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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11301
Peder Horrebow
1679 - 1764 (85 years)
Peder [Nielsen] Horrebow was a Danish astronomer. Born in Løgstør, Jutland to a poor family of fishermen, Horrebow entered the University of Copenhagen in 1703. He worked his way through grammar school and university by virtue of his technical knowledge: he repaired mechanical and musical instruments and cut seals. He received his MA from the university in 1716, and his MD in 1725. From 1703 to 1707, he served as an assistant to Ole Rømer and lived in Rømer's home. He worked as a household tutor from 1707 to 1711 to a Danish baron, and entered the governmental bureaucracy as an excise w...
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Isaac Sir Newton
#11303
William Ernest Henley
1849 - 1903 (54 years)
William Ernest Henley was an English poet, writer, critic and editor. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem "Invictus". A fixture in London literary circles, the one-legged Henley might have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's character Long John Silver , while his young daughter Margaret Henley inspired J. M. Barrie's choice of the name Wendy for the heroine of his play Peter Pan .
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Karl Reinhardt
1895 - 1941 (46 years)
Karl August Reinhardt was a German mathematician whose research concerned geometry, including polygons and tessellations. He solved one of the parts of Hilbert's eighteenth problem, and is the namesake of the Reinhardt polygons.
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Norman H. Anning
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Norman Herbert Anning was a mathematician, assistant professor, professor emeritus, and instructor in mathematics, recognized and acclaimed in mathematics for publishing a proof of the characterization of the infinite sets of points in the plane with mutually integer distances, known as the Erdős–Anning theorem.
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Jacques Callot
1592 - 1635 (43 years)
Jacques Callot was a baroque printmaker and draftsman from the Duchy of Lorraine . He is an important person in the development of the old master print. He made more than 1,400 etchings that chronicled the life of his period, featuring soldiers, clowns, drunkards, Gypsies, beggars, as well as court life. He also etched many religious and military images, and many prints featured extensive landscapes in their background.
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Antonio Collalto
1765 - 1820 (55 years)
Antonio Collalto was an Italian mathematician and physicist. Life He was from a modest and otherwise unrecorded family. According to Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, his surname did not indicate a connection with the house of Collalto but instead his status as a Jewish convert to Catholicism in his youth. He was unable to study at the Patriarchal Seminary of Venice, run by the Somaschi Fathers, and gained a scientific education from the physicist Vincenzo Miotti. He completed his studies and then became a priest. In 1795 he became professor of maths and physics in the public schools of Venice. In 1...
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Diego Rodríguez
1569 - 1668 (99 years)
Diego Rodríguez was a mathematician, astronomer, educator, and technological innovator in New Spain. He was one of the most important figures in the scientific field in the colony in the second half of the seventeenth century.
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Arthur Herbert Copeland
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Arthur Herbert Copeland was an American mathematician. He graduated from Harvard University in 1926 and taught at Rice University and the University of Michigan. His main interest was in the foundations of probability.
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Johannes Valentinus Andreae
1586 - 1654 (68 years)
Johannes Valentinus Andreae , a.k.a. Johannes Valentinus Andreä or Johann Valentin Andreae, was a German theologian, who claimed to be the author of an ancient text known as the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 . This became one of the three founding works of Rosicrucianism, which was both a legend and a fashionable cultural phenomenon across Europe in this period.
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Pierre Simon Marquis De Laplace
#11312
James Cagney
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
James Francis Cagney Jr. was an American actor, dancer and film director. On stage and in film, he was known for his consistently energetic performances, distinctive vocal style, and deadpan comic timing. He won acclaim and major awards for a wide variety of performances.
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John Bell
1812 - 1895 (83 years)
John Bell was a British sculptor, born in Bell's Row, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. His family home was Hopton Hall, Suffolk. His works were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and he was responsible for the marble group representing "America" on the Albert Memorial in London.
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Eugene P. Northrop
1908 - 1969 (61 years)
Eugene P. Northrop was an American research mathematician and a math popularizer. Northrop received his PhD from Yale University in 1934 with thesis advisor Einar Hille. Northrop held the William Rainey Harper Chair of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, and frequently served in administrative roles and on technical commissions. He is most remembered for his 1944 book Riddles in Mathematics, which was well-received by the mathematical community and remains in print as a Dover book .
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Hiroshi Okamura
1905 - 1948 (43 years)
Hiroshi Okamura was a Japanese mathematician who made contributions to analysis and the theory of differential equations. He was a professor at Kyoto University. He discovered the necessary and sufficient conditions on initial value problems of ordinary differential equations for the solution to be unique. He also refined the second mean value theorem of integration.
