Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#11201

Kenneth O. May

1915 - 1977 (62 years)

Kenneth O. May was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who developed May's theorem. May was a prime mover behind the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, and was the first editor of its journal Historia Mathematica. Every four years the ICHM awards the Kenneth O. May Prize for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics.

#11202

Ludwig Bieberbach

Ludwig Bieberbach

1886 - 1982 (96 years)

Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach was a German mathematician and Nazi. Biography Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled On the theory of automorphic functions . He began working as a Privatdozent at Königsberg in 1910 and as Professor ordinarius at the University of Basel in 1913. He taught at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and the University of Berlin from 1921–45.

#11203

Frank Lauren Hitchcock

Frank Lauren Hitchcock

1875 - 1957 (82 years)

Frank Lauren Hitchcock was an American mathematician and physicist known for his formulation of the transportation problem in 1941. Academic life Frank did his preparatory study at Phillips Andover Academy. He entered Harvard University and completed his bachelor's degree in 1896. Then he began teaching, first in Paris and at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. From 1904 to 1906 he taught chemistry at North Dakota State University, Fargo.

#11204

Valentin Belousov

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.

#11205

Paul I. Richards

1923 - 1978 (55 years)

Paul Irving Richards was a physicist and applied mathematician. Richard's is best known to electrical engineers for the eponymous Richards' transformation. However, much of his career was concerned with radiation transport and fluid flow. Notably, he produced one of the earliest models of traffic waves on busy highways.

#11206

Carl Benjamin Boyer

Carl Benjamin Boyer

1906 - 1976 (70 years)

Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."

#11207

Wilhelm Ackermann

Wilhelm Ackermann

1896 - 1962 (66 years)

Wilhelm Friedrich Ackermann was a German mathematician and logician best known for his work in mathematical logic and the Ackermann function, an important example in the theory of computation. Biography Ackermann was born in Herscheid, Germany, and was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Göttingen in 1925 for his thesis Begründung des "tertium non datur" mittels der Hilbertschen Theorie der Widerspruchsfreiheit, which was a consistency proof of arithmetic apparently without Peano induction . This was one of two major works in proof theory in the 1920s and the only one following Hilbert's school of thought.

#11208

Oscar P. Snyder

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...

#11209

Frank Ramsey

1903 - 1930 (27 years)

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.

#11210

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.

#11211

Ralph Fox

1913 - 1973 (60 years)

Ralph Hartzler Fox was an American mathematician. As a professor at Princeton University, he taught and advised many of the contributors to the Golden Age of differential topology, and he played an important role in the modernization of knot theory and of bringing it into the mainstream.

#11212

George Barker Jeffery

1891 - 1957 (66 years)

George Barker Jeffery FRS was a leading mathematical physicist in the early twentieth century. He is probably best known to the scientifically literate public as the translator of papers by Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, and other fathers of relativity theory.

#11213

Lionel Cooper

1915 - 1979 (64 years)

Jacob Lionel Bakst Cooper was a South African mathematician who worked in operator theory, transform theory, thermodynamics, functional analysis and differential equations. Development Cooper was born in Beaufort West, Western Cape, South Africa. Following the death of his father in 1919, the family moved to Cape Town where he attended the South African College School. His ability was soon recognized and he was encouraged to become a rabbi. However he rejected the Jewish faith and instead studied mathematics and physics at the University of Cape Town, where he won the Governor General's prize for pure mathematics.

#11214

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.

#11215

Oliver Dimon Kellogg

Oliver Dimon Kellogg

1878 - 1932 (54 years)

Oliver Dimon Kellogg was an American mathematician. His father, Day Otis Kellogg, was a professor of literature at the University of Kansas and editor of the American edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1895 Oliver Kellogg began his undergraduate study at Princeton University, where he earned his master's degree in 1900. With a John S. Kennedy stipend he first studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then in 1901/1902 at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. At Göttingen in 1902 he earned his PhD with a thesis Zur Theorie der Integralgleichungen und des Dirichlet'schen Prinzips under the direction of David Hilbert.

#11216

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.

#11217

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.

#11218

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.

#11219

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...

#11220

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.

#11221

John Carlin

John B. Carlin is an Australian statistician. He is Head of Data Science and Director of the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and a professor in the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He has also led the Victorian Centre for Biostatistics, a collaboration between the MCRI, the University of Melbourne, and Monash University, since 2012. The economist Wendy Carlin is his sister.

#11222

Raymond Paley

1907 - 1933 (26 years)

Raymond Edward Alan Christopher Paley was an English mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical analysis before dying young in a skiing accident. Life Paley was born in Bournemouth, England, the son of an artillery officer who died of tuberculosis before Paley was born. He was educated at Eton College as a King's Scholar and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a wrangler in 1928, and with J. A. Todd, he was one of two winners of the 1930 Smith's Prize examination.

#11223

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.

#11224

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.

#11225

Bernard Lewis Welch

1911 - 1989 (78 years)

Bernard Lewis Welch was a British statistician and educator. He is known for creating Welch's t-test. Biography Born in 1911 in Sunderland in County Durham, the youngest of four brothers, Welch was educated at the Bede School. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was captain of the college cricket team for two years. Welch graduated, first class, in mathematics in 1933.

#11226

Heinrich Behmann

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 ...

#11227

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.

#11228

Pierre Courcelle

1912 - 1980 (68 years)

Pierre Paul Courcelle was a French historian who was a specialist of ancient philosophy and of Latin Patristics, especially of St Augustine. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1968.

#11229

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 .

#11230

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.

