The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11001
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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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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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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William Elwood Byerly
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
William Elwood Byerly was an American mathematician at Harvard University where he was the "Perkins Professor of Mathematics". He was noted for his excellent teaching and textbooks. Byerly was the first to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, and Harvard's chair "William Elwood Byerly Professor in Mathematics" is named after him. Byerly Hall in Radcliffe Yard, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University is also named for him.
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Otto Blumenthal
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Ludwig Otto Blumenthal was a German mathematician and professor at RWTH Aachen University. Biography He was born in Frankfurt, Hesse-Nassau. A student of David Hilbert, Blumenthal was an editor of Mathematische Annalen. When the Civil Service Act of 1933 became law in 1933, after Hitler became Chancellor, Blumenthal was dismissed from his position at RWTH Aachen University. He was married to Amalie Ebstein, also known as 'Mali' and daughter of Wilhelm Ebstein.
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Axel Johannes Malmquist
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Axel Johannes Malmquist was a Swedish mathematician working in the area of ordinary differential equations. He studied in the University of Stockholm in 1900-1907 and obtained PhD in Stockholm in 1909. He worked in the university of Stockholm in 1903-1913, and then became a professor in the Stockholm Institute of Technology.
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Claude Chabauty
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Claude Chabauty was a French mathematician. Career He was admitted in 1929 to the École normale supérieure in Paris. In 1938 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on number theory and algebraic geometry. Subsequently he was a professor in Strasbourg. From 1954 on, and for 22 years, he was the director of the department of pure mathematics at the University of Grenoble.
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Willem de Sitter
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Willem de Sitter was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Life and work Born in Sneek, de Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa . Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
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George Henry Livens
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
George Henry Livens was a British mathematician best known for his work on electromagnetics, elasticity and thermodynamics. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1910 and was awarded the Smith Prize in 1911 for an essay entitled "The influence on density on the position of the emission and absorption lines in a gas spectrum" and was elected fellow of Jesus College. He went on to an appointment as Lecturer in Geometry at Sheffield University, a post he held until 1919 when he was appointed Fielden Lecturer in Manchester. He left this post for a chair at the University College of South Wales in 1922 where he remained for the rest of his career.
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Luciano Orlando
1887 - 1915 (28 years)
Luciano Orlando was an Italian mathematician and military engineer. Biography Orlando received in 1903 his laurea from the University of Messina, where he was a student of Bagnera and Marcolongo. After a year of graduate study at the University of Pisa, he became an assistant and libero docente at the University of Messina. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he moved to Rome, where he taught at the Istituto superiore di Magistero and at the Aeronautical School of Engineering of the Sapienza University of Rome. He took part in some university competitions but was unsuccessful and when, in 1915...
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Erich Schönhardt
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Erich Schönhardt was a German mathematician known for his 1928 discovery of the Schönhardt polyhedron, a non-convex polyhedron that cannot be partitioned into tetrahedra without introducing additional vertices.
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Henry Seely White
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Henry Seely White was an American mathematician. He was born in Cazenovia, New York to parents Aaron White and Isadore Maria Haight. He matriculated at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and graduated with honors in 1882 at the age of twenty-one. White excelled at Wesleyan in astronomy, ethics, Latin, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. At the university, John Monroe Van Vleck taught White mathematics and astronomy. Later, Van Vleck persuaded White to continue to study mathematics at the graduate level. Subsequently, White studied at the University of Göttingen under Klein, and received his ...
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Pierre Fatou
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou was a French mathematician and astronomer. He is known for major contributions to several branches of analysis. The Fatou lemma and the Fatou set are named after him. Biography
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Hermann Künneth
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Hermann Lorenz Künneth was a German mathematician and renowned algebraic topologist, best known for his contribution to what is now known as the Künneth theorem. In the winter semester 1910/11, Künneth joined the students' fraternity “Studentengesangverein Erlangen“, now “Akademisch-Musikalische Verbindung Fridericiana Erlangen“ . He carried out a variety of posts during his studies as well as after having left university in 1914.
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Ingebrigt Johansson
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Ingebrigt Johansson was a Norwegian mathematician. He developed the symbolic logic system known as minimal logic. Biography Johansson was born in Narvik, Norway on October 24, 1904 as the son of bricklayer Isak Johansson and Gjertrud Kletten . In 1941 he married Gidske Jacoba Schult . He died in Oslo, Norway on April 24, 1987.
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Erich Bessel-Hagen
1898 - 1946 (48 years)
Erich Bessel-Hagen was a German mathematician and a historian of mathematics. Erich Paul Werner Bessel-Hagen was born in 1898 in Charlottenburg, a suburb, later a district in Berlin. He studied at the University of Berlin where in 1920 he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics under the direction of Constantin Carathéodory.
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Guido Ascoli
1887 - 1957 (70 years)
Guido Ascoli was an Italian mathematician, known for his contributions to the theory of partial differential equations, and for his works on the teaching of mathematics in secondary high schools. Selected publications . A book collecting the winning papers of the 1935 prize of the Annali della Reale Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. An English translation of the title reads as:-"Partial differential equations of elliptic and parabolic type".
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Stefan Kaczmarz
1895 - 1939 (44 years)
Stefan Marian Kaczmarz was a Polish mathematician. His Kaczmarz method provided the basis for many modern imaging technologies, including the CAT scan. Kaczmarz was a professor of mathematics in the faculty of mechanical engineering of Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów from 1919 to 1939, where he collaborated with Stefan Banach.
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Ernst Leonard Lindelöf
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Ernst Leonard Lindelöf was a Finnish mathematician, who made contributions in real analysis, complex analysis and topology. Lindelöf spaces are named after him. He was the son of mathematician Lorenz Leonard Lindelöf and brother of the philologist .
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Bohuslav Hostinský
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Bohuslav Hostinský was a Czechoslovak mathematician and theoretical physicist. Family His father Otakar Hostinský was a musicologist and professor of aesthetics at Charles University. Bohuslav Hostinský was the eldest of four siblings.
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Valentin Belousov
1925 - 1988 (63 years)
Valentin Danilovich Belousov was a Soviet and Moldovan mathematician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR . He graduated from the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute , Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , Professor , honored worker of science and technology of the Moldavian SSR.
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Oscar P. Snyder
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Oscar Peter Snyder was a United States Army major general who served in the Army Medical Department as a Chief of the U.S. Army Dental Corps from 1954 to 1956. Biography World War I Oscar Peter Snyder was born to Emil and Anna Snyder on 6 January 1895 near Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio. He attended the Orrsville public schools graduating in 1912. He entered The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery in June 1916. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Regular Army on 24 October 1916. He first served at Columbus Barracks...
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Félix Pollaczek
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Félix Pollaczek was an Austrian-French engineer and mathematician, known for numerous contributions to number theory, mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and probability theory. He is best known for the Pollaczek–Khinchine formula in queueing theory , and the Pollaczek polynomials.
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Sōichi Kakeya
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
Sōichi Kakeya was a Japanese mathematician who worked mainly in mathematical analysis and who posed the Kakeya problem and solved a version of the transportation problem. He received the Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy in 1928, and was elected to the Japan Academy in 1934.
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Herman Auerbach
1901 - 1942 (41 years)
Herman Auerbach was a Polish mathematician and member of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Auerbach was professor at Lwów University. During the Second World War because of his Jewish descent he was imprisoned by the Germans in the Lwów ghetto. In 1942 he was murdered at Bełżec extermination camp.
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Harold Loukes
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Harold Loukes was a British academic in India and at the University of Oxford. Loukes was born in Ecclesall, Sheffield, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Central Secondary School in Sheffield before studying English at Jesus College, Oxford. He obtained a first-class degree in 1934 and then spent 10 years teaching at the University of Delhi and at the New School in Darjeeling, where he was headmaster. In 1945, he returned to Britain, teaching for four years before being appointed a lecturer in the Department of Education of the University of Oxford. In 1951, he was promoted to Reader in Education; he spent a total of 30 years in the department.
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Olive Hazlett
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Olive Clio Hazlett was an American mathematician who spent most of her career working for the University of Illinois. She mainly researched algebra, and wrote seventeen research papers on subjects such as nilpotent algebrass, division algebras, modular invariants, and the arithmetic of algebras.
