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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#1101
Christoph Koutschan
#22726
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Christoph Koutschan is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is currently with the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Education Christoph Koutschan is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany from 1999 to 2005 and then moved to the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in Linz, Austria, where he completed his PhD in symbolic computation in 2009 under the supervision of Peter Paule.
Go to Profile#1102
David Spiegelhalter
#5333
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir David John Spiegelhalter is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#1103
Eugene Trubowitz
#19872
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Eugene Trubowitz is an American mathematician who studies analysis and mathematical physics. He is a Global Professor of Mathematics at New York University Abu Dhabi. Life and work Trubowitz, who was born in 1951, received his doctorate in 1977 under the supervision of Henry McKean at New York University, with thesis titled The inverse problem for periodic potentials. Since 1983, he wais a full professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. As of 2016, he has retired from his position at ETH.
Go to Profile#1104
Anna Wienhard
#20843
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Anna Katharina Wienhard is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry, and especially the use of higher Teichmüller spaces to study the deformation theory of symmetric geometric structures. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.
Go to Profile#1105
Thomas Willmore
#22021
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Thomas James Willmore was an English geometer. He is best known for his work on Riemannian 3-space and harmonic spaces. Willmore studied at King's College London. After his graduation in 1939, he was appointed as a lecturer, but the onset of World War II led him to working as a scientific officer at RAF Cardington, working mainly on barrage balloon defences. During the war, he found the time to write his Ph.D. on relativistic cosmology, and gained his Ph.D. on Clock regraduations and general relativity as an external student of the University of London in 1943 . In 1946, he was given a lectureship at the University of Durham.
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Richard Askey
#18028
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Richard Allen Askey was an American mathematician, known for his expertise in the area of special functions. The Askey–Wilson polynomials Askey scheme, which organizes orthogonal polynomials- Askey earned a B.A. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955, an M.A. at Harvard University in 1956, and a Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1961. After working as an instructor at Washington University and University of Chicago , he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963 as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics. He became a full professor at Wisconsin in 1968, and since 2003 was a professor emeritus.
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Chaim L. Pekeris
#8623
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Chaim Leib Pekeris was an Israeli-American physicist and mathematician. He made notable contributions to geophysics and the spectral theory of many-electron atoms, in particular the helium atom. He was also one of the designers of the first computer in Israel, WEIZAC.
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Paul Malliavin
#21298
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Paul Malliavin was a French mathematician who made important contributions to harmonic analysis and stochastic analysis. He is known for the Malliavin calculus, an infinite dimensional calculus for functionals on the Wiener space and his probabilistic proof of Hörmander's theorem. He was Professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1979 to 2010.
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Jim Geelen
#18194
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jim Geelen is a professor at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorial optimization. He is known for his work on Matroid theory and the extension of the Graph Minors Project to representable matroids. In 2003, he won the Fulkerson Prize with his co-authors A. M. H. Gerards, and A. Kapoor for their research on Rota's excluded minors conjecture. In 2006, he won the Coxeter–James Prize presented by the Canadian Mathematical Society.
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Paul Seidel
#25986
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Paul Seidel is a Swiss-Italian mathematician. He is a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Career Seidel attended Heidelberg University, where he received his Diplom under supervision of Albrecht Dold in 1994. He then pursued his Ph.D. studies at the University of Oxford under supervision of Simon Donaldson in 1998. He was a chargé de recherche at the CNRS from 1999 to 2002, a professor at Imperial College London from 2002 to 2003, a professor at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2007, and then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2007 on...
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Ivan Vidav
#25445
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Ivan Vidav was a Slovenian mathematician. Ivan Vidav was born in Villa Opicina near Trieste, Italy. He was a student of Josip Plemelj. Vidav received his Ph.D. with Plemelj as his advisor in 1941 at the University of Ljubljana with the dissertation Kleinovi teoremi v teoriji linearnih diferencialnih enačb .
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Dominic Welsh
#22296
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
James Anthony Dominic Welsh is an English mathematician and emeritus professor of Oxford University's Mathematical Institute. He is an expert in matroid theory, the computational complexity of combinatorial enumeration problemss, percolation theory, and cryptography.
Go to Profile#1113
Robert R. Sokal
#11583
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Robert Reuven Sokal was an Austrian–American biostatistician and entomologist. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Stony Brook University, Sokal was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He promoted the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Peter H. A. Sneath.
Go to Profile#1114
Vincent Lafforgue
#21641
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Vincent Lafforgue is a French mathematician who is active in algebraic geometry, especially in the Langlands program, and a CNRS "Directeur de Recherches" at the Institute Fourier in Grenoble. He is the younger brother of Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue.
Go to Profile#1115
E. M. Wright
#18901
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Sir Edward Maitland Wright was an English mathematician, best known for co-authoring An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers with G. H. Hardy. He served as the Principal of the University of Aberdeen from 1962 to 1976.
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Warren E. Dixon
#17583
Overall Influence
Warren E. Dixon is a control theorist and a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida. He has served as the chair of the department since 2021. Bibliography
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Robert Connelly
#21415
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Connelly is a mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and rigidity theory. Connelly received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 1969. He is currently a professor at Cornell University.
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Manuel Kauers
#22991
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Manuel Kauers is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is working on computer algebra and its applications to discrete mathematics. He is currently professor for algebra at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and leader of the Institute for Algebra at JKU. Before that, he was affiliated with that university's Research Institute for Symbolic Computation .
Go to Profile#1119
Bertrand Halperin
#9047
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bertrand I. Halperin is an American physicist, former holder of the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University. Biography Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood and attended public schools. His mother was Eva Teplitzky Halperin and his father Morris Halperin. His mother was a college administrator and his father a customs inspector. Both his parents were born in USSR. His paternal grandmother's family the Maximovs claimed descent from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the BESHT.
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Yurii Mitropolskiy
#18487
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Yurii Oleksiyovych Mitropolskiy was a renowned Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to the fields of dynamical systems and nonlinear oscillations. He was born in Poltava Governorate and died in Kyiv.
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Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy
#12192
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy was a Hungarian mathematician. His father, Gyula Szőkefalvi-Nagy was also a famed mathematician. Szőkefalvi-Nagy collaborated with Alfréd Haar and Frigyes Riesz, founders of the Szegedian school of mathematics. He contributed to the theory of Fourier series and approximation theory. His most important achievements were made in functional analysis, especially, in the theory of Hilbert space operators. He was editor-in-chief of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik, the Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum, and the Analysis Mathematica. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1953, along with his co-author F.
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Azriel Lévy
#17743
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Azriel Lévy is an Israeli mathematician, logician, and a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Lévy obtained his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1958, under the supervision of Abraham Fraenkel and Abraham Robinson. Later, using Cohen's method of forcing, he proved several results on the consistency of various statements contradicting the axiom of choice. For example, with J. D. Halpern he proved that the Boolean prime ideal theorem does not imply the axiom of choice. He discovered the models L[x] used in inner model theory. He also introduced the...
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Claude LeBrun
#18125
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Claude R. LeBrun is an American mathematician who holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. Much of his research concerns the Riemannian geometry of 4-manifolds, or related topics in complex and differential geometry.
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Jim Stasheff
#24454
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
James Dillon Stasheff is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in algebraic topology and algebra as well as their applications to physics.
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Pierre Dusart
#17819
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pierre Dusart is a French mathematician at the Université de Limoges who specializes in number theory. He has published in several countries, specially in South Korea, with his colleague Damien Sauveron who is associate professor in Computer Sciences at the Université de Limoges.
Go to Profile#1126
Dietrich Braess
#25416
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Dietrich Braess is a German mathematician. He is known for Braess's paradox, which deals with traffic equilibrium. Braess' focus has centered on numerical treatment of elliptical differential equations and nonlinear approximation theories.
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Craig Tracy
#22831
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Craig Arnold Tracy is an American mathematician, known for his contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory. Born in United Kingdom, he moved as infant to Missouri where he grew up and obtained a B.Sc. in physics from University of Missouri . He studied as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Stony Brook University where he obtained a Ph.D. on the thesis entitled Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models advised by Barry M. McCoy, in which he studied Painlevé functions in exactly solvable statistical mechanical models.
Go to Profile#1128
Herbert Spohn
#14000
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Herbert Spohn is a German mathematician and mathematical physicist working in kinetic equations; dynamics of stochastic particle systems, hydrodynamic limit; kinetic of growths processes; disordered systems; open quantum systems dynamics of charged particles coupled to their radiation field; Schrödinger operators; functional integration and stochastic analysis.
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Robert Phelps
#23739
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Robert Ralph Phelps was an American mathematician who was known for his contributions to analysis, particularly to functional analysis and measure theory. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington from 1962 until his death.
Go to Profile#1130
Magnus Wenninger
#18003
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Father Magnus J. Wenninger OSB was an American mathematician who worked on constructing polyhedron models, and wrote the first book on their construction. Early life and education Born to German immigrants in Park Falls, Wisconsin, Joseph Wenninger always knew he was going to be a priest. From an early age, it was understood that his brother Heinie would take after their father and become a baker, and that Joe, as he was then known, would go into the priesthood.
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Edward Tufte
#1095
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Edward Rolf Tufte , sometimes known as "ET", is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.
Go to Profile#1132
Themistocles M. Rassias
#23666
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Themistocles M. Rassias is a Greek mathematician, and a professor at the National Technical University of Athens , Greece. He has published more than 300 papers, 10 research books and 45 edited volumes in research Mathematics as well as 4 textbooks in Mathematics for university students. His research work has received more than 19,000 citations according to Google Scholar and more than 5,800 citations according to MathSciNet. His h-index is 49. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board of several international mathematical journals.
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Peter M. Neumann
#19263
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Peter Michael Neumann OBE was a British mathematician. His fields of interest included the history of mathematics and Galois theory. Biography Born in December 1940, Neumann was a son of the German-born mathematicians Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann. He gained a BA degree from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1963, and a DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 1966. Neumann was a Tutorial Fellow at the Queen's College, Oxford, and a lecturer at the University of Oxford. His research work was in the field of group theory. In 1987, Neumann won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical...
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Ernst Hairer
#20609
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ernst Hairer is a professor of mathematics at the University of Geneva known for his work in numerical analysis. His PhD was completed at the University of Innsbruck. He is the father of the mathematician Martin Hairer, who won the Fields medal in 2014.
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Daniel J. Bernstein
#2159
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Daniel Julius Bernstein is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a research professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before this, he was a visiting professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Go to Profile#1136
Karim Adiprasito
#26523
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (36 years)
Karim Alexander Adiprasito is a German mathematician working at the University of Copenhagen and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who works in combinatorics. He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Free University Berlin under the supervision of Günter M. Ziegler. He has been a professor at the Hebrew University since 2015, and at the University of Copenhagen since 2019. He is of German and Indonesian descent, and bears an Indonesian surname.
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Mamikon Mnatsakanian
#22028
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Mamikon A. Mnatsakanian was an Armenian physicist. In 1959, he discovered a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1969 from Yerevan State University, where he became professor of astrophysics. As an undergraduate he specialized in the development of geometric methods for solving calculus problems by a visual approach that makes no use of formulas, which he later developed into his system of visual calculus.
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Bruce Reznick
#13335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bruce Reznick is an American mathematician long on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is a prolific researcher noted for his contributions to number theory and the combinatorial-algebraic-analytic investigations of polynomials. In July 2019, to mark his 66th birthday, a day long symposium "Bruce Reznick 66 fest: A mensch of Combinatorial-Algebraic Mathematics" was held at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
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Ioan James
#22160
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Ioan Mackenzie James FRS is a British mathematician working in the field of topology, particularly in homotopy theory. Biography James was born in Croydon, Surrey, England, and was educated at St Paul's School, London and Queen's College, Oxford. In 1953 he earned a D. Phil. from the University of Oxford for his thesis entitled Some problems in algebraic topology, written under the direction of J. H. C. Whitehead.
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John Kingman
#13146
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sir John Frank Charles Kingman is a British mathematician. He served as N. M. Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge from 2001 until 2006, when he was succeeded by David Wallace. He is known for developing the mathematics of the coalescent theory, a theoretical model of inheritance that is fundamental to modern population genetics.
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Alicia Dickenstein
#16374
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alicia Dickenstein is an Argentine mathematician known for her work on algebraic geometry, particularly toric geometry, tropical geometry, and their applications to biological systems. She is a full professor at the University of Buenos Aires, a 2019 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a former vice-president of the International Mathematical Union , and a 2015 recipient of The World Academy of Sciences prize.
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Joseph Oesterlé
#17730
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Joseph Oesterlé is a French mathematician who, along with David Masser, formulated the abc conjecture which has been called "the most important unsolved problem in diophantine analysis". He is a member of Bourbaki.
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Evgeny Golod
#24373
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Evgenii Solomonovich Golod was a Russian mathematician who proved the Golod–Shafarevich theorem on class field towerss. As an application, he gave a negative solution to the Kurosh–Levitzky problem on the nilpotency of finitely generated nil algebras, and so to a weak form of Burnside's problem.
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Steven Kleiman
#27241
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Steven Lawrence Kleiman is an American mathematician. Professional career Kleiman is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in Boston, he did his undergraduate studies at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1965, after studying there with Oscar Zariski and David Mumford, and joined the MIT faculty in 1969. Kleiman held the prestigious NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship , Sloan Fellowship , and Guggenheim Fellowship .
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Norman L. Biggs
#23575
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Norman Linstead Biggs is a leading British mathematician focusing on discrete mathematics and in particular algebraic combinatorics. Education Biggs was educated at Harrow County Grammar School and then studied mathematics at Selwyn College, Cambridge. In 1962, Biggs gained first-class honours in his third year of the university's undergraduate degree in mathematics.1946–1952: Uxendon Manor Primary School, Kenton, Middlesex1952–1959: Harrow County Grammar School1959–1963: Selwyn College, Cambridge 1960: First Class, Mathematical Tripos Pt. I1962: Wrangler, Mathematical Tripos Pt. II; B.A. 1963: Distinction, Mathematical Tripos Pt.
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Brian D. Ripley
#10820
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Brian David Ripley FRSE is a British statistician. From 1990, he was professor of applied statistics at the University of Oxford and is also a professorial fellow at St Peter's College. He retired August 2014 due to ill health.
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David Tall
#23211
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Orme Tall is Emeritus Professor in Mathematical Thinking at the University of Warwick. One of his early influential works is the joint paper with Vinner "Concept image and concept definition in mathematics with particular reference to limits and continuity". The "concept image" is a notion in cognitive theory. It consists of all the cognitive structure in the individual's mind that is associated with a given concept. Tall and Vinner point out that the concept image may not be globally coherent, and may have aspects which are quite different from the formal concept definition. They study...
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Dave Bayer
#9606
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Allen Bayer is an American mathematician known for his contributions in algebra and symbolic computation and for his consulting work in the movie industry. He is a professor of mathematics at Barnard College, Columbia University.
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Emmy Murphy
#25324
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and a professor at Princeton University who works in the area of symplectic topology, contact geometry and geometric topology. Education Murphy graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007, She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012; her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.
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Natascha Artin Brunswick
#18997
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Natascha Artin Brunswick, née Jasny was a Russian-American mathematician and photographer. St. Petersburg and Hamburg Natascha Artin Brunswick was the daughter of , a Russian Jewish economist from Kharkiv. Her mother was a Russian orthodox aristocrat and dentist. Since at the time Russian orthodox Christians were prohibited from marrying Jews, she converted to Protestantism. They were married in Finland.
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