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,
#11051
Ivan Meštrović
1883 - 1962 (79 years)
Ivan Meštrović was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's Stone Workshop in Split and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he was formed under the influence of the Secession. He traveled throughout Europe and studied the works of ancient and Renaissance masters, especially Michelangelo, and French sculptors Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol. He was the initiator of the national-romantic group Medulić . During the First World War, he lived in emigration.
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Ole Peder Arvesen
1895 - 1991 (96 years)
Ole Peder Arvesen was a Norwegian engineer and mathematician. Arvesen was born in Fredrikstad. He was appointed professor of descriptive geometry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1938 to 1965. He served as secretary general of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters from 1950 to 1966, having been a fellow since 1934, and was also a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. Among his publications are Under Duskens billedbok from 1928, the textbook Innføring i nomografi from 1932, Mennesker og matematikere from 1940, Glimt av den store karikatur from 1941, and the memoir book Men bare om løst og fast from 1976.
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Nelli Neumann
1886 - 1942 (56 years)
Nelli Neumann was a German mathematician who worked in synthetic geometry. She was one of the first women to obtain a doctorate in mathematics at a German university. Biography Nelli Neumann was born in Breslau, Prussia, the only child of Jewish parents Max and Sophie Neumann. Her father was a judicial officer, while her mother died when Nelli was two years old. After ten years in the private Höhere Töchterschule in Breslau, Neumann attended grammar courses and graduated from the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium boys' school in 1905. Her father promoted her mathematical talent by arranging private mathematics lessons given by Richard Courant.
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August Gutzmer
1860 - 1924 (64 years)
Karl Friedrich August Gutzmer was a German mathematician who was chairman of some German commissions about improvement of the teaching of mathematics. Life and work Gutzmer was born near Schwerin but his family moved to Berlin when he was eight years old. In Berlin he studied in Friedrichswerdersche Gymnasium till 1881. From 1881 to 1884 he attended mathematics lectures at Berlin University despite not being registered as a student. He graduated in 1887 in Berlin.
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Yitzchak Ratner
1857 - Present (169 years)
Yitzchak ben Nechemia Ratner was a nineteenth-century Jewish maskilic mathematician. He wrote mathematical and astronomical articles for various journals, and was the author of Mishpat Emet , a criticism of Lichtenfeld's pamphlets against Slonimski's works. In 1888 he edited a second edition of Slonimski's Yesodei Chokmat ha-Shi'ur on the principles of algebra.
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Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen
1778 - 1852 (74 years)
Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen was a cartographer, explorer, and naval officer of the Russian Empire, who ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. He participated in the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe, and subsequently became a leader of another circumnavigation expedition that discovered the continent of Antarctica. Like Otto von Kotzebue and Adam Johann von Krusenstern, Bellingshausen belonged to the cohort of prominent Baltic German navigators who helped Russia launch its naval expeditions.
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Ruth Goulding Wood
1875 - 1939 (64 years)
Ruth Goulding Wood was a professor of mathematics who researched non-Euclidean geometry at Smith College. Wood was also a member of the American Mathematical Society. Life and career Wood was born on January 29, 1875, in the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. After attending primary and secondary school in Pawtucket, Wood pursued and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1898. Wood then decided to further her education by attending Yale University, graduating with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1901. Her thesis, Non-Euclidean displacements and symmetry transformations, concerned t...
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Thomas Cavendish
1560 - 1592 (32 years)
Sir Thomas Cavendish was an English explorer and a privateer known as "The Navigator" because he was the first who deliberately tried to emulate Sir Francis Drake and raid the Spanish towns and ships in the Pacific and return by circumnavigating the globe. Magellan's, Loaisa's, Drake's, and Loyola's expeditions had preceded Cavendish in circumnavigating the globe. His first trip and successful circumnavigation made him rich from captured Spanish gold, silk and treasure from the Pacific and the Philippines. His richest prize was the captured 600-ton sailing ship the Manila Galleon Santa Ana . He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I of England after his return.