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Vladimir Gennadievich Sprindzuk
1936 - 1987 (51 years)
Vladimir Gennadievich Sprindzuk was a Soviet-Belarusian number theorist. Education and career Sprindzuk studied from 1954 at Belarusian State University and from 1959 at the University of Vilnius. There he received in 1963 his Ph.D. with Jonas Kubilius as primary advisor and Yuri Linnik as secondary advisor and with thesis entitled "Метрические теоремы о дыяфантавых приближение алгебраическими числами ограниченной степени" . In 1965 he received his Russian doctorate of sciences from the State University of Leningrad with thesis entitled "Проблема Малера в метрической теории чисел" . In 196...
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Arthur Wieferich
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Arthur Josef Alwin Wieferich was a German mathematician and teacher, remembered for his work on number theory, as exemplified by a type of prime numbers named after him. He was born in Münster, attended the University of Münster and then worked as a school teacher and tutor until his retirement in 1949. He married in 1916 and had no children.
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Yoshie Katsurada
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Yoshie Katsurada was a Japanese mathematician specializing in differential geometry. She became the first Japanese woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, in 1950, and the first to obtain an imperial university professorship in mathematics, in 1967.
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Henri Milloux
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Paul Henri Milloux was a French mathematician, specializing in holomorphic functions and meromorphic functions in complex analysis. Milloux did his secondary and undergraduate studies at the University of Lille from 1916–1921, although his studies were seriously disrupted by WW I. In 1921 he passed the agrégation. He received his PhD from the University of Paris in 1924 with thesis Le théorème de M. Picard. Suites de functions holomorphes. Fonctions méromorphes et functions entières. After several teaching jobs, he was appointed in 1926 as lecturer at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Strasbourg.
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Heinrich Behmann
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Heinrich Behmann was a German mathematician. He performed research in the field of set theory and predicate logic. Behmann studied mathematics in Tübingen, Leipzig and Göttingen. During World War I, he was wounded and received the Iron Cross 2nd Class. David Hilbert supervised the preparation of his doctoral thesis, Die Antinomie der transfiniten Zahl und ihre Auflösung durch die Theorie von Russell und Whitehead. In 1922 Behmann proved that the monadic predicate calculus is decidable. In 1938 he obtained a professorial chair in mathematics at Halle . In 1945 he was dismissed for having been ...
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Sergei Chernikov
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Sergei Nikolaevich Chernikov was a Russian mathematician who contributed significantly to the development of infinite group theory and linear inequalities. Biography Chernikov was born on 11 May 1912 in Sergiyev Posad, in Moscow Oblast, Russia, to Nikolai Nikolaevich, a priest, and Anna Alekseevna, a housewife. After graduating from secondary school, he worked as a labourer, as a driver, as a book-keeper and as an accountant. Until November 1931 he taught mathematics in a school for workers. From 1930 he was an external student of the Pedagogic Institute of Saratov State University, where he graduated in 1933.
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Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma
1904 - 1964 (60 years)
Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma was a Dutch mathematician who specialized in analytic number theory. Koksma received his Ph.D. degree in 1930 at the University of Groningen under supervision of Johannes van der Corput, with a thesis on Systems of Diophantine Inequalities. Around the same time, aged 26, he was invited to become full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He accepted and in 1930 became the first professor in mathematics at this university. Koksma is also one of the founders of the Dutch Mathematisch Centrum .
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Vitalii Ditkin
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Vitalii Arsenievich Ditkin was a Soviet mathematician who introduced Ditkin sets. Biography Studied at the Moscow State University in 1932–1935; in 1938 got PhD degree . From 1943 to 1948 he was with the Steklov Institute of Mathematics; from 1948 to 1955, with the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. In 1949, got the Doctor of Sciences degree. In 1955, he became a deputy director of newly formed Computing Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He remained with the Computing Centre till his death.
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Charles C. Conley
1933 - 1984 (51 years)
Charles Cameron Conley was an American mathematician who worked on dynamical systems. The Conley index theory and the Conley–Zehnder theorem are named after him. Early life and education Conley was born in Royal Oak, Michigan and graduated from Royal Oak High School in 1949. Starting in 1949, he attended Wayne State University in Detroit for one year before he joined the United States Air Force. After four and a half years in the Air Force, mostly stationed in England, he returned to Wayne State. At Wayne State, he earned a B.S. degree in 1957, where he with the Phi Beta Kappa Key, and an M.S.
