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,
#11251
Herman L. Smith
1892 - 1950 (58 years)
Herman Lyle Smith was an American mathematician, the co-discoverer, with E. H. Moore, of netss, and also a discoverer of the related notion of filterss independently of Henri Cartan. Born in Pittwood, Illinois, Smith received his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon in 1914 and his M.S. from the University of Chicago the following year. His Ph.D. was granted in 1926 by the University of Chicago for work done under Moore. He was later employed as a professor of mathematics by Louisiana State University.
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Ernest Preston Lane
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Ernest Preston Lane was an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Education and career In 1909, he received his bachelor's degree in from the University of Tennessee. Later in life, he went on to receive his master's degree from the University of Virginia in 1913. He taught mathematics at several academic institutions before receiving in 1918 from the University of Chicago his PhD under Ernest Julius Wilczynski with thesis Conjugate systems with indeterminate axis curves. At the University of Wisconsin Lane was from 1919 to 1923 an assistant professor. At the Universi...
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Hans Hahn
1879 - 1934 (55 years)
Hans Hahn was an Austrian mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to functional analysis, topology, set theory, the calculus of variations, real analysis, and order theory. In philosophy he was among the main logical positivists of the Vienna Circle.
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Henry Scheffé
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Henry Scheffé was an American statistician. He is known for the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and Scheffé's method. Education and career Scheffé was born in New York City on April 11, 1907, the child of German immigrants. The family moved to Islip, New York, where Scheffé went to high school. He graduated in 1924, took night classes at Cooper Union, and a year later entered the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics there in 1931. Staying at Wisconsin, he married his wife Miriam in 1934 and finished his...
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Richard Brauer
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Richard Dagobert Brauer was a leading German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.
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Wilfrid Norman Bailey
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Wilfrid Norman Bailey was a mathematician who introduced Bailey's lemma and Bailey pairs into the theory of basic hypergeometric series. Bailey chains and Bailey transforms are named after him. External links
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Gertrude Blanch
1897 - 1996 (99 years)
Gertrude Blanch was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. She was a leader of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York from its beginning. She worked later as the assistant director and leader of the Numerical Analysis at UCLA computing division and was head of mathematical research for the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
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Bernard Koopman
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Bernard Osgood Koopman was a French-born American mathematician, known for his work in ergodic theory, the foundations of probability, statistical theory and operations research. Education and work After living in France and Italy, Koopman emigrated to the United States in 1915. Koopman was a student of George David Birkhoff and his initial work concentrated on dynamical systems and mathematical physics.
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Lila Knudsen Randolph
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Lila Knudsen Randolph was the chief statistician at the Food and Drug Administration and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. At the FDA, her work involved statistical sampling of food and drugs, and "she was instrumental in developing practical applications of statistics in the validation of analytical methods". She also did early work in computational statistics, writing in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1942 about the use of punched cards to construct orthogonal polynomials.
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Stefan Bergman
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Stefan Bergman was a Congress Poland-born American mathematician whose primary work was in complex analysis. His name is also written Bergmann; he dropped the second "n" when he came to the U. S. He is best known for the kernel function he discovered while at University of Berlin in 1922. This function is known today as the Bergman kernel. Bergman taught for many years at Stanford University, and served as an advisor to several students.
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René Maurice Fréchet
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
René Maurice Fréchet was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionalss on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.
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Rudolf Ernest Langer
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Rudolf Ernest Langer was an American mathematician, known for the Langer correction and as a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career Langer, the elder brother of William L. Langer, earned his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under G. D. Birkhoff. He taught mathematics at Dartmouth College from 1922 to 1925. From 1927 to 1964 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, from 1942 to 1952, the chair of the mathematics department. From 1956 to 1963 he was the director of the Army Mathematics Research Center; he was succeeded as director by J. Barkley Rosser.
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Jacob Tamarkin
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Jacob David Tamarkin was a Russian-American mathematician, best known for his work in mathematical analysis. Biography Tamarkin was born in Chernigov, Russian Empire , to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, David Tamarkin, was a physician and his mother, Sophie Krassilschikov, was from a family of a landowner. He shares a common ancestor with the Van Leer family, sometimes spelled Von Löhr or Valar. He moved to St. Petersburg as a child and grew up there. In high school, he befriended Alexander Friedmann, a future cosmologist, with whom he wrote his first mathematics paper in 1906, and remained friends and colleagues until Friedmann's sudden death in 1925.
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Rensis Likert
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.
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L. H. C. Tippett
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Leonard Henry Caleb Tippett , known professionally as L. H. C. Tippett, was an English statistician. Tippett was born in London but spent most of his early life in Cornwall and attended St Austell County Grammar School, where his contemporaries included the historian A. L. Rowse. Tippett graduated in physics in the early 1920s from Imperial College London. He studied for his Master of Science in statistics under Karl Pearson at the Galton Laboratory, University College London and R. A. Fisher at Rothamsted. He spent his entire career, 1925 to 1965, on the staff of the Shirley Institute, Manchester becoming in 1952 one of the first Assistant Directors.
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Karol Borsuk
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Karol Borsuk was a Polish mathematician. His main interest was topology, while he obtained significant results also in functional analysis. Borsuk introduced the theory of absolute retracts and absolute neighborhood retracts , and the cohomotopy groups, later called Borsuk–Spanier cohomotopy groups. He also founded shape theory. He has constructed various beautiful examples of topological spaces, e.g. an acyclic, 3-dimensional continuum which admits a fixed point free homeomorphism onto itself; also 2-dimensional, contractible polyhedra which have no free edge. His topological and geometric...
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Wacław Sierpiński
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory , number theory, theory of functionss, and topology. He published over 700 papers and 50 books.
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Richard von Mises
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:
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Lothar Collatz
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Lothar Collatz was a German mathematician, born in Arnsberg, Westphalia. The "3x + 1" problem is also known as the Collatz conjecture, named after him and still unsolved. The Collatz–Wielandt formula for the Perron–Frobenius eigenvalue of a positive square matrix was also named after him.
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Gladys L. Palmer
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Gladys Louise Palmer was an American social statistician who "gained worldwide attention for her research on manpower problems and labor mobility" and for her work on the standardization of labor statistics.
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D. R. Fulkerson
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
Delbert Ray Fulkerson was an American mathematician who co-developed the [[FordFulkerson algorithm]], one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networkss. Early life and education D. R. Fulkerson was born in Tamms, Illinois, the third of six children of Elbert and Emma Fulkerson. Fulkerson became an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. His academic career was interrupted by military service during World War II. Having returned to complete his degree after the war, he went on to do a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of Cyrus MacDuffee, who was a student of L.
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Edward H. Bersoff
Edward H. Bersoff founded BTG, Inc. and served as its chief executive and president until 2001, when he sold the company to Titan Corporation. He was elected to the board of Titan in February 2002 and holds board positions with a number of other organizations.
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Dirk Jan Struik
1894 - 2000 (106 years)
Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch-born American mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the U.S. Life Dirk Jan Struik was born in 1894 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, as a teacher's son. He attended the Hogere Burgerschool nl over there. It was in this school that he was first introduced to left-wing politics and socialism by one of his teachers, called Mister van Dam.
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Torrence Parsons
1941 - 1987 (46 years)
Torrence Douglas Parsons was an American mathematician. He worked mainly in graph theory, and is known for introducing a graph-theoretic view of pursuit–evasion problems . He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1966 under the supervision of Albert W. Tucker.
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Jean Favard
1902 - 1965 (63 years)
Jean Favard was a French mathematician who worked on analysis. Favard was born in Peyrat-la-Nonière. During World War II he was a prisoner of war in Germany. He also was a President of the French Mathematical Society in 1946. He died in La Tronche, aged 62.
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Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy was an Indian mathematician who wrote the first textbook of point-set topology in India. Life He was born in India on 24 October 1894. Vaidyanathaswamy studied Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, under Prof Edmund Taylor Whittaker graduating around 1914. He then did postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge under Prof H. F. Baker. After his return to India, he was a professor at the University of Madras, and after his retirement was associated with the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta.
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Erich Kamke
1890 - 1961 (71 years)
Erich Kamke was a German mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. Also, his book on set theory became a standard introduction to the field. Biography Kamke was born in Marienburg, West Prussia, German Empire .
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Clifford Hugh Dowker
1912 - 1982 (70 years)
Clifford Hugh Dowker was a topologist known for his work in point-set topology and also for his contributions in category theory, sheaf theory and knot theory. Biography Clifford Hugh Dowker grew up on a small farm in Western Ontario, Canada. He excelled in mathematics and was paid to teach his math teacher math at his secondary school. He was awarded a scholarship at Western Ontario University, where he got his B.S. in 1933. He wanted to pursue a career as a teacher, but he was persuaded to continue with his education because of his extraordinary mathematical talent. He earned his M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1936 and his Ph.D.
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Hilda Geiringer
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Hilda Geiringer , also known as Hilda von Mises and Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer, was an Austrian mathematician. Life Geiringer was born in 1893 in Vienna, Austria into a Jewish family. Her father, Ludwig Geiringer, was born in Hungary and her mother, Martha Wertheimer, was from Vienna. Her parents had married while her father was working in Vienna as a textile manufacturer.
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Eric van Douwen
1946 - 1987 (41 years)
Eric Karel van Douwen was a Dutch mathematician specializing in set-theoretic topology. He received his Ph.D. in 1975 from Vrije Universiteit under the supervision of Maarten Maurice and Johannes Aarts, both of whom were in turn students of Johannes de Groot.
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Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze was an Austrian mathematician, famous for the Tietze extension theorem on functions from topological spaces to the real numbers. He also developed the Tietze transformations for group presentations, and was the first to pose the group isomorphism problem. Tietze's graph is also named after him; it describes the boundaries of a subdivision of the Möbius strip into six mutually-adjacent regions, found by Tietze as part of an extension of the four color theorem to non-orientable surfaces.
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Evan Tom Davies
1904 - 1973 (69 years)
Evan Tom Davies was a Welsh mathematician. He studied applications of the Lie derivative as it relates to Riemannian geometry as well as absolute differential calculus, and published a large number of papers relating to the subjects.
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Theophil Henry Hildebrandt
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
Theophil Henry Hildebrandt was an American mathematician who did research on functional analysis and integration theory. Hildebrandt was born in Dover, Ohio, graduated from high school at age 14 and at age 17 in 1905 received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago he earned his master's degree in 1906 and his PhD in 1910, with thesis A Contribution to the Foundations of Fréchet's Calcul Fonctionnel written under the direction of E. H. Moore. He became an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1909 and then a full professor in 1923, serving as chair of the mathematics department from 1934 until his retirement in 1957.
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Hellmuth Kneser
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Hellmuth Kneser was a Baltic German mathematician, who made notable contributions to group theory and topology. His most famous result may be his theorem on the existence of a prime decomposition for 3-manifolds. His proof originated the concept of normal surface, a fundamental cornerstone of the theory of 3-manifolds.
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Josip Plemelj
1873 - 1967 (94 years)
Josip Plemelj was a Slovene mathematician, whose main contributions were to the theory of analytic functions and the application of integral equations to potential theory. He was the first chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
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Clarence Raymond Adams
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Clarence Raymond Adams was an American mathematician who worked on partial difference equations. He entered Brown University in the fall of 1915 and graduated in 1918. Adams received his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under the direction of G. D. Birkhoff. On August 17, 1922, he married Rachel Blodgett, who earned a PhD from Radcliffe College in 1921. As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow of Harvard University, he studied at the Sapienza University of Rome under Tullio Levi-Civita and at the University of Göttingen under Richard Courant. In 1923 Adams returned to Brown University as an instructo...
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Eric Harold Neville
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Eric Harold Neville, known as E. H. Neville was an English mathematician. A heavily fictionalised portrayal of his life is rendered in the 2007 novel The Indian Clerk. He is the one who convinced Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England.
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Anne C. Morel
Anne C. Morel was an American mathematician known for her work in logic, order theory, and algebra. She was the first female full professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. Education and career Morel graduated in 1941 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She began graduate study in mathematics in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley, but left her studies to serve in the WAVES during World War II. She returned to her studies in Berkeley in 1946, and completed her Ph.D. in 1953. Her dissertation, A Study in the Arithmetic of Order Types, was supervised by Al...
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Arnold Walfisz
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Arnold Walfisz was a Jewish-Polish mathematician working in analytic number theory. Life After the Abitur in Warsaw , Arnold Walfisz studied in Germany at Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen. Edmund Landau was his doctoral-thesis supervisor at the University of Göttingen. Walfisz lived in Wiesbaden from 1922 through 1927, then he returned to Warsaw, worked at an insurance company and at the mathematical institute of the university . In 1935, together with , he founded the mathematical journal Acta Arithmetica. In 1936, Walfisz became professor at the University of Tbilisi in the nation of Georgia .