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James Edward Oliver
1829 - 1895 (66 years)
James Edward Oliver was an American mathematician known for his role in establishing the mathematics department at Cornell University. Born in Portland, Maine, Oliver graduated from Harvard College in 1849 and was immediately appointed assistant in the office of the American Nautical Almanac in Cambridge. Two decades would elapse before, in 1871, he became assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell, and two years later was appointed as full professor.
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Plato Tiburtinus
1110 - 1145 (35 years)
Plato Tiburtinus was a 12th-century Italian mathematician, astronomer and translator who lived in Barcelona from 1116 to 1138. He is best known for translating Hebrew and Arabic documents into Latin, and was apparently the first to translate information on the astrolabe from Arabic.
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Arnold Emch
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Arnold F. Emch was an American mathematician, known for his work on the inscribed square problem. Emch received his Ph.D. in 1895 at the University of Kansas under the supervision of Henry Byron Newson. In the late 1890s until 1905, he was an assistant professor of graphic mathematics in the school of engineering at the Kansas State Agricultural College . In 1905, Emch became a professor of mathematics at the Kantonsschule in Solothurn, Switzerland. In 1908, Emch gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rome. From 1911 to 1939, he was a professor at the University of ...
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Anastasios A. Tsiatis
#11063
Johan Antony Barrau
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Johan Antony Barrau was a Dutch mathematician, specializing in geometry. Barrau was educated at the Dutch Royal Naval College at Willemsoord and then at the University of Amsterdam. From 1891 to 1898, Barrau was an officer with the Royal Netherlands Navy, later with the Netherlands Marine Corps. However, he left the service and became a mathematics teacher at a Hogere Burgerschool in Dordrecht until 1900, then in Amsterdam. In 1907 he obtained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Diederik Korteweg. From 1908 to 1913 Barrau was a mathematics professor at the Delft University of Technology.
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Aubrey Beardsley
1872 - 1898 (26 years)
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
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François d'Aguilon
1567 - 1617 (50 years)
François d'Aguilon was a Jesuit, mathematician, physicist, and architect from the Spanish Netherlands. D'Aguilon was born in Brussels; his father was a secretary to Philip II of Spain. He became a Jesuit in Tournai in 1586. In 1598 he moved to Antwerp, where he helped plan the construction of the Saint Carolus Borromeus church. In 1611, he started a special school of mathematics in Antwerp, fulfilling a dream of Christopher Clavius for a Jesuit mathematical school; in 1616, he was joined there by Grégoire de Saint-Vincent. The notable geometers educated at this school included Jean-Charles d...
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Henry Morton Stanley
1841 - 1904 (63 years)
Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh-American explorer, journalist, soldier, colonial administrator, author and politician who was famous for his exploration of Central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Besides his discovery of Livingstone, he is mainly known for his search for the sources of the Nile and Congo rivers, the work he undertook as an agent of King Leopold II of the Belgians which enabled the occupation of the Congo Basin region, and his command of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. He was knighted in 1897, and served in Parliament as a Liberal U...
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Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau
1837 - 1916 (79 years)
Colonel Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau was a French soldier and mathematician. He served in the artillery and as an officier of the French Legion of Honor. He introduced Moreau's necklace-counting function into mathematics, and achieved the worst result ever recorded in an international chess tournament.
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Gustav Ferdinand Mehler
1835 - 1895 (60 years)
Gustav Ferdinand Mehler, or Ferdinand Gustav Mehler was a German mathematician. He is credited with introducing Mehler's formula; the Mehler–Fock transform; the Mehler–Heine formula; and Mehler functions , in connection with his utilization of Zonal spherical functions in Electromagnetic theory.
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Ernst August Weiß
1900 - 1942 (42 years)
Ernst August Weiß was a German mathematician. Early life and education Since 1906, he attended the Lyceum in Metz, the Luther school and Schiller gymnasium in Münster, and 1912–1917 the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin, where he passed the Notabitur. He volunteered for the German military engineers in World War I, participated in the attrition warfare near Reims and Soissons and was captured 26 September 1918 during the tank battle near Cheppy by American soldiers. After his release in September 1919 he studied mathematics at Leibniz University Hannover and Bonn University, where he obtained a Ph.D.