#11231

Robert Horton Cameron

1908 - 1989 (81 years)

Robert Horton Cameron was an American mathematician, who worked on analysis and probability theory. He is known for the Cameron–Martin theorem. Education and career Cameron received his Ph.D. in 1932 from Cornell University under the direction of W. A. Hurwitz. He studied under a National Research Council postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1933 to 1935. Cameron was a faculty member at MIT from 1935 to 1945. He was then a faculty member at the University of Minnesota until his retirement. He spent the academic year 1953–1954 on sabbatical leave at the Institute for Advanced Study.

#11232

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.

#11233

Frank Adams

1930 - 1989 (59 years)

John Frank Adams was a British mathematician, one of the major contributors to homotopy theory. Life He was born in Woolwich, a suburb in south-east London, and attended Bedford School. He began his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a student of Abram Besicovitch, but soon switched to algebraic topology. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1956. His thesis, written under the direction of Shaun Wylie, was titled On spectral sequences and self-obstruction invariants. He held the Fielden Chair at the University of Manchester , and became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at the University of Cambridge .

#11234

Morgan Ward

1901 - 1963 (62 years)

Henry Morgan Ward was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and career Ward was born in New York City. He studied at University of California, Berkeley, receiving his BA in 1924. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Caltech in 1928, with a dissertation titled The Foundations of General Arithmetic; his advisor was Eric Temple Bell. He became a research fellow at Caltech, and then in 1929 a member of the faculty; he remained at Caltech until his death in 1963. Among his doctoral students was Robert P. Dilworth, who also became a Caltech professor.

#11235

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.

#11236

George Pólya

1887 - 1985 (98 years)

George Pólya was a Hungarian American mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The Martians, an informal category which included one of his most famous students at ETH Zurich, John von Neumann.

#11237

Gábor Szegő

1895 - 1985 (90 years)

Gábor Szegő was a Hungarian-American mathematician. He was one of the foremost mathematical analysts of his generation and made fundamental contributions to the theory of orthogonal polynomials and Toeplitz matrices building on the work of his contemporary Otto Toeplitz.

#11238

Abraham Wald

1902 - 1950 (48 years)

Abraham Wald was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry and econometrics, and founded the field of sequential analysis. One of his well-known statistical works was written during World War II on how to minimize the damage to bomber aircraft and took into account the survivorship bias in his calculations. He spent his research career at Columbia University. He was the grandson of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner.

#11239

Lionel Penrose

1898 - 1972 (74 years)

Lionel Sharples Penrose, FRS was an English psychiatrist, medical geneticist, paediatrician, mathematician and chess theorist, who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of intellectual disability. Penrose was initially the Galton professor of eugenics at University College London, before having his title changed to professor of human genetics at his bequest. He was later emeritus professor.

#11240

Mark Kac

1914 - 1984 (70 years)

Mark Kac was a Polish American mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, the idea of understanding the extent to which the spectrum allows one to read back the geometry.

#11241

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.

#11242

Henry Thomas Herbert Piaggio

1884 - 1967 (83 years)

Henry Thomas Herbert Piaggio was an English mathematician. Educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Cambridge, he was appointed lecturer in mathematics at the University of Nottingham in 1908 and then the first Professor of Mathematics in 1919. He was the author of "An Elementary Treatise on Differential Equations and their Applications".-

#11243

Samuel S. Wilks

1906 - 1964 (58 years)

Samuel Stanley Wilks was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications. Early life and education Wilks was born in Little Elm, Texas and raised on a farm. He studied Industrial Arts at the North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas, obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1926. He received his master's degree in mathematics in 1928 from the University of Texas. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa under Everett F. Lindquist; his thesis dealt with a problem of st...

#11244

Alfred J. Lotka

Alfred J. Lotka

1880 - 1949 (69 years)

Alfred James Lotka was an American mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics. A biophysicist, Lotka is best known for his proposal of the predator–prey model, developed simultaneously but independently of Vito Volterra. The Lotka–Volterra model is still the basis of many models used in the analysis of population dynamics in ecology.

#11245

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.

#11246

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis OBE, FNA, FASc, FRS was an Indian scientist and statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure, and for being one of the members of the first Planning Commission of free India. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys. For his contributions, Mahalanobis has been considered the Father of statistics in India.

#11247

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...

#11248

Karl Menger

1902 - 1985 (83 years)

Karl Menger was an Austrian–American mathematician, the son of the economist Carl Menger. In mathematics, Menger studied the theory of algebras and the dimension theory of low-regularity curves and regions; in graph theory, he is credited with Menger's theorem. Outside of mathematics, Menger has substantial contributions to game theory and social sciences.

#11249

Einar Hille

1894 - 1980 (86 years)

Carl Einar Hille was an American mathematics professor and scholar. Hille authored or coauthored twelve mathematical books and a number of mathematical papers. Early life and education Hille was born in New York City. His parents were both immigrants from Sweden who separated before his birth. His father, Carl August Heuman, was a civil engineer. He was brought up by his mother, Edla Eckman, who took the surname Hille. When Einar was two years old, he and his mother returned to Stockholm. Hille spent the next 24 years of his life in Sweden, returning to the United States when he was 26 years old.

#11250

Louis Rosenhead

1906 - 1984 (78 years)

Louis Rosenhead CBE was a British mathematician noted for his work on fluid mechanics, and was head of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Liverpool University from 1933 to 1973. Life Rosenhead was born in Mabgate, Leeds, on 1 January 1906 to parents from Poland, the first of three children. His parents Abram Rozenkopf and Chaja Nagacz came from adjacent villages in Poland. They were married in Leeds in 1905, adopting the Anglicized versions of their names: Abraham and Ellen Rosenhead. Abraham was a tailor who did his national service in Russia and came to England in 1903; Ellen came in 1902.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions