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,
#11201
John Viriamu Jones
1856 - 1901 (45 years)
John Viriamu Jones, FRS , was a Welsh scientist, who worked on measuring the ohm, and an educationalist who was instrumental in establishing the University of Sheffield and Cardiff University. Early life and studies John Viriamu Jones was born on 2 January 1856 in Pentrepoeth in Swansea, the third of the six children of Thomas Jones, a celebrated Independent clergyman, and Jane Jones. He was named after the missionary and martyr John Williams – 'Viriamu' being the Erromanga for "Williams". His older siblings were David Brynmor and Annie; his younger brothers were Irvonwy, Leifchild Stratten and Morlais Glasfryn.
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George Adams
1709 - 1772 (63 years)
George Adams was an English instrument maker and science writer. His son George Adams, who carried on the business, was also known as an instrument maker and optician. Life He was the eldest surviving son of Morris Adams, a cook, and his wife Mary, and was baptised in 1709. He was an apprentice to instrument makers, James Parker who died, and then Thomas Heath. He went into business in 1734, in Fleet Street, London.
Go to Profile#11203
Terry Carr
1937 - 1987 (50 years)
Terry Gene Carr was an American science fiction fan, author, editor, and writing instructor. Background and discovery of fandom Carr was born in Grants Pass, Oregon. He attended the City College of San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley from 1954 to 1959.
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Maximilian Herzberger
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Maximilian Jacob Herzberger was a German-American mathematician and physicist, known for his development of the superachromat lens. Life Maximilian Herzberger was the son of Leopold Herzberger and Sonja/Sofia Behrendt/Berendt/Berends ; he had a sister Olga . The family was Jewish. He studied mathematics and physics at the Berlin University, where Albert Einstein was one of his professors, and later became a friend and advisor. In 1923, Herzberger finished his Ph.D. thesis Ueber Systeme hyperkomplexer Grössen under Ludwig Bieberbach and Issai Schur at the philosophical faculty. In 1925, he married Edith Kaufmann ; they had three children, born in Jena, viz.
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Samuel Hawksley Burbury
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Samuel Hawksley Burbury, FRS was a British mathematician. Life He was born on 18 May 1831 at Kenilworth, the only son of Samuel Burbury of Clarendon Square, Leamington, by Helen his wife. He was educated at Shrewsbury School , where he was head boy, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. At the university he won exceptional distinction in both classics and mathematics. He was twice Person prizeman , Craven university scholar , and chancellor's classical medallist . He graduated B.A. as fifteenth wrangler and second classic in 1854, becoming fellow of his college in the same year; he proceeded M.A.
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Taro Morishima
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Taro Morishima was a Japanese mathematician specializing in algebra who attended University of Tokyo in Japan. Morishima published at least thirteen papers, including his work on Fermat's Last Theorem. and a collected works volume published in 1990 after his death. He also corresponded several times with American mathematician H. S. Vandiver.
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Richard Birkeland
1879 - 1928 (49 years)
Richard Birkeland was a Norwegian mathematician, author and professor. He is known for his contributions to the theory of algebraic equations. Biography He was born at Farsund in Vest-Agder, Norway. He was the son of Theodor Birkeland and Therese Karoline Overwien . He graduated from the Christiania Technical School in 1899. In 1906, he received a scholarship to study mathematics in Paris and Göttingen. He became a professor at the Norwegian Institute of Technology from 1910. He was rector of the Norwegian Institute of Technology and from 1923 professor at the University of Oslo.
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Michel Reiss
1805 - 1869 (64 years)
Michel Reiss was a German mathematician who introduced the Reiss relation.
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Andrew Guinand
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Andrew Paul Guinand was an Australian mathematician and a professor at the University of New England. Early life and education Guinand attended St Peter's College, Adelaide from 1924 to 1929. In 1930, he entered St Mark's College of the University of Adelaide to study mathematics. After graduating in 1933, Guinand attended the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where Edward Charles Titchmarsh supervised his doctoral research. From 1937 to 1938, he studied at Göttingen, after which he studied at Princeton University, until in 1940 he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and served a...