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Leila Bram
1927 - 1979 (52 years)
Leila Ann Dragonette Bram was an American mathematician. She was one of the first to study mock theta functions, and for many years directed the mathematics program at the Office of Naval Research, a position where she set the program for much of mathematics research.
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Cora Barbara Hennel
1886 - 1947 (61 years)
Cora Barbara Hennel was an Indiana mathematician active in the first half of the 20th century. Early life and education Hennel was born in Evansville, Indiana to Joseph H. and Anna Marie Thuman Hennel. After high school graduation Cora and her older sister Cecilia taught in country grade schools to save money for college. In 1903, both Hennels entered Indiana University and shortly thereafter, convinced their parents to move with their younger sister, Edith, to Bloomington. All three sisters attended and graduated from Indiana University. Hennel earned her earned her A.B. in Mathematics in 1907, her Masters in 1908, and in 1912, became the first person to earn a Ph.D.
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Thomas Jefferson Jackson See
1866 - 1962 (96 years)
Thomas Jefferson Jackson See was an American astronomer whose promulgated theories in astronomy and physics were eventually disproven. His educational and professional career were dogged by plagiarism and conflict, including his attacks on relativity. He was fired from his position at two observatories, eventually serving out his professional years at a naval shipyard in California.
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Kerim Erim
1894 - 1952 (58 years)
Kerim Erim was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. He graduated from the Advanced Vocational School for Engineering in Istanbul in 1914 and received a PhD in Germany. He subsequently became Professor of Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Science in the newly established Istanbul University.
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Anthony M. Ralston
#11075
Luigi Poletti
1864 - 1967 (103 years)
Luigi Poletti was an Italian mathematician and poet. He was born in Pontremoli, where he also died, age 102. He attended the episcopal seminary in Potremoli, then the high school of Parma, graduated in Turin and started to study mathematics there. He did not finish and took a job in a bank. 1911 he accidentally found the book of prime number tables written by Lehmer, a mathematician from the United States in the house of professor Gino Loria, a friend of his family, when he visited Genoa. Since then he spent many years to extend the first table in order to simplify "Eratosthenes Crivello" , a method from ancient Greece to find prime numbers.
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Kazimierz Cwojdziński
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Kazimierz Cwojdziński was a Polish mathematician and professor of the School of Engineering in Poznań. Cwojdziński published his works regarding secondary school curriculum and school mathematics in the journals Wiadomości Matematyczne, Muzeum, Parametr, and Matematyka as well as the German journal Archiv der Mathematik und Physik. He was among the first year-group to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Adam Mickiewicz University.
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Johannes Knoblauch
1855 - 1915 (60 years)
Johannes Knoblauch was a German mathematician. Biography Johannes Knoblauch, whose father was the physics professor Karl Hermann Knoblauch, studied law, mathematics and physics from 1872 in Halle, Heidelberg and Berlin. At the Friedrich Wilhelm University he studied from 1874 to 1878 and from 1880 to 1883 and received his Promotion in 1882 and his Habilitation in 1883. His doctoral dissertation "Ueber die Allgemeine Wellenfläche" was supervised by Karl Weierstrass. Knoblauch was a teacher for the academic year 1878–1879 at the state Gymnasium in Halle and from 1879 to 1880 at Berlin's Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.
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John Caswell
1650 - 1712 (62 years)
John Caswell was an English mathematician who served as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1709 until his death. Life and career John Caswell , was from Crewkerne, Somerset, and he matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, in March 1671 when he was 16 years old. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1674 and his Master of Arts in 1677. He was a pupil of John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1649 until his death in 1703. He worked with the cartographer John Adams on the survey of England and Wales that Adams began in the late 17th century. In 1709, he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and also served as vice-principal of Hart Hall, Oxford.
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John Farrar
1779 - 1853 (74 years)
John Farrar was an American scholar. He first coined the concept of hurricanes as “a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere”, after the Great September Gale of 1815. Farrar remained Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University between 1807 and 1836. During this time, he introduced modern mathematics into the curriculum. He was also a regular contributor to the scientific journals.
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Johann Hommel
1518 - 1562 (44 years)
Johann Hommel was a German astronomer and mathematician. Work Hommel was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig in 1551. In 1552 or 1553, Richard Cantzlar introduced transversal dot lines in graduations. It was a variant of the zigzag line system introduced by Hommel. Tycho Brahe obtained the zigzag line system from Hommel.
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Christian Wiener
1826 - 1896 (70 years)
Ludwig Christian Wiener was a German mathematician who specialized in descriptive geometry. Wiener was also a physicist and philosopher. In 1863, he was the first person to identify qualitatively the internal molecular cause of Brownian motion.
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Elling Holst
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
Elling Bolt Holst was a Norwegian mathematician, biographer and children's writer. Early and personal life Holst was born in Drammen, Norway. He was a son of bookseller Adolph Theodor Holst and Amalie Fredrikke Bergh. He was a grandson of merchant and politician, member of the Storting, Elling Mathias Holst .
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Lorna Swain
1891 - 1936 (45 years)
Lorna Mary Swain was a British mathematician and college lecturer, known for being one of few female mathematicians to contribute their talents to the war effort in World War I, and for being one of few early female lecturers at University of Cambridge. Academically, she is known for her work in fluid dynamics as well as her deep desire to see more women pursue higher education and teaching in the field of mathematics.
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Arthur Hirsch
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Arthur Hirsch was a German mathematician. Life and work Hirsch completed his schooling in Königsberg in 1882 and then studied mathematics and physics in the universities of Berlin and Königsberg. Among his teachers at Königsberg were David Hilbert and Adolf Hurwitz. In 1892 he received a doctorate from Königsberg for a thesis about linear differential equations.
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Wilhelm Ahrens
1872 - 1927 (55 years)
Wilhelm Ahrens was a German mathematician and writer on recreational mathematics. Biography Ahrens was born in Lübz at the Elde in Mecklenburg and studied from 1890 to 1897 at the University of Rostock, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Freiburg. In 1895 at the University of Rostock he received his Promotion , summa cum laude, under the supervision of Otto Staude with dissertation entitled Über eine Gattung n-fach periodischer Functionen von n reellen Veränderlichen. From 1895 to 1896 he taught at the German school in Antwerp and then studied another semester under Sophus Lie in Leipzig.
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Carl Fabian Björling
1839 - 1910 (71 years)
Carl Fabian Emanuel Björling was a Swedish mathematician and meteorologist. Life He was born on 30 November 1839 in Västerås, Sweden, and died on 6 May 1910. He was the son of mathematician Emanuel Björling and father of lawyer Carl Georg Björling.
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Luca Valerio
1553 - 1618 (65 years)
Luca Valerio was an Italian mathematician. He developed ways to find volumes and centers of gravity of solid bodies using the methods of Archimedes. He corresponded with Galileo Galilei and was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
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Charles de Bovelles
1479 - 1567 (88 years)
Charles de Bovelles was a French mathematician and philosopher, and canon of Noyon. His Géométrie en françoys was the first scientific work to be printed in French. Bovelles authored a number of philological, theological and mystical treatises, and has been reckoned to be "perhaps the most remarkable French thinker of the 16th century."
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Arima Yoriyuki
1714 - 1783 (69 years)
Arima Yoriyuki was a Japanese mathematician of the Edo period. He was the lord of Kurume Domain. He approximated the value of and its square, correct to 29 digits: Further reading
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Thomas Bartholin
1616 - 1680 (64 years)
Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.
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Moritz Allé
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Moritz Allé was an Austrian astronomer and mathematician, one of the teachers of Nikola Tesla. Scientific career After his university graduation, Allé startet his professional career as an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1856. He was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Kraków in 1859. In 1860 he completed his PhD at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. In 1862 he was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Prague. It was there where he completed his habilitation in mathematics in 1863. In 1867, Allé was appointed professor of mathematics at the Joanneum in Graz and was elected as its rector in 1875/76.