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Alf Victor Guldberg
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Alf Victor Emanuel Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician. His father was Axel Sophus Guldberg and his aunt was Cathinka Guldberg. Alf Guldberg received in 1892 his Ph.D. and became in that year a privatdocent at the University of Oslo. In 1913 he became a professor there. He also taught at the Norwegian Military Academy and the Norwegian Military College.
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Robert William Genese
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
Robert William Genese was an Irish mathematician whose career was spent in Wales. Early life and education Genese was born on Westland Row a street on the south side of Dublin on 8 May 1848. From St John's College of the University of Cambridge, Genese received in 1871 his bachelor's degree and in 1874 his master's degree.
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François Nau
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
François Nau was a French Catholic priest, mathematician, Syriacist, and specialist in oriental languages. He published a great number of eastern Christian texts and translations for the first and often only time.
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Adolf Kiefer
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Adolf Kiefer was a Swiss mathematician, working mainly on geometry. Life Kiefer was born in 1857 in Selzach, Switzerland to Jakob, a farmer, village mayor and member of Solothurn parliament. In 1880 he graduated as a teacher of mathematics and physics. He taught, from 1881-2, at the Concordia Institute, in Zürich. Kiefer's 1881 doctorate was from the University of Zürich for the thesis Der Kontakt höherer Ordnung bei algebraischen Flächen. Between 1882 and 1894 he taught geometry and technical drawing at the canton school in Frauenfeld, becoming deputy head in 1886 and head in 1888. In 1894 he became director of the Concordia Institute.
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Petrus Bertius
1565 - 1629 (64 years)
Petrus Bertius was a Flemish philosopher, theologian, historian, geographer and cartographer. Bertius published much in mathematics, and historical and theological works, but he is now best known as cartographer with his edition of the Geographia of Ptolemy , and for its atlas.
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Alexander Myller
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Alexander Myller was a Romanian mathematician and professor at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași.
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George Richard Crooks
1822 - 1897 (75 years)
George Richard Crooks was an American Methodist minister, writer, and educator. Early career George Crooks was born in Philadelphia, the son of George R. Crooks, Sr. and Mary M. Crooks. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1840 at the age of 18, and, according to his yearbooks, his family was then residing in Adams, Illinois. Following graduation he undertook missionary work as a circuit rider in Illinois. He soon returned to Dickinson, and in the 1841-2 Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Dickinson College, Crooks is listed as "Tutor in Languages and Mathematics."
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Jacques Babinet
1794 - 1872 (78 years)
Jacques Babinet was a French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who is best known for his contributions to optics. Biography His father was Jean Babinet and mother, Marie‐Anne Félicité Bonneau du Chesn. Babinet started his studies at the Lycée Napoléon, but was persuaded to abandon a legal education for the pursuit of science. A graduate of the École Polytechnique, which he left in 1812 for the Military School at Metz, he was later a professor at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France. In 1840, he was elected as a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences. He was also an astronome...
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Michael Tombros
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Michael Tombros was a Greek sculptor who was influential in introducing avant-garde styles into Greece. Life Michael Tombros was born in Athens in 1889, son of a marble sculptor from Korthio, Andros island. He attended the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1903 to 1909. He studied sculpture with Georgios Vroutos and Lazaros Sochos, and drawing with Dimitrios Geraniotis, Alexandros Kalloudis and Georgios Jakobides. He also worked at the marble sculpture workshop of N.M. Perakis. In 1910 he set up his own studio in Athens. In 1914 he obtained a scholarship from the estate of George Averoff which...
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Aphra Behn
1640 - 1689 (49 years)
Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. Rising from obscurity, she came to the notice of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. Upon her return to London and a probable brief stay in debtors' prison, she began writing for the stage. She belonged to a coterie of poets and famous libertines such as John Wilmot, Lord Rochester. Behn wrote under the pastoral pseudonym Astrea.
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John Sturgeon Mackay
1843 - 1914 (71 years)
John Sturgeon Mackay FRSE LLD was a Scottish mathematician and academic author. Life He was born on 22 October 1843 at Auchencairn near Kirkcudbright the son of John Mackay and his wife Jessie Sturgeon. The family moved to Perth early in his life and he was educated at Perth Academy. He entered St Andrews University in 1859 and graduated MA in 1863.
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Charles P. Neill
1865 - 1942 (77 years)
Charles Patrick Neill was an American civil servant who was raised in Austin, Texas, after his family emigrated from Ireland in 1850. Neill graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1897 with a doctorate in economics and politics. He was appointed the United States Commissioner of Labor in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. As Commissioner of Labor he helped inspect the Meat Packing industries, and reported women and child labor injustices. He also mediated labor disputes between workers and employers in the coal, railroad, and steel corporations.
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James Summers
1828 - 1891 (63 years)
James Summers was a British scholar of English literature, hired by the Meiji government of the Empire of Japan to establish an English language curriculum at the Kaisei Gakuin . Early life Summers was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire. His father was a plasterer of limited means, and seems to have left his family some time before James became 10 years old. Summers moved from Bird Street to the Close with his mother and went to the Lichfield Diocesan Training School for about one year from September 1844 to November 1845. He moved again to Stoke-on-Trent with his mother and started his teaching career at a National School there.
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Giacomo Bellacchi
1838 - 1924 (86 years)
Giacomo Bellacchi was an Italian mathematician. After graduating from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, he became a teacher at a military school and at the Tuscan Technical Institute, where one of his pupils was Vito Volterra.
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Walter Fricke
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Walter Ernst Fricke was a distinguished German professor of theoretical astronomy at the University of Heidelberg. He was a mathematician and cryptanalyst during World War II at the Wehrmacht signals intelligence agency, Inspectorate 7/VI from 1941 to 1942
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Al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf ibn Maṭar
786 - 833 (47 years)
was a mathematician and translator. Biography Almost nothing is known about his life, except that he was active in Baghdad, then the capital of the ʿAbbāsid Empire. He was the first author who translated Euclid's Elements from Greek into Arabic. His first translation was made for Yaḥyā ibn Khālid, the Vizier of Caliph Hārūn al‐Rashīd. He made a second, improved, more concise translation for the Caliph al-Maʾmūn . Around 829, he translated Ptolemy's Almagest, which at that time had also been translated by Hunayn Ibn Ishaq and .
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James White
1775 - 1820 (45 years)
James White was an English advertising agent, author and lifelong friend of Charles Lamb. Personal life He was the son of Samuel and Mary White and was baptised at the Church of St. John in Bedwardine, Worcester, on 17 April 1775.
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Perdiccas
365 BC - 321 BC (44 years)
Perdiccas was a general of Alexander the Great. He took part in the Macedonian campaign against the Achaemenid Empire, and, following Alexander's death in 323 BC, rose to become supreme commander of the imperial army, as well as regent for Alexander's half brother and intellectually disabled successor, Philip Arridaeus .
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Jacques-Marie-Frangile Bigot
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Jacques Marie Frangile Bigot was a French naturalist and entomologist most noted for his studies of Diptera. Bigot was born in Paris, France, where he lived all his life, though he had a small house in Quincy-sous-Sénart, Essonne. He became a member of the Entomological Society of France in 1844, and his first paper was published in its Annals in 1845, as was most of his later work. Bigot was a prolific author, and, like Francis Walker, his work was the subject of much later criticism.
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Johann Samuel König
1712 - 1757 (45 years)
Johann Samuel König was a German mathematician. Biography Johann Bernoulli instructed both König and Pierre Louis Maupertuis as pupils during the same period. König is remembered largely for his disagreements with Leonhard Euler, concerning the principle of least action. He is also remembered as a tutor to Émilie du Châtelet, one of the few female physicists of the 18th century.
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Stephen Harriman Long
1784 - 1864 (80 years)
Stephen Harriman Long was an American army civil engineer, explorer, and inventor. As an inventor, he is noted for his developments in the design of steam locomotives. He was also one of the most prolific explorers of the early 1800s, although his career as an explorer was relatively short-lived. He covered over 26,000 miles in five expeditions, including a scientific expedition in the Great Plains area, which he famously confirmed as a "Great Desert" .
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Margaret Millington
1944 - 1973 (29 years)
Margaret Hilary Millington was an English-born mathematician. She was born Margaret Hilary Ashworth in Halifax, Yorkshire, the daughter of the local assistant head postmaster, and was educated there. She continued her studies at St Mary's College, Durham and went on to Oxford University, where she earned a PhD in 1968 with A. O. L. Atkin as her advisor. Also, in 1968, she married Lieutenant A.H. Millington, who was part of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. She was awarded a two-year Science Research Council Fellowship which allowed her to pursue research at any university. During...
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René Risser
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
René Nathan Risser was a French statistician, mathematician, actuary, artillery officer, government administrator, professor of actuarial science, and inventor. Education and career Risser graduated from the École polytechnique in 1892 and then graduated from the École d'application de l'artillerie et du génie in the Arrondissement of Fontainebleau. In 1898 he became an employee of the Statistique générale de la France upon recommendations from Emmanuel Carvallo and Arthur Fontaine. Upon the advice of Lucien March, Risser oriented his career toward actuarial science and in 1907 joined the government ministry of Travail et de la Prévoyance sociale .
