Mordente
1532 - 1608 (76 years)
Fabrizio Mordente was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his invention of the "proportional eight-pointed compass" which has two arms with cursors that allow the solution of problems in measuring the circumference, area and angles of a circle. In 1567 he published a single sheet treatise in Venice showing illustrations of his device.
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George Sinclair
George Sinclair was a Scottish mathematician, engineer and demonologist. The first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow, he is known for Satan's Invisible World Discovered, , a work on witchcraft. He wrote in all three areas of his interests, including an account of the "Glenluce Devil", a poltergeist case from , in a 1672 book mainly on hydrostatics but also a pioneering study of geological structures through his experience in coal mines.
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Jean-Léon Gérôme
1824 - 1904 (80 years)
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.
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Max Simon
1844 - 1918 (74 years)
Maximilian Simon was a German historian of mathematics and mathematics teacher. He was concerned mostly with mathematics in the antiquity. Born into a Jewish family, he studied from 1862 to 1866 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, obtaining his Ph.D. from Karl Weierstrass und Ernst Eduard Kummer He was a mathematics teacher in Berlin from 1868 to 1871, and in Strasbourg from 1871 to 1912, where he became an honorary professor of the university.
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William Clark
1770 - 1838 (68 years)
William Clark was an American explorer, soldier, Indian agent, and territorial governor. A native of Virginia, he grew up in pre-statehood Kentucky before later settling in what became the state of Missouri.
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Eric Gill
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog.
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Karl Bobek
1855 - 1899 (44 years)
Karl Joseph Bobek was a German mathematician working on elliptic functions and geometry. External links
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Mellen Woodman Haskell
1863 - 1948 (85 years)
Mellen Woodman Haskell was an American mathematician, specializing in geometry, group theory, and applications of group theory to geometry. Education and career After secondary education at Roxbury Latin School, he received in 1883 his bachelor's degree and in 1885 his M.A. and a Parker Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University. From 1885 to 1889 he studied mathematics at the University of Leipzig and the University of Göttingen, where in 1889 he received, under Felix Klein, his Dr. phil.. In 1889 Haskell became an instructor at the University of Michigan. At the University of California, ...
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Śrīpati
1019 - 1066 (47 years)
Śrīpati , also transliterated as Shri-pati, was an Indian astronomer, astrologer and mathematician. His major works include Dhīkotida-karana , a work of twenty verses on solar and lunar eclipses; Dhruva-mānasa , a work of 105 verses on calculating planetary longitudes, eclipses and planetary transits; Siddhānta-śekhara a major work on astronomy in 19 chapters; and Gaṇita-tilaka, an incomplete arithmetical treatise in 125 verses based on a work by Shridhara.
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Paul Jean Joseph Barbarin
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Paul Jean Joseph Barbarin was a French mathematician, specializing in geometry. Education and career Barbarin studied mathematics for a brief time at the École Polytechnique, but changed, at the age of 19, to the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied mathematics under Briot, Bouquet, Tannery, and Darboux. After graduation, Barbarin became a professor of mathematics at the Lyceum of Nice and then at the School of St.-Cyr of the Lyceum of Toulon. In 1891 he became a professor at the Lyceum of Bordeaux, where he taught for many years. At the time of his death he was a professor at the École...
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Orson Spencer
1802 - 1855 (53 years)
Orson Spencer was a prolific writer and prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served in several highly visible positions within the church and left an extensive legacy of theological writings. Orson Spencer is one of the examples William Mulder cites of highly educated people becoming Mormons during the time of Joseph Smith
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David Christiani
1610 - 1688 (78 years)
David Christiani was a German mathematician, philosopher and Lutheran theologian. He became an ordinary professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg in 1643, ordinary professor of theology at the University of Giessen in 1681, and rector of the University of Giessen in 1686.
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Al-Samawal al-Maghribi
1130 - 1180 (50 years)
Al-Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī , commonly known as Samau'al al-Maghribi, was a mathematician, astronomer and physician. Born to a Jewish family, he concealed his conversion to Islam for many years for fear of offending his father, then openly embraced Islam in 1163 after he had a dream telling him to do so. His father was a Rabbi from Morocco.
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Norman Robert Campbell
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Norman Robert Campbell was an English physicist and philosopher of science. Early life Norman Robert Campbell was born in 1880. He was the son of William Middleton Campbell, Governor of the Bank of England, and his wife Edith Agneta Bevan. He was educated at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1902.
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William Jack
1834 - 1924 (90 years)
William Jack FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and journalist. He was Editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper from 1870 to 1876, and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1879 until 1909.
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Andrea Argoli
1570 - 1657 (87 years)
Andrea Argoli , born in Tagliacozzo, was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He was one of the most important 17th-century makers of ephemerides, which gave the positions of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time or times.
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Ludwig Leichhardt
1813 - 1848 (35 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt , known as Ludwig Leichhardt, was a German explorer and naturalist, most famous for his exploration of northern and central Australia. Early life Leichhardt was born on 23 October 1813 in the hamlet of Sabrodt near the village of Trebatsch, today part of Tauche, in the Prussian Province of Brandenburg . He was the fourth son and sixth of the eight children of Christian Hieronymus Matthias Leichhardt, farmer and royal inspector and his wife Charlotte Sophie, née Strählow. Between 1831 and 1836 Leichhardt studied philosophy, language, and natural sciences at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin but never received a university degree.
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Vittorio Grünwald
1855 - 1943 (88 years)
Vittorio Grünwald was an Italian professor of mathematics and German language. His father Guglielmo Grünwald was Hungarian, his mother Fortuna Marini was Italian. In 1861 he moved to Hungary with his family, then came back in 1877 to Verona, later in November 1885 they moved to Brescia, and then to Venice. He studied at the Technische Universität Wien, where he graduated in mathematics. After coming back to Italy, he taught mathematics and German language in several schools , and then he settled in Florence.
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Gabriel Oltramare
1816 - 1906 (90 years)
Gabriel Oltramare was a Swiss mathematician, known for his book "Essai sur le Calcul de Généralisation". Oltramare studied mathematics and natural sciences in Geneva from 1836 to 1839 and then studied higher mathematics at the Sorbonne, receiving there his licence ès sciences mathématiques in 1840. He was a teacher in Aarau. He was in Egypt from 1843 to 1844 as a tutor for Isma'il, son of Ibrahim Pasha of the Muhammad Ali dynasty. At the Collège de Genève. Oltramare was privat-docent of mechanics from 1845 to 1870 and simultaneously of mathematics from 1848 to 1850. In 1848 he was appointed professor ordinarius of higher mathematics at the University of Geneva.
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Gerard of Brussels
1187 - 1260 (73 years)
Gerard of Brussels was an early thirteenth-century geometer and philosopher known primarily for his Latin book Liber de motu , which was a pioneering study in kinematics, probably written between 1187 and 1260. It has been described as "the first Latin treatise that was to take the fundamental approach to kinematics that was to characterize modern kinematics." He brought the works of Euclid and Archimedes back into popularity and was a direct influence on the Oxford Calculators in the next century. Gerard is cited by Thomas Bradwardine in his Tractatus de proportionibus velocitatum . His chi...
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Frederick A. P. Barnard
1809 - 1889 (80 years)
Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard was an American academic and educator who served as the 10th President of Columbia University. Born in Sheffield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale University in 1828 and served in a succession of academic appointments, including as Chancellor of the University of Mississippi from 1856 to 1861. He assumed office as President of Columbia University in 1864, where he presided over a series of improvements to the university until his death in 1889. He was also known as an author of academic texts.
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Werner Boy
1879 - 1914 (35 years)
Werner Boy was a German mathematician. He was the discoverer and eponym of Boy's surface—a three-dimensional projection of the real projective plane without singularities, the first of its kind. He discovered it in 1901 after his thesis adviser, David Hilbert, asked him to prove that it was not possible to immerse the real projective plane in three-dimensional space. Boy sketched several models of the surface, and discovered that it could have 3-fold rotational symmetry, but was unable to find a parametric model for the surface. It was not until 1978 that Bernard Morin found the first paramet...
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Nicolas-François Canard
1754 - 1833 (79 years)
Nicolas-François Canard was a French mathematician, philosopher and economist. He was one of the pioneers of applying mathematics to economic problems, foreshadowing the works of Antoine Augustin Cournot, William Stanley Jevons, and others.
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Antonio Pigafetta
1492 - 1531 (39 years)
Antonio Pigafetta was a Venetian scholar and explorer. He joined the Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the world's first circumnavigation, and is best known for being the chronicler of the voyage. During the expedition, he served as Magellan's assistant until Magellan's death in the Philippine Islands, and kept an accurate journal, which later assisted him in translating the Cebuano language. It is the first recorded document concerning the language.
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Choi Seok-jeong
1646 - 1715 (69 years)
Choi Seok-jeong was a Korean politician and mathematician in the Joseon period of Korea. He published the Gusuryak in 1700, the first known literature on Latin squares, predating Leonhard Euler by at least 67 years. He also invented the hexagonal tortoise problem. Choi was a member of the Jeonju Choe clan.
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Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti was an Italian mathematician, the brother of politician Palmiro Togliatti. He was a researcher at the ETH Zurich from 1924 to 1926. He discovered Togliatti surfaces.
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