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Jacques Pelletier du Mans
1517 - 1583 (66 years)
Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance. Life Born in Le Mans into a bourgeois family, he studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where his brother Jean was a professor of mathematics and philosophy. He subsequently studied law and medicine, frequented the literary circle around Marguerite de Navarre and from 1541 to 1543 he was secretary to René du Bellay. In 1541 he published the first French translation of Horace's Ars Poetica and during this period he also published numerous scientific and mathematical treatis...
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Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval
1716 - 1764 (48 years)
André Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval was a French mathematician and philosopher. He was born in Charenton-le-Pont on 16 February 1716 and died in Berlin on 2 September 1764. In 1744, he was forced to flee France to Switzerland due to his criticism of Catholic doctrines, accompanied by his student Marie Anne Victoire Pigeon; on 30 June 1746, they married. Prémontval had been raised Roman Catholic, but had spent some time as an atheist and then deist; in Switzerland, Prémontval and his wife converted to Protestantism.
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John Winthrop
1714 - 1779 (65 years)
John Winthrop was an American mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He was the 2nd Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in Harvard College. Early life John Winthrop was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His great-great-grandfather, also named John Winthrop, was founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He graduated in 1732 from Harvard, where, from 1738 until his death, he served as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy.
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Frank William Land
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Frank William Land was a populariser of mathematics and a professor of mathematics at Hull University. He was lecturer at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea with Cyril Bibby, whom he later followed to Hull where he worked with Bill Cockcroft. For a time during the Second World War he taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe.
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Franz Albert Schultz
1692 - 1763 (71 years)
Franz Albert Schultz was a Prussian divine and superintendent. Biography Schultz was born 25 September 1692 in Neustettin . He studied at the University of Halle-Wittenberg philosophy under Christian Wolff and divinity. At this time he followed August Hermann Francke's pietism. In 1723, having declined becoming a professor, he became educator at the Berlin Cadet Corps and in 1724 field preacher in Mohrungen. In 1728 he became Archpriest and Superintendent in Rastenburg, 1731 professor of divinity at the University of Königsberg. Immanuel Kant was among his students.
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Anna Irwin Young
1873 - 1920 (47 years)
Anna Irwin Young was an American professor of mathematics, physics and astronomy and in 1916 was a charter member of the Mathematical Association of America. Biography Young was born in what is now Chicago Heights, Illinois on November 25, 1873. Her father was Rev. Samuel Young of Ireland, and her mother was Eliza Caskey Young.
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Albin Herzog
1852 - 1909 (57 years)
Albin Herzog was a Swiss mathematician who was director of the ETH Zurich. Life and work Herzog studied in the high schools of Steckborn and Frauenfeld. Between 1870 and 1874 he studied mathematics al Polytechnicum of Zurich and in 1875 he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Zurich. The same year he began teaching at Polytechnicum of Zurich, where he remained the rest of his life, as director of the Mechanical Technical Department and General Manager from 1895 to 1899. During his time as general manager, Albert Einstein flunked the entrance exam, failing in French, chemistry, and...
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Carl Milles
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Carl Milles was a Swedish sculptor. He was married to artist Olga Milles and brother to Ruth Milles and half-brother to the architect Evert Milles. Carl Milles sculpted the Gustaf Vasa statue at the Stockholm Nordic Museum, the Poseidon statue in Gothenburg, the Orpheus group outside the Stockholm Concert Hall, and the Fountain of Faith in Falls Church, Virginia. His home near Stockholm, Millesgården, became his resting place and is now a museum.
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Lili Bleeker
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Caroline Emilie "Lili" Bleeker was a Dutch entrepreneur and physicist from Middelburg known for her designs and the manufacturing of optical instruments. In the era she grew up, it was the norm for women to become housewives whose chief roles were to perform domestic duties, but Bleeker did not want to conform to these standards. She wanted to pursue an education, and never married her life-long partner, Gerard Willemse, which was quite anomalous at the time. She would later emerge as one of the first women in the Netherlands to become a doctor in physics and mathematics. After earning her Ph...
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Bernard Lamy
1640 - 1715 (75 years)
Bernard Lamy was a French Oratorian, mathematician and theologian. Life Lamy was born in Le Mans, France. After studying there, he went to join the Maison d'Institution in Paris, and to Saumur thereafter. In 1658 he entered the congregation of the Oratory.
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Felix Ziegel
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Felix Yurievich Ziegel was a Soviet researcher, Doctor of Science and docent of Cosmology at the Moscow Aviation Institute, author of more than forty popular books on astronomy and space exploration, generally regarded as a founder of Russian ufology. Ziegel, the co-founder of the first officially approved Soviet UFO research group, became an overnight sensation when, on 10 November 1967, speaking on the Soviet central television, he made an extensive report on the UFO sightings registered in the USSR and encouraged viewers to send him and his colleagues first-hand accounts of their observations, which resulted in barrage of letters and reports.
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Aleksei Zinovyevich Petrov
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
Aleksei Zinovyevich Petrov was a mathematician noted for his work on the classification of Einstein spaces, today called Petrov classification. The Petrov classification is related with the Weyl tensor and it was first published by A. Z. Petrov in 1954.
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Jan Marek Marci
1595 - 1667 (72 years)
Jan Marek Marci , or Johannes Marcus Marci, was a Bohemian doctor and scientist, rector of the University of Prague, and official physician to the Holy Roman Emperors. The crater Marci on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
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Vincentio Reinieri
1606 - 1647 (41 years)
Vincentio Reinieri was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. He was a friend and disciple of Galileo Galilei. Biography Born at Genoa, he was a member of the Olivetan order. His order sent him to Rome in 1623. He met Galileo at Siena in 1633. Galileo had Reinieri update and attempt to improve his astronomical tables of the motions of Jupiter's moons, revising these tables for prediction of the positions of these satellites.
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Konstantinos Negris
1804 - 1880 (76 years)
Konstantinos Negris was an author, mathematician, physicist, and professor. He fought in the Greek War of Independence. Konstantinos was a member of the prominent Phanariots family Negris. He was one of the first professors at the newly founded University of Athens and introduced the works of Legendre and Hachette to Greek education, also he was one of the first professors to study abroad; consequently, Greek students continued their studies in France and Germany. He personally intervened in the education of Greek mathematician Ioannis Papadakis. Both Papadakis and Negris influenced the educational path of Nikolaos Ch.
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Abu'l-Hasan ibn Ali al-Qalasadi
1412 - 1486 (74 years)
Abū'l-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Qurashī al-Qalaṣādī was a Muslim Arab mathematician from Al-Andalus specializing in Islamic inheritance jurisprudence. Franz Woepcke stated that al-Qalaṣādī was known as one of the most influential voices in algebraic notation for taking "the first steps toward the introduction of algebraic. He wrote numerous books on arithmetic and algebra, including al-Tabsira fi'lm al-hisab .
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Lucjan Zarzecki
1873 - 1925 (52 years)
Lucjan Zarzecki was a Polish pedagogue and mathematician, a co-originator of national education concept. His area of study was general didactics and didactics of mathematics. Member of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, professor and director of Pedagogics Department of the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in Warsaw.
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Jamshid al-Kashi
1380 - 1429 (49 years)
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Jamshīd Masʿūd al-Kāshī was an astronomer and mathematician during the reign of Tamerlane. Much of al-Kāshī's work was not brought to Europe and still, even the extant work, remains unpublished in any form.
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Yakov Geronimus
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Yakov Lazarevich Geronimus, sometimes spelled J. Geronimus was a Russian mathematician known for contributions to theoretical mechanics and the study of orthogonal polynomials. The Geronimus polynomials are named after him.
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William Ruggles
1797 - 1877 (80 years)
William Ruggles was a professor at George Washington University. Biography William Ruggles was born in Rochester, Massachusetts, about fifty miles south of present-day Boston, on Tuesday September 5, 1797. He was the son of Elisha Ruggles and Mary Clap who also parented six other children: Nathaniel, Micah, Henry, Charles, James, and Lucy. William was the second youngest child in his family. Not much is known about his childhood growing up in Massachusetts until he enrolled in Brown University; where he later graduated from, at the age of twenty-three, in the class of 1820. Two years after graduating from Brown University, Ruggles became a tutor at Columbian College.
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Johann Caspar Horner
1774 - 1834 (60 years)
Johann Caspar Horner was a Swiss physicist, mathematician and astronomer. Life At the beginning, he wanted to be a priest, but later he went to Göttingen, where he learnt astronomy. Then he traveled throughout the world for three years on behalf of the Russians. After the journey he took two years in Saint Petersburg with the cataloging the items he had found. He discovered a method for approaching the roots of equation with unknown factor in a higher power. His findings were published under the titles Über die Curven zweiten Grades and Die fünf regelmässigen Körper. He wrote some other works...
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Abdias Treu
1597 - 1669 (72 years)
Abdias Treu was a German mathematician and academic. He was the professor of mathematics and physical science at the University of Altdorf from 1636-1669. He is best known for his contributions to the field of astronomy. He also contributed writings on the mathematical nature of music theory. He is the grandfather of physician and botanist Christoph Jacob Treu.
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Aristide Maillol
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was a French sculptor, painter, and printmaker. Biography Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art. After several applications and several years of living in poverty, his enrollment in the École des Beaux-Arts was accepted in 1885, and he studied there under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. His early paintings show the influence of his contemporaries Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin.
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Karl Heinrich Gräffe
1799 - 1873 (74 years)
Karl Heinrich Gräffe was a German mathematician, who was professor at the University of Zurich. Life and work Gräffe's father migrated to North America, leaving the family business of jewelry in his hands. Even so, Gräffe succeeded, studying at night, entering the Carolineum of Brunswick in 1821. From 1823, he studied at the University of Göttingen with professors Gauss and Thibaut, doctorate in 1825.
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Vladimir Potapov
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Vladimir Petrovich Potapov was a Soviet mathematician. He was born in Odesa and died in Kharkiv. External links Vladimir Petrovich Potapov at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
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George Murray Burnett
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
George Murray Burnett FRSE FRSA FRIC LLD was a Scottish mathematician and chemist. He served as both Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University from 1974 until 1980. He is largely remembered for his work on polymer reactions.
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Thomas Bewick
1753 - 1828 (75 years)
Thomas Bewick was an English wood-engraver and natural history author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving cutlery, making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds.
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Ioannis Papadakis
1825 - 1876 (51 years)
Ioannis G. Papadakis was an author, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, meteorologist, and professor. He was the second director of the National Observatory of Athens. He temporarily succeeded Georgios Konstantinos Vouris until Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt replaced him as the third director of the observatory. His most notable work was the observation of the Moons of Jupiter and other meteorological observations in the 1850s. He was also a Scottish rite freemason.
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Sergey Degayev
1857 - 1921 (64 years)
Sergey Petrovich Degayev was a Russian revolutionary terrorist, Okhrana agent, and the murderer of inspector of secret police Georgy Sudeykin. After emigrating to the United States, Degayev took the name Alexander Pell and became a prominent American mathematician, the founder of school of Engineering at the University of South Dakota. The Dr. Alexander Pell scholarship is named in his honor.
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Thomas W. Sederberg
#11240
Adolphe Buhl
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Adolphe Buhl was a French mathematician and astronomer. Biography At the age of 14, he was paralyzed, immobilizing him for a few years and forcing him to walk on crutches all his life. He became interested in mathematics and reached a high level of expertise as a self-taught mathematician. He obtained a PhD in 1901 at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris with thesis Sur les équations différentielles simultanées et la forme aux dérivées partielles adjointe and with second thesis La théorie de Delaunay sur le mouvement de la lune. The thesis committee was composed of Gaston Darbo...