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Dorothy Lewis Bernstein
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Dorothy Lewis Bernstein was an American mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics, statistics, computer programming, and her research on the Laplace transform. She was the first woman to be elected president of the Mathematics Association of America.
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Joseph P. LaSalle
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Joseph Pierre LaSalle was an American mathematician specialising in dynamical systems and responsible for important contributions to stability theory, such as LaSalle's invariance principle which bears his name.
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Arthur Bleksley
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Arthur Edward Herbert Bleksley was a South African Professor of Applied Mathematics and an astronomer. Bleksley's early research involved the astrophysics and astronomy of variable stars. He encouraged science awareness in South Africa by publishing articles about science, by being on a popular radio show, and through his presentations at the Johannesburg Planetarium.
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Beryl May Dent
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Beryl May Dent was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student a...
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Richard V. Andree
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Richard Vernon Andree was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Andree taught at the University of Oklahoma for 37 years, and served as a professor emeritus there until his death. He and his wife, Josephine, founded the Mu Alpha Theta mathematics honor society. Andree wrote a book on abstract algebra entitled Selections From Modern Abstract Algebra which was first published in 1958. He also wrote and published at his own expense numerous puzzle books and enjoyed cryptography. Andree and his students developed the ALPS programming language for the Bendix G-15 computer.
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Meier Eidelheit
1910 - 1943 (33 years)
Meier "Maks" Eidelheit was a Polish mathematician belonging to the Lwów School of Mathematics who worked in Lwów and was murdered in the Holocaust. Biography Meier Eidelheit left the Lwów Gymnasium in 1929 and then studied mathematics at the scientific faculty in Lwów, completing his study in 1933 with a thesis on the theory of summation. In 1938, with Stefan Banach as supervisor, he gained a doctorate from the Jan-Kazimierz-University of Lwów with a Dissertation über die Auflösbarkeit eines linearen Gleichungssystems mit unendlich vielen Unbekannten. From 1933 to 1939 he gave private lectur...
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Wallie Abraham Hurwitz
1886 - 1958 (72 years)
Wallie Abraham Hurwitz was an American mathematician who worked on analysis. Hurwitz graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree and then went to Harvard to do graduate work. He won a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which enabled him to study at the University of Göttingen, where he earned a doctoral degree under Hilbert in 1910. In 1912 Hurwitz joined the mathematics faculty of Cornell University, where he remained until he died in 1958 at age seventy-one. His doctoral students include R. H. Cameron and Florence M. Mears.
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Richard Baldus
1885 - 1945 (60 years)
Richard Baldus was a German mathematician, specializing in geometry. Richard Baldus was the son of a station chief of the Anatolian Railway. After his graduation in 1904 at Wilhelmsgymnasium München, he studied in Munich and at the University of Erlangen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1910 under Max Noether with thesis Über Strahlensysteme, welche unendlich viele Regelflächen 2. Grades enthalten and where he received his Habilitierung in 1911. He became in 1919 Professor für Geometrie at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and served there as rector in 1923–1924. In 1932 he became Professo...
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James Henry Taylor
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
James Henry Taylor was a professor of mathematics at George Washington University from 1929–1958, and professor emeritus from 1959 until his death. Early life Born on February 21, 1893, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, Taylor died of cancer on March 30, 1972, at the age of 79. In addition to the title of professor, Taylor was also referred to as an emeritus of mathematics in Residence from 1958 until his death.
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Charles Pisot
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Charles Pisot was a French mathematician. He is chiefly recognized as one of the primary investigators of the numerical set associated with his name, the Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers. He followed the classical path of great French mathematicians by studying at the École Normale Supérieure on Ulm street, where he was received first at the agrégation in 1932. He then began his academic career at the Bordeaux University before being offered a chair at the Science Faculty of Paris and at the École Polytechnique. He was a member of Bourbaki.
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Louis Bachelier
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his doctoral thesis The Theory of Speculation .
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Henry Louis Smith
1859 - 1951 (92 years)
Henry Louis Smith was the ninth president of Davidson College and the first president to not be an ordained Presbyterian minister. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Smith graduated from Davidson in 1881 but returned as a professor of physics before becoming president in 1901. It was during his time as a professor that Smith and a group of students created one of the first x-ray images in America.
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