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George Adam Pfeiffer
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
George Adam Pfeiffer was an American mathematician. Pfeiffer received in 1910 his master's degree in engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and then his A.M. in 1911 and in 1914 his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University. He spent the academic year 1914–1915 as a Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University and then in 1915 became an instructor at Princeton University. During WW I, he was in the U.S. army and at Princeton University taught meteorology to army aviation students. After the war he taught, starting as an instructor in February 1919, at Columbia University. Th...
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Hettie Belle Ege
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Hettie Belle Ege was an American professor of mathematics. From 1914 to 1916, she was the acting president of Mills College. Early life Ege was born in Erie, Illinois on March 31, 1861, the daughter of Joseph Arthur Ege and his second wife, Catherine Rebecca Reisch Ege. Her parents were both from Pennsylvania; her father died the year she was born, and her mother remarried in 1869. She attended Western College in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 1886; she later graduated from Mills College in 1903, with further studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Munich, and the University of C...
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Cataldo Agostinelli
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Cataldo Agostinelli was an Italian mathematician who wrote 218 papers and several treatises in various disciplines which include dynamics of rigid systems, celestial mechanics, dynamics of non-holonomic systems and magnetohydrodynamics about which he wrote , commissioned by C.N.R., a broad monograph in which also the magnetohydrodynamics waves, the vortexes and the plasma theory are dealt with. He was member of the Accademia dei Lincei, President of the Accademia delle Scienze of Turin and member of several other local Academies.
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Roy Chapman Andrews
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He led a series of expeditions through the politically disturbed China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. Chapman's popular writing about his adventures made him famous.
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Wilhelm Fuhrmann
1833 - 1904 (71 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Fuhrmann was a German mathematician. The Fuhrmann circle and the Fuhrmann triangle are named after him. Biography Fuhrmann was born on 28 February 1833 in Burg bei Magdeburg. Fuhrmann had shortly worked as sailor before he returned to school and attended the Altstadt Gymnasium in Königsberg, where his teachers noticed his interest and talent in mathematics and geography. He graduated in 1853 and went on to study mathematics and physics at the University of Königsberg. One of his peers later remembered him as the most talented and diligent student of his class. Fuhrmann howev...
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Gustavo Sannia
1875 - 1930 (55 years)
Gustavo Sannia was an Italian mathematician working in differential geometry, projective geometry, and summation of series. He was the son of Achille Sannia, mathematician and senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Henrik Petrini
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henrik Petrini was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are mainly connected with the theory of partial differential equations, in particular potential theory. He was born in Falun and received his PhD in 1890 from Uppsala University in mechanics, where he subsequently held a position as professor. In 1901 he moved to Växjö, where he worked as a lektor for mathematics and physics at the gymnasium. In 1914 he finally moved to Stockholm. He is best known for his counterexample of a continuous function for which the Newton potential is not twice differentiable. He was also int...
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Emanuels Grīnbergs
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Emanuels Donats Frīdrihs Jānis Grinbergs was a Latvian mathematician, known for Grinberg's theorem on the Hamiltonicity of planar graphs. Biography Grinbergs was born on January 25, 1911, in St. Petersburg, the son of a Lutheran bishop from Latvia. Latvia became independent from Russia in 1917, and on the death of his father in 1923, Grinbergs' family returned to Riga, taking Grinbergs with them.
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Johann Friedrich Weidler
1691 - 1755 (64 years)
Johann Friedrich Weidler was a German jurist and mathematician. Biography At the age of fifteen Weidler moved to the University of Jena, enrolled on June 10, 1712 at the University of Wittenberg, obtained the academic degree of Magister on April 30, 1712 and became an adjunct at the philosophical faculty of the Wittenberg Academy on April 19, 1715. After he had been given the professorship of lower mathematics in 1715, he took over the professorship of higher mathematics in 1719.
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