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Viktoras Biržiška
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Viktoras Biržiška was a Lithuanian mathematician, engineer, journalist, and encyclopedist of noble extraction. His brothers were Mykolas Biržiška and Vaclovas Biržiška. Biography He was the youngest of the three Biržiška brothers, sons of Antanas and Elžbieta Biržiska, all who contributed significantly to the Lithuanian National Revival. He studied mathematics and engineering at the University of St. Petersburg in Russia between 1904 and 1908, and later at the Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology from 1909 to 1914.
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William Arthur
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
William Arthur FRSE MC was a Scottish mathematician. Life He was born on 12 January 1894 at Fergushill near Kilwinning in Ayrshire. He studied at Queen's Park High School in Glasgow then studied Mathematics at Glasgow University graduating MA in 1915. As most, his career was interrupted by the First World War during which he served in the Welsh Guards. He won the Military Cross for his bravery.
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Johannes Praetorius
1537 - 1616 (79 years)
Johannes Praetorius or Johann Richter was a Bohemian German mathematician and astronomer. Life Praetorius was born in Jáchymov, Bohemia. From 1557 he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and from 1562 to 1569 he lived in Nuremberg. His astronomical and mathematical instruments are kept at Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
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Louis Puissant
1769 - 1843 (74 years)
Louis Puissant was a French topographical engineer, geodesist, and mathematician. He was appointed an officer in the corps of topographical engineers of l'armée des Pyrénées occidentales in 1792 and then a professor in l’école centrale d'Agen in 1796. From October 1802 to August 1803, he was in charge of geodesic triangulations on the island of Elba and then in 1803–1804 in Lombardy. He was elected a member of l'Société Philomathique de Paris in 1810 and a member of l'Académie des sciences in 1828.
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Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis
1792 - 1843 (51 years)
Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He is best known for his work on the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference, leading to the Coriolis effect. He was the first to apply the term travail for the transfer of energy by a force acting through a distance, and he prefixed the factor ½ to Leibniz's concept of vis viva, thus specifying today's kinetic energy.
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Robert Hues
1553 - 1632 (79 years)
Robert Hues was an English mathematician and geographer. He attended St. Mary Hall at Oxford, and graduated in 1578. Hues became interested in geography and mathematics, and studied navigation at a school set up by Walter Raleigh. During a trip to Newfoundland, he made observations which caused him to doubt the accepted published values for variations of the compass. Between 1586 and 1588, Hues travelled with Thomas Cavendish on a circumnavigation of the globe, performing astronomical observations and taking the latitudes of places they visited. Beginning in August 1591, Hues and Cavendish again set out on another circumnavigation of the globe.
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Fabrizio Mordente
1532 - 1608 (76 years)
Fabrizio Mordente was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his invention of the "proportional eight-pointed compass" which has two arms with cursors that allow the solution of problems in measuring the circumference, area and angles of a circle. In 1567 he published a single sheet treatise in Venice showing illustrations of his device.
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George Sinclair
George Sinclair was a Scottish mathematician, engineer and demonologist. The first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow, he is known for Satan's Invisible World Discovered, , a work on witchcraft. He wrote in all three areas of his interests, including an account of the "Glenluce Devil", a poltergeist case from , in a 1672 book mainly on hydrostatics but also a pioneering study of geological structures through his experience in coal mines.
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Jean-Léon Gérôme
1824 - 1904 (80 years)
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880." The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. He is considered one of the most important painters from this academic period. He was also a teacher with a long list of students.
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Max Simon
1844 - 1918 (74 years)
Maximilian Simon was a German historian of mathematics and mathematics teacher. He was concerned mostly with mathematics in the antiquity. Born into a Jewish family, he studied from 1862 to 1866 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, obtaining his Ph.D. from Karl Weierstrass und Ernst Eduard Kummer He was a mathematics teacher in Berlin from 1868 to 1871, and in Strasbourg from 1871 to 1912, where he became an honorary professor of the university.
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