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Edwin E. Floyd
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Edwin Earl Floyd was an American mathematician, specializing in topology . Education and career Floyd studied received in 1943 his bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama and in 1948 his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia under Gordon Whyburn with thesis The extension of homeomorphisms. He was in the academic year 1948–1949 an instructor at Princeton University and became in 1949 a member of the faculty of the University of Virginia, where in the 1960s he collaborated with Pierre Conner in research on cobordism theory. At the University of Virginia, he was the chair of the department of mathematics from 1966 to 1969 and since 1966 the Robert C.
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Victor Thébault
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Victor Michael Jean-Marie Thébault was a French mathematician best known for propounding three problems in geometry. The name Thébault's theorem is used by some authors to refer to the first of these problems and by others to refer to the third.
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James Lewin McGregor
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
James Lewin McGregor was a mathematician who introduced Karlin–McGregor polynomials. A native of Canada he served in the Canadian military during World War II. He received his undergrad degree from the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Cal Tech and then became a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
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Helen M. Walker
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Helen Mary Walker was a statistician and prominent educational researcher, and the first female president of the American Statistical Association when she was elected in 1944. From 1949 to 1950, she was also president of the American Educational Research Association and served on the Young Women's Christian Association from 1936 to 1950.
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Geoffrey Shepherd
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Geoffrey Seddon Shepherd was an American statistician and econometrician. He taught at Iowa State University, after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1932. External links
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Lipót Fejér
1880 - 1959 (79 years)
Lipót Fejér was a Hungarian mathematician of Jewish heritage. Fejér was born Leopold Weisz, and changed to the Hungarian name Fejér around 1900. Biography He was born in Pécs, Austria-Hungary, into the Jewish family of Victoria Goldberger and Samuel Weiss. His maternal great-grandfather Samuel Nachod was a doctor and his grandfather was a renowned scholar, author of a Hebrew-Hungarian dictionary. Leopold's father, Samuel Weiss, was a shopkeeper in Pecs. In primary schools Leopold was not doing well, so for a while his father took him away to home schooling. The future scientist developed his ...
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Alexander Doniphan Wallace
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Alexander Doniphan Wallace was an American mathematician who introduced proximity spaces. Wallace received from the University of Virginia B.A. in 1935, M.A. in 1936 and Ph.D. in 1940. He was an instructor at Princeton University in 1940–1941 and became an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 and remained there until 1947. He was a professor and chair of the mathematics department at Tulane University in 1947–1963. From 1963 until his retirement in 1973 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Florida.
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John Charles Burkill
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
John Charles Burkill was an English mathematician who worked on analysis and introduced the Burkill integral. He was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Burkill was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1953. In 1948, Burkill won the Adams Prize. He was Master of Peterhouse until 1973. His doctoral students include Frederick Gehring.
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Gordon Pall
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Gordon Pall was a Canadian mathematician. In 1945, he and Lloyd Williams founded the Canadian Mathematical Congress. Education and career Gordon Pall got a B.A. at the University of Manitoba in 1926, an M,A. at the University of Toronto in 1927, and a Ph.D. in 1929 under Leonard Eugene Dickson with the dissertation "Problems in Additive Theory of Numbers" at the University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1929.
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Charles Winsor
1895 - 1951 (56 years)
Charles Paine Winsor was an American engineer, physiologist and biostatistician. Winsor was born in Boston to Frederick Winsor and Mary Anna Lee Winsor in 1895. He studied at Harvard University where he obtained 2 degrees in engineering. From 1921 to 1927 he worked as an engineer at the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company. His interest in biology made him switch career and he moved to Baltimore to work for Raymond Pearl, and he returned to Harvard to finish his PhD in 1935 in general physiology under W. J. Crozier. Following this, from 1938 to 1941 he worked at the Statistical Laboratory at Iowa State College as Assistant Professor of mathematics.
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Tobias Dantzig
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Tobias Dantzig was an American mathematician, the father of George Dantzig, and the author of Number: The Language of Science and Aspects of Science . Biography Born in Shavli into the family of Shmuel Dantzig and Guta Dimant , he grew up in Lodz and studied mathematics with Henri Poincaré in Paris. His brother Jacob was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust; he also had a brother Naftali and sister Emma.
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