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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#11001

Theodore Motzkin

1908 - 1970 (62 years)

Theodore Samuel Motzkin was an Israeli-American mathematician. Biography Motzkin's father Leo Motzkin, a Ukrainian Jew, went to Berlin at the age of thirteen to study mathematics. He pursued university studies in the topic and was accepted as a graduate student by Leopold Kronecker, but left the field to work for the Zionist movement before finishing a dissertation.

#11002

Robert König

1885 - 1979 (94 years)

Robert Johann Maria König was an Austrian mathematician. He studied from 1903 to 1907 at the University of Vienna and at the University of Göttingen, where he received his PhD under David Hilbert with thesis Oszillationseigenschaften der Eigenfunktionen der Integralgleichung mit definitem Kern und das Jacobische Kriterium der Variationsrechnung. In 1911 he earned his Habilitation qualification at the University of Leipzig with thesis Konforme Abbildung der Oberfläche einer räumlichen Ecke.

#11003

Jacques Hadamard

Jacques Hadamard

1865 - 1963 (98 years)

Jacques Salomon Hadamard was a French mathematician who made major contributions in number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry and partial differential equations. Biography The son of a teacher, Amédée Hadamard, of Jewish descent, and Claire Marie Jeanne Picard, Hadamard was born in Versailles, France and attended the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his father taught. In 1884 Hadamard entered the École Normale Supérieure, having placed first in the entrance examinations both there and at the École Polytechnique. His teachers included Tannery, Hermite, Darboux, Appell, Goursat and Picard.

#11004

Ludwig Berwald

1883 - 1942 (59 years)

Ludwig Berwald was a German mathematician best known for his contributions to differential geometry, especially Finsler geometry. He taught in Munich and Prague for 32 years, publishing 54 papers, before being deported by the SS to the Łódź Ghetto, where he and his wife Hedwig died within a year.

#11005

Octav Onicescu

1892 - 1983 (91 years)

Octav Onicescu was a Romanian mathematician and a member of the Romanian Academy. Together with his student, Gheorghe Mihoc, he is considered to be the founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics.

#11006

E. J. G. Pitman

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Edwin James George Pitman was an Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to statistics and probability theory. In particular, he is remembered primarily as the originator of the Pitman permutation test, Pitman nearness and Pitman efficiency.

#11007

Gerhard Haenzel

1898 - 1944 (46 years)

Gerhard Karl Theodor Haenzel was a German mathematician. Education and career Haenzel, whose father was a teacher and school board member, completed his Abitur after studying from 1907 to 1915 at the Peter Gröning-Gymnasium in Stargard. Shortly after his Abitur, he was called up in July 1915 for active military service. His military service lasted until 30 September 1920 and he attained the rank of lieutenant. He was on the Eastern and Western fronts and in the German fight against the Polish uprising. He suffered a serious wound and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd class. From 1920 to ...

#11008

Giuseppe Colombo

1920 - 1984 (64 years)

Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo was an Italian scientist, mathematician and engineer at the University of Padua, Italy. Mercury Colombo studied the planet Mercury, and it was his calculations which showed how to get a spacecraft into a solar orbit which would encounter Mercury multiple times, using a gravity assist maneuver with Venus. Due to this idea, NASA was able to have the Mariner 10 accomplish three fly-bys of Mercury instead of one. Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist. Since then, the technique has become common.

#11009

Philip Franklin

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Philip Franklin was an American mathematician and professor whose work was primarily focused in analysis. Dr. Franklin received a B.S. in 1918 from City College of New York . He received his M.A. in 1920 and Ph.D. in 1921 both from Princeton University. His dissertation, The Four Color Problem, was supervised by Oswald Veblen. After teaching for one year at Princeton and two years at Harvard University , Franklin joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Mathematics, where he stayed until his 1964 retirement.

#11010

Wilhelm Grunwald

1909 - 1989 (80 years)

Wilhelm Grunwald was a German mathematician who introduced the Grunwald–Wang theorem, though his original statement and proof of this contained a small error that was corrected by Shianghao Wang. He later left mathematics to become a science librarian, and was director of the Göttingen university library .

#11011

Louis Lazarus Silverman

1884 - 1967 (83 years)

Louis Lazarus Silverman was an American mathematician, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an academic institution in the state of Missouri. Born in a village in Lithuania, Silverman moved with his parents to the United States when he was eight years old. He received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and then his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1910. From 1910 to 1918 he was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Cornell University, where he worked with Wallie Abraham Hurwitz on divergent series and summability methods. From 19...

#11012

Ronald M. Foster

1896 - 1998 (102 years)

Ronald Martin Foster , was an American mathematician at Bell Labs whose work was of significance regarding electronic filters for use on telephone lines. He published an important paper, A Reactance Theorem, which quickly inspired Wilhelm Cauer to begin his program of network synthesis filters which put the design of filters on a firm mathematical footing. He is also known for the Foster census of cubic, symmetric graphs and the 90-vertex cubic symmetric Foster graph.

#11013

Paul Riebesell

1883 - 1950 (67 years)

Paul Louis Riebesell was a German mathematician, statistician, actuary, and president of Hamburger Feuerkasse. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he was an invited speaker in 1932 in Zürich and in 1936 in Oslo.

#11014

Luigi Fantappiè

Luigi Fantappiè

1901 - 1956 (55 years)

Luigi Fantappiè was an Italian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and for creating the theory of analytic functionals: he was a student and follower of Vito Volterra. Later in life, he proposed scientific theories of sweeping scope.

#11015

Pasquale Joseph Federico

1902 - 1982 (80 years)

Pasquale Joseph Federico was a lifelong mathematician and longtime high-ranking official of the United States Patent Office. Biography He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania. About 1910 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he gained a bachelor's degree in physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1923. He then received his LL.B or law degree from Washington College of Law in 1932.

#11016

Allen Shields

1927 - 1989 (62 years)

Allen Lowell Shields was an American mathematician who worked on measure theory, complex analysis, functional analysis and operator theory, and was "one of the world's leading authorities on spaces of analytic functions."

#11017

Federico Cafiero

1914 - 1980 (66 years)

Federico Cafiero was an Italian mathematician known for his contributions in real analysis, measure and integration theory, and in the theory of ordinary differential equations. In particular, generalizing the Vitali convergence theorem, the Fichera convergence theorem and previous results of Vladimir Mikhailovich Dubrovskii, he proved a necessary and sufficient condition for the passage to the limit under the sign of integral: this result is, in some sense, definitive. In the field of ordinary differential equations, he studied existence and uniqueness problems under very general hypotheses ...

#11018

Banesh Hoffmann

Banesh Hoffmann

1906 - 1986 (80 years)

Banesh Hoffmann was a British mathematician and physicist known for his association with Albert Einstein. Life Banesh Hoffmann was born in Richmond, Surrey, on 6 September 1906. He studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to earn his doctorate at Princeton University.

#11019

Guglielmo Tagliacarne

1893 - 1979 (86 years)

Tagliacarne Guglielmo was an Italian statistician Biography Guglielmo Tagliacarne was born in Orta San Giulio, Novara, on May 31, 1893. He studied at the Bocconi University, Milan, obtaining a master's degree in Economics. He carried on his statistical studies analyzing supply chains, buying and consumption behaviors, demographic and occupational trends and the provincial and regional calculation of National Income.

#11020

Werner Fenchel

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Moritz Werner Fenchel was a mathematician known for his contributions to geometry and to optimization theory. Fenchel established the basic results of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory which would, in time, serve as the foundation for nonlinear programming. A German-born Jew and early refugee from Nazi suppression of intellectuals, Fenchel lived most of his life in Denmark. Fenchel's monographs and lecture notes are considered influential.

#11021

Oswald Veblen

1880 - 1960 (80 years)

Oswald Veblen was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905; while this was long considered the first rigorous proof of the theorem, many now also consider Camille Jordan's original proof rigorous.

#11022

Egbert van Kampen

Egbert van Kampen

1908 - 1942 (34 years)

Egbert Rudolf van Kampen was a Dutch mathematician. He made important contributions to topology, especially to the study of fundamental groups. Life Van Kampen was born to Dutch parents in Belgium, where his father had recently taken a job as an accountant in Antwerp. At the outbreak of World War I the family moved back to the Netherlands, first to Amsterdam and in 1918 to The Hague. At the age of 16 he graduated from high school and entered Leiden University to study mathematics. After his undergraduate studies he continued with a doctorate study at the same university under the guidance of Willem van der Woude.

#11023

Clyde E. Love

1882 - 1960 (78 years)

Clyde Elton Love was an American contract bridge author and mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a native of Bancroft, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905.

#11024

Paul Neményi

1895 - 1952 (57 years)

Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...

#11025

Ralph Palmer Agnew

1900 - 1986 (86 years)

Ralph Palmer Agnew was an American mathematician. Agnew was born in Poland, Ohio, and did his undergraduate studies at Allegheny College. After completing a master's degree at Iowa State College he moved to Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1930. He was appointed to the Cornell faculty in 1931. He chaired the mathematics department at Cornell from 1940 to 1950, and was responsible for bringing William Feller and Mark Kac to Cornell.

#11026

Erika Pannwitz

1904 - 1975 (71 years)

Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S. After the war, she became editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH.

#11027

Giacomo Albanese

1890 - 1947 (57 years)

Giacomo Albanese was an Italian mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He took a permanent position in the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1936. Biography Albanese attended the school in Palermo, Sicily. He graduated from there in 1909. Then he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as a student of mathematics, and received his doctorate in 1913. He was awarded the Ulisse Dini prize for his doctoral essay on the topic Continuous systems of curves on an algebraic surface, written under the direction of Eugenio Bertini.

#11028

William Henry Roever

1874 - 1951 (77 years)

William Henry Roever was an American applied mathematician. Roever received in 1897 a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received an A.M. in 1904 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1906 from Harvard University with advisor Maxime Bôcher and thesis Brilliant points. Roever taught astronomy from 1899 to 1901 at Washington University in St. Louis and mathematics from 1905 to 1908 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then returned to Washington University in St. Louis to teach mathematics and later became the chair of the department of mathe...

#11029

George H. Bryan

George H. Bryan

1864 - 1928 (64 years)

George Hartley Bryan FRS was an English applied mathematician who was an authority on thermodynamics and aeronautics. He was born in Cambridge, and was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, obtaining his BA in 1886 , MA in 1890, and DSc in 1896. He was a professor at University College of North Wales, and is generally credited with developing the modern mathematical treatment of the motion of airplanes in flight as rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom.

#11030

Gaspare Mignosi

1875 - 1951 (76 years)

Gaspare Mignósi was an Italian mathematician. Mignosi became in 1930 a professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Cagliari and in 1932 a professor at the University of Palermo. He continued the studies of the school of algebraic geometry and number theory, which flourished in Sicily around 1920 with Gaetano Scorza and Michele Cipolla. Particularly noteworthy is the contribution made by Mignosi to the so-called apiristic solution of binomial congruences.

#11031

Nikolai Luzin

1883 - 1950 (67 years)

Nikolai Nikolayevich Luzin was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.

#11032

Arne Beurling

1905 - 1986 (81 years)

Arne Carl-August Beurling was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.

#11033

Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin

Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin

1866 - 1962 (96 years)

Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin was a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for proving the prime number theorem. The King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.

#11034

Albert Ingham

1900 - 1967 (67 years)

Albert Edward Ingham was an English mathematician. Early life and education Ingham was born in Northampton. He went to Stafford Grammar School and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1919 after service in the British Army in World War I. Ingham received a distinction as a Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1922. He also received an 1851 Research Fellowship.

#11035

Johanna Piesch

1898 - 1992 (94 years)

Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.

#11036

Vadim Yefremovich

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Vadim Arsenyevich Yefremovich was a Soviet mathematician. Yefremovich was a member of the Moscow Topological School and specialized in the geometric aspects of general topology. He introduced the notion of proximity spaces at the First International Topological Conference in Moscow in 1935. He was imprisoned from 1937 to 1944, and did not publish on proximity spaces until 1951, at which point the theory was developed rapidly by Efremovič and associates.

#11037

Józef Marcinkiewicz

Józef Marcinkiewicz

1910 - 1940 (30 years)

Józef Marcinkiewicz was a Polish mathematician. He was a student of Antoni Zygmund; and later worked with Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Kaczmarz and Raphaël Salem. He was a professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno.

#11038

Yudell Luke

1918 - 1983 (65 years)

Yudell Leo Luke was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to MRIGlobal, was awarded the N. T. Veatch award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity in 1975, and appointed as Curator's Professor at the University of Missouri in 1978, a post he held until his death.

#11039

Ganesh Prasad

1876 - 1935 (59 years)

Ganesh Prasad was an Indian mathematician who specialised in the theory of potentials, theory of functions of a real variable, Fourier series and the theory of surfaces. He was trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Göttingen and on return to India he helped develop the culture of mathematical research in India. The mathematical community of India considers Ganesh Prasad as the ′Father of Mathematical Research in India′. He was also an educator taking special interest in the advancement of primary education in the rural areas of India.

#11040

Walter Schnee

1885 - 1958 (73 years)

Walter Schnee was a German mathematician. From 1904 to 1908 he studied mathematics in Berlin. From 1909 to 1917 he worked at the University of Breslau. He then went to the University of Leipzig, where he stayed till 1954. He worked in the field of number theory.

#11041

Georgi Bradistilov

Georgi Bradistilov

1904 - 1977 (73 years)

Georgi Delchev Bradistilov was a Bulgarian mathematician. Biography Georgi Bradistilov, the fourth and youngest child in the family of the high-ranked civil servant at Bulgarian Ministry of Finance, Delcho Petkov Bradistilov , and teacher Nona Georgieva Bradistilova , was born on 12 October 1904 OS in Panagyurishte. He attended 3rd Sofia gymnasium and in 1922 entered Sofia University to study physics and mathematics. In 1927 he graduated with honors and the same year was appointed as assistant professor in mathematics. In the 1930s he studied at the University of Paris and the University of Munich.

#11042

Martin Beale

1928 - 1985 (57 years)

Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming. Career He was educated at Winchester College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1949 and gaining a diploma in mathematical statistics in 1950. He then joined the Mathematics Group at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, working under Stephen Vajda for 11 years, except for a leave of absence in 1957/58 to assist the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. In 1955 he extended George ...

#11043

Francesco Paolo Cantelli

Francesco Paolo Cantelli

1875 - 1966 (91 years)

Francesco Paolo Cantelli was an Italian mathematician. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, probability theory, and actuarial science. Biography Cantelli was born in Palermo. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1899 from the University of Palermo with a thesis on celestial mechanics and continued his interest in astronomy by working until 1903 at Palermo Astronomical Observatory , which was under the direction of Annibale Riccò. Cantelli's early papers were on problems in astronomy and celestial mechanics.

#11044

S. L. Loney

1860 - 1939 (79 years)

Sydney Luxton Loney, M.A. was a Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Holloway College, Egham, Surrey, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England. He authored a number of mathematics texts, some of which have been reprinted numerous times. He is known as an early influence on Srinivasa Ramanujan.

#11045

Gerhard Gentzen

Gerhard Gentzen

1909 - 1945 (36 years)

Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.

#11046

Geoffrey Timms

1903 - 1982 (79 years)

Geoffrey Timms OBE FRSE was a 20th century British mathematician and cryptoanalyst. In the Second World War he was one of the several mathematicians working alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma code.

#11047

Edward Collingwood

Edward Collingwood

1900 - 1970 (70 years)

Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbriann family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.

#11048

Ralph Leigh

1915 - 1987 (72 years)

Ralph Alexander Leigh was a modern languages scholar, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of French in the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1982, later Sandars Reader in Bibliography, in 1986–87. He specialized in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

#11049

Barnet Woolf

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.

#11050

William Caspar Graustein

William Caspar Graustein

1888 - 1941 (53 years)

William Caspar Graustein was an American mathematician. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1910 and later became an instructor at Harvard University. In 1921, he married Mary Curtis Graustein , who was the first American woman to earn a mathematics Ph.D. from Radcliffe College.

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