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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11101
Antonio Signorini
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Antonio Signorini was an influential Italian mathematical physicist and civil engineer of the 20th century. He is known for his work in finite elasticity, thermoelasticity and for formulating the Signorini problem.
Go to Profile#11102
Mary Domitilla Thuener
1880 - 1977 (97 years)
Mary Domitilla Thuener was a nun and mathematician who served as the first head of Villa Madonna College. Early life and education Thuener was born on October 25, 1880. Her father was an immigrant from Germany who married an American; they had seven children but only three survived. Eleanor, the oldest, was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She completed her studies at St. Mary’s Academy in Monroe, Michigan in 1905, took orders as a Benedictine nun, and entered the St. Waldburg convent in Covington, Kentucky, taking the name Mary Domitilla. There she came to work as a teacher in two local Cat...
Go to Profile#11103
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach
1656 - 1723 (67 years)
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was an Austrian architect, sculptor, engraver, and architectural historian whose Baroque architecture profoundly influenced and shaped the tastes of the Habsburg Empire. His influential book A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture was one of the first and most popular comparative studies of world architecture. His major works include Schönbrunn Palace, Karlskirche, and the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and Schloss Klessheim, Holy Trinity Church, and the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg.
Go to Profile#11104
Claude Lorrain
1600 - 1682 (82 years)
Claude Lorrain was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in Italy, and is one of the earliest important artists, apart from his contemporaries in Dutch Golden Age painting, to concentrate on landscape painting. His landscapes are usually turned into the more prestigious genre of history paintings by the addition of a few small figures, typically representing a scene from the Bible or classical mythology.
Go to Profile#11105
Joseph Lovering
1813 - 1892 (79 years)
Joseph Lovering was an American scientist and educator. Biography Lovering graduated from Harvard in 1833. In 1838, he was named Hollis Professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in Harvard. He held this chair until 1888, when he was appointed Professor Emeritus, after 50 years service. He was acting regent of the university and succeeded Felton as regent.
Go to Profile#11106
Alī ibn Ahmad al-Nasawī
1010 - 1075 (65 years)
#11107
Giovanni Fagnano
1715 - 1797 (82 years)
Giovanni Francesco Fagnano dei Toschi was an Italian churchman and mathematician, the son of Giulio Carlo de' Toschi di Fagnano, also a mathematician. Religious career Fagnano was ordained as a priest. In 1752 he became canon, and in 1755 he was appointed archdeacon of the cathedral of Senigallia.
Go to Profile#11108
Archibald Henderson
1877 - 1963 (86 years)
Archibald Henderson was an American professor of mathematics who wrote on a variety of subjects, including drama and history. He is well known for his friendship with George Bernard Shaw. Early life He was born at Salisbury, North Carolina, was educated at the University of North Carolina , where he was a member of Sigma Nu fraternity, and studied more at Chicago, Cambridge, and Berlin universities, and at the Sorbonne . After 1899 he taught at the University of North Carolina, becoming professor of pure mathematics in 1908.
Go to Profile#11109
György Alexits
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
György Alexits , born in Budapest, was a Hungarian mathematician, and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Alexits is the author of Konvergenzprobleme der Orthogonalreihen , translated as Convergence Problems of Orthogonal Series .
Go to Profile#11110
John Purser
1835 - 1903 (68 years)
John Purser was an Irish mathematician, who was professor at Queen's College, Belfast. Life and work Son of John Tertius Purser , the general manager of the well known brewery Guinness, Purser was educated in a wealthy family, which included artists, as his cousin Sarah Purser, or engineers, as his brother-in-law John Purser Griffith. He was the brother of mathematician Frederick Purser. He studied in Trinity College, Dublin, graduating BA in mathematics in 1856.
Go to Profile#11111
Wenceslaus Johann Gustav Karsten
1732 - 1787 (55 years)
Wenceslaus Johann Gustav Karsten was a German mathematician. In 1768, Karsten published a graphic representation of infinitely many logarithms of real and complex numbers. He was a professor of Mathematics at the Universities of Rostock, Bützow and Halle.
Go to Profile#11112
Domenico Guglielmini
1655 - 1710 (55 years)
Domenico Guglielmini was an Italian mathematician, chemist and physician, active and successful mainly in Bologna and Padua. Life Born in Bologna to a well-off family, he graduated in medicine in 1678 with Marcello Malpighi at the University of Bologna, at the same time he studied mathematics with Geminiano Montanari and became a member of the Academia della Traccia o dei Filosofi.
Go to Profile#11113
Alexis Hocquenghem
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Alexis Hocquenghem was a French mathematician. He is known for his discovery of Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem codes, better known under the acronym BCH codes. BCH codes is a class of error correcting codes that was published by Hocquenghem in 1959, and bears the names of mathematicians R. C. Bose and D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri, who independently discovered these codes and published that result shortly afterwards, in 1960.
Go to Profile#11114
Pierre Boutroux
1880 - 1922 (42 years)
Pierre Léon Boutroux was a French mathematician and historian of science. Boutroux is chiefly known for his work in the history and philosophy of mathematics. Biography He was born in Paris on 6 December 1880 into a well connected family of the French intelligentsia. His father was the philosopher Émile Boutroux. His mother was Aline Catherine Eugénie Poincaré, sister of the scientist and mathematician Henri Poincaré. A cousin of Aline, Raymond Poincaré was to be President of France.
Go to Profile#11115
Jacques Cartier
1491 - 1557 (66 years)
Jacques Cartier was a French-Breton maritime explorer for France. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas" after the Iroquoian names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona and at Hochelaga .
Go to Profile#11116
Marie Henri Andoyer
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Marie Henri Andoyer was a French astronomer and mathematician. Biography Andoyer was born in Paris, 1 October 1862 to Marie Antionette Doubliez and Louis Jules Andoyer. His father was bureau chief at the Banque de France. Andoyer studied at the Lycée d’Harcourt, before attending the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1884 with a degree in mathematical sciences. The same year he began working at Toulouse Observatory and was a lecturer at the Faculty of Sciences in Toulouse.
Go to Profile#11117
Nikolai Yefimov
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Nikolai Vladimirovich Yefimov was a Soviet mathematician. He is most famous for his work on generalized Hilbert's problem on surfaces of negative curvature. Yefimov grew up in Rostov-on-Don and graduated from Rostov State University, where he studied with Morduhai-Boltovskoi. He worked at Voronezh State University from 1934 to 1941. He taught at the Moscow State University since 1946. Aleksei Pogorelov was one of his students there.
Go to Profile#11118
Thomas Chalmers
1780 - 1847 (67 years)
Thomas Chalmers , was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, professor of theology, political economist, and a leader of both the Church of Scotland and of the Free Church of Scotland. He has been called "Scotland's greatest nineteenth-century churchman".
Go to Profile#11119
Lois Wilfred Griffiths
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Lois Wilfred Griffiths was an American mathematician and teacher. She served as a researcher, mathematician, and professor for 37 years at Northwestern University before retiring in 1964. She is best known for her work in polygonal numbers. She published multiple papers and wrote a textbook, Introduction to the Theory of Equations, published in 1945.
Go to Profile#11120
Erich Hüttenhain
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Erich Hüttenhain was a German academic mathematician and cryptographer and considered a leading cryptanalyst in the Third Reich. He was Head of the cryptanalysis unit at OKW/Chi, the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
Go to Profile#11121
Elizabeth Buchanan Cowley
1874 - 1945 (71 years)
Elizabeth Buchanan Cowley was an American mathematician. Life Cowley was born on May 22, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She had four siblings, but they and her father all died by 1900. Cowley's mother, Mary Junkin Buchanan Cowley, later became a member of the Board of Public Education of Pittsburgh, and was the namesake of the Mary J. Cowley School in Pittsburgh. Cowley's grandfather was James Galloway Buchanan, a surgeon in the Union Army.
Go to Profile#11122
Florence Lewis
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
Florence Parthenia Lewis was an American mathematician and astronomer. Early life and education Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Lewis attended the University of Texas for her undergraduate degree, which she received in 1897, and Radcliffe College for a master's degree, which she received in 1906. She earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in astronomy and mathematics.
Go to Profile#11123
Oskar Anderson
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson was a Russian-German mathematician of Baltic German descent. He is best known for his work on mathematical statistics and econometrics. Life Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk , but soon moved to Kazan . His father, Nikolai Anderson, was professor in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. His older brothers were the folklorist Walter Anderson and the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson.
Go to Profile#11124
Onorato Nicoletti
1872 - 1929 (57 years)
Onorato Nicoletti was an Italian mathematician. Biography Nicoletti received his laurea in 1894 from the Scuola Normale di Pisa. In 1898, he became a professor of infinitesimal calculus at the University of Modena. After two years, he returned to Pisa, where he was a teacher of algebra, and then, after the death of Ulisse Dini, of infinitesimal calculus.
Go to Profile#11125
Fritz Gassmann
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Fritz Gassmann was a Swiss mathematician and geophysicist. Life His Ph.D. advisors at ETH Zurich were George Pólya and Hermann Weyl. He was a geophysics professor at the ETH Zurich. Legacy Gassmann is the eponym for the Gassmann triple and Gassmann's equation.
Go to Profile#11126
John Cranke
1746 - 1816 (70 years)
John Cranke was an English scientific thinker and clergyman. Cranke was admitted as a sizar at the age of 21 into Trinity College, Cambridge on 1 July 1767, after graduating from Sedbergh School. His father was James Cranke, a notable artist who has an entry in Redgrave's Century of English Painters.
Go to Profile#11127
Eustachio Manfredi
1674 - 1739 (65 years)
Eustachio Manfredi was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and poet. Biography Eustachio Manfredi was born in Bologna on 20 September 1674. He attended Jesuit school, then studied at the University of Bologna, graduating with a degree in law in 1691. At the same time he devoted himself to scientific studies in mathematics and astronomy, and to literature.
Go to Profile#11128
Oronce Fine
1494 - 1555 (61 years)
Oronce Fine was a French mathematician, cartographer, editor and book illustrator. Life Born in Briançon, the son and grandson of physicians, he was educated in Paris and obtained a degree in medicine in 1522.
Go to Profile#11129
Colin J. H. Mcdiarmid
#11130
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1880 - 1938 (58 years)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. His work was branded as "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933, and in 1937 more than 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.
Go to Profile#11131
Jessie Forbes Cameron
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Jessie Forbes Cameron was a British mathematician who in 1912 became the first woman to complete her doctorate in mathematics at the University of Marburg in Germany. Life and work Jessie Cameron was born on 8 January 1883 in Stanley, Scotland, one of eight children whose parents were James Cameron, a school principal at a village school in Perthshire, and his wife Jessie Forbes.
Go to Profile#11132
Daniel Murray
1862 - 1934 (72 years)
Daniel Alexander Murray was a Canadian mathematician. Murray was born in Colchester County, Nova Scotia, and was educated at Dalhousie University and Johns Hopkins University, as well as universities in Berlin and Paris. He was successively associate professor of mathematics at New York University, instructor at Cornell University, professor at Dalhousie University, and, after 1907, professor of applied mathematics at McGill University.
Go to Profile#11133
Gillie Larew
1882 - 1977 (95 years)
Gillie Aldah Larew was an American mathematician, the first alumna of Randolph–Macon Woman's College to become a full professor there, and eventually the dean of the college. Early life and education Larew was the daughter of farmer and lawyer Captain I. H. Larew, and was born on July 28, 1882, in Pulaski County, Virginia. Her father had eleven children, three of whom died before Larew was born and five of whom were from a second wife after Larew's mother died in 1887. She was privately schooled before attending Randolph–Macon Woman's College from 1899 to 1903.
Go to Profile#11134
Enea Bortolotti
1896 - 1942 (46 years)
Enea Bortolotti was an Italian mathematician born in Rome. Biography He graduated in mathematics in 1920 at the Universities of Pisa, where he was a student of Luigi Bianchi. He taught analytic and descriptive geometry at the Universities of Cagliari and Florence. He was mainly involved in differential geometry: it was a specialist in the theory of linear connections.
Go to Profile#11135
George W. Myers
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
George W. Myers was an American astronomer, mathematician and progressive educator. Born in Champaign Illinois, he earned his bachelor's degree in 1888 from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D in 1896 from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Germany under the supervision of Hugo von Seeliger.
Go to Profile#11136
Sheila Scott Macintyre
1910 - 1960 (50 years)
Sheila Scott Macintyre FRSE was a Scottish mathematician best known for her work on the Whittaker constant. Macintyre is also known for co-authoring a German-English mathematics dictionary with Edith Witte.
Go to Profile#11137
Mary de Lellis Gough
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Sister Mary de Lellis Gough was an Irish nun who spent most of her life in the USA. She is notable for being the earliest known Irish woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Life She was born in Kilmore, County Wexford, Ireland. Her parents were Ellen Dunne and Walter Gough. She attended the local St John of God's primary school. She emigrated to Texas in 1909 with a group of young Irish women, and joined the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, taking vows as Mary de Lellis in 1911.
Go to Profile#11138
Louis Napoleon George Filon
1875 - 1937 (62 years)
Louis Napoleon George Filon, FRS was an English applied mathematician, famous for his research on classical mechanics and particularly the theory of elasticity and the mechanics of continuous media. He also developed a method for the numerical quadrature of oscillatory integrals, now known as Filon quadrature. He was Vice Chancellor of the University of London from 1933 to 1935.
Go to Profile#11139
Johannes Widmann
1460 - 1505 (45 years)
Johannes Widmann was a German mathematician. The + and - symbols first appeared in print in his book Mercantile Arithmetic or Behende und hüpsche Rechenung auff allen Kauffmanschafft published in Leipzig in 1489 in reference to surpluses and deficits in business problems.
Go to Profile#11140
Georgii Suvorov
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Georgii Dmitrievic Suvorov was a Soviet mathematician who made major contributions to the function theory and topology. Biography Suvorov was born on 19 May 1919 in Saratov. He graduated in mathematics from the Tomsk University in 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he served in the Soviet Army. For his military service, he was awarded the medals "For the Defense of Moscow" , "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945" and "For the Victory over Japan" . He was demobilized with the rank of lieutenant. After demobilization, he taught for several months at the Stalin Pedagogical...
Go to Profile#11141
Meher Baba
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Meher Baba was an Indian spiritual master who said he was the Avatar, or God in human form, of the age. A major spiritual figure of the 20th century, he had a following of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in India, but with a significant number in the United States, Europe and Australia.
Go to Profile#11142
Ossip Zadkine
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Ossip Zadkine was a Russian-French artist of the School of Paris. He is best known as a sculptor, but also produced paintings and lithographs. Early years and education Zadkine was born on 28 January 1888 as Yossel Aronovich Tsadkin in the city of Vitsebsk, Russian Empire . He was born to a baptized Jewish father and a mother named Zippa-Dvoyra, who he claimed to be of Scottish origin. Archival materials state that Iosel-Shmuila Aronovich Tsadkin was of Jewish faith and studied in the Vitebsk City Technical School between 1900 and 1904, including two years in one class with would-be artists Marc Chagall and Victor Mekler .
Go to Profile#11143
Annie Leuch-Reineck
1880 - 1978 (98 years)
Annie Leuch-Reineck was a Swiss mathematician and women's rights activist. She was one of the most influential participants in the Swiss women's movement during the 1920s and 1930s. Life Provenance and early years Annie Reineck was born in Kannawurf, a village in the countryside between Erfurt and Magdeburg in Germany. Erhard Reineck , her father, was a protestant church minister and superintentant originally from Magdeburg. Her mother, born Marie Godet , was from Neuchâtel in francophone western Switzerland. Annie grew up in Kannawurf and then in nearby Heldrungen. She received her early education at the home of her elder sister, Theodora .
Go to Profile#11144
Karl Schröter
1905 - 1977 (72 years)
Karl Walter Schröter was a German mathematician and logician. Later on, after the war, he made important contributions concerning semantic consequences and provability logic . He worked as a mathematical theoretician and cryptanalyst for the civilian Pers Z S, the cipher bureau of the Foreign Office , from Spring 1941 to the end of World War II.
Go to Profile#11145
Allan J. C. Cunningham
1842 - 1928 (86 years)
Allan Joseph Champneys Cunningham was a British-Indian mathematician. Biography Born in Delhi, Cunningham was the son of Sir Alexander Cunningham, archaeologist and the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India. He started a military career with the East India Company's Bengal Engineers at a young age. From 1871 to 1881, he was instructor in mathematics at the Indian Institute Of Technology Roorkee . Upon returning to the United Kingdom in 1881, he continued teaching at military institutes in Chatham, Dublin and Shorncliffe. He left the army in 1891. He spent the rest of his life studying number theory.
Go to Profile#11146
Ilya Nikolaevich Bronshtein
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Ilya Nikolaevich Bronshtein was a Russian applied mathematician and historian of mathematics. Work and life Bronshtein taught at the Moscow State Technical University , then the State College of Mechanical Engineering, on the Chair of Advanced Mathematics established in 1939. He also collaborated at the Zhukovsky Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute.
Go to Profile#11147
Nicolo Tartaglia
1499 - 1557 (58 years)
Nicolo, known as Tartaglia , was an Italian mathematician, engineer , a surveyor and a bookkeeper from the then Republic of Venice. He published many books, including the first Italian translations of Archimedes and Euclid, and an acclaimed compilation of mathematics. Tartaglia was the first to apply mathematics to the investigation of the paths of cannonballs, known as ballistics, in his Nova Scientia ; his work was later partially validated and partially superseded by Galileo's studies on falling bodies. He also published a treatise on retrieving sunken ships.
Go to Profile#11148
Mary Cordia Karl
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Elizabeth Karl was an American mathematician who contributed significantly to the theory of orthopoles in geometry. This was the subject of her PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University in 1931. She was Head of the Mathematics department at College Notre Dame of Maryland until 1965, when she retired with the title of Professor Emeritus.
Go to Profile#11149
René de Saussure
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
René de Saussure was a Swiss Esperantist and professional mathematician , who composed important works about Esperanto and interlinguistics from a linguistic viewpoint. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His chef d'oeuvre is an analysis on the logic of word construction in Esperanto, Fundamentaj reguloj de la vortteorio en Esperanto , defending the language against several Idist critiques. He developed the concept of neceso kaj sufiĉo by which he opposed the criticism of Louis Couturat that Esperanto lacks recursion.
Go to Profile#11150
Mary Cleophas Garvin
1899 - 1990 (91 years)
Sister Mary Cleophas, born Linetta Anna Garvin, was an American mathematician. Early life Linetta Garvin was born in Vickery, Ohio, one of six children of Odelia Margaret and automobile and meat salesman Austin Edward Garwin.
Go to Profile