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Liouba Bortniker
1860 - 1900 (40 years)
Liouba Bortniker was a mathematician from the Russian Empire who became a naturalized French citizen, was the first woman to earn an agrégation in mathematics, the inaugural winner of the Peccot–Vimont prize of the Collège de France, and the first woman to publish in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. She was known for her work on cyclides.
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Albert Curtz
1600 - 1671 (71 years)
Albert Curtz , was a German astronomer and member of the Society of Jesus. He expanded on the works of Tycho Brahe and used the pseudonym of Lucius Barrettus. Background The Latin version of the name Albert Curtz, Albertus Curtius is an anagram of his pseudonym, Lucius Barretus.
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Marco Antonio de Dominis
1560 - 1624 (64 years)
Marco Antonio de Dominis was a Dalmatian ecclesiastic, archbishop of Split and Primate of Dalmatia and all Croatia, adjudged heretic of the Catholic faith, polymath and man of science. Early life He was born on the island of Rab , off the coast of Dalmatia, in a noble family of Dalmatian origin. Educated at the Illyrian College at Loreto and at the University of Padua, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1579 and taught mathematics, logic, and rhetoric at Padua and Brescia, Italy.
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Wolfgang Cramer
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Wolfgang Cramer was a German philosopher and mathematician. Biography Early Years Cramer, the son of a governmental master builder, was born in Hamburg and spent his school time in Breslau . After his Abitur in 1920 he studied three semesters of philosophy directed by Richard Hönigswald and Siegfried Marck at the University of Breslau. A friend from this time was Moritz Löwi. At the University of Heidelberg he studied another semester of philosophy directed by Karl Jaspers. Afterwards he worked as a bank officer. In the winter term 1924/25 he started to study again and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau.
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Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes
1836 - 1907 (71 years)
Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes was an American librarian, mathematician, and botanist who became the first woman to become state librarian of Indiana and the first woman on the faculty of Purdue University.
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Valentin Naboth
1523 - 1593 (70 years)
Valentin Naboth , known by the latinized name Valentinus Nabodus, was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. Life and academic career Valentin Naboth was born in Calau to a formerly Jewish family. He was the younger brother of the Lutheran theologian and author Alexius Naboth. In 1544, Valentin matriculated at the University of Wittenberg. At that time Philipp Melanchthon, Erasmus Reinhold, Johannes Bugenhagen, Paul Eber, and Georg Major taught there. In 1550 he transferred to the University of Erfurt.
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Charles Niven
1845 - 1923 (78 years)
Charles Niven was a Scottish mathematician and physicist who spent most of his career at the University of Aberdeen. He published on mechanics, electricity, and heat. Life and work Charles Niven studied mathematics at Aberdeen and was awarded a BA in 1863, and then studied at Cambridge. Charles and his older brother William D. were tutored by Edward Routh for the Mathematical Tripos. Charles became senior wrangler in 1867.
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Duncan Liddel
1561 - 1613 (52 years)
Duncan Liddel was a Scottish mathematician, physician and astronomer. Life Liddel was born in Aberdeen, Scotland. Having received an education in languages and philosophy at the local school and the University of Aberdeen, he went abroad at age 18. Moving to Gdańsk in Polish Prussia first, he arrived after a few months at the Viadrina European University , where a Scot, John Craig was teaching logic and mathematics; Craig superintended his studies.
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Carlos Green Smith
1813 - 1892 (79 years)
Carlos Green Smith was an American educator who served as president of the University of Alabama from 1874 to 1878. Carlos Green Smith was born on December 18, 1813, to parents James and Elizabeth Julia Green, née Green. He was raised near Lexington, Georgia, and attended the University of Tennessee. Smith joined the faculty upon graduation and taught mathematics. After two years, Smith left Tennessee to enroll at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. Smith ended his medical studies at Louisville to teach at La Grange College in Alabama. At La Grange, Smith taught ancient languages for four years.
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Adolf Weiler
1851 - 1916 (65 years)
Adolf Weiler was a Swiss mathematician. Life and work After his studies in the Department of Mathematics Teachers of the Polytechnicum of Zurich, he went to study at university of Göttingen and university of Erlangen under Alfred Clebsch and Felix Klein. He was awarded doctor in 1874 with a dissertation on quadratic line complexes. Some years before, in 1872, he constructed a model of the Clebsch's diagonal surface.
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Jean Charlot
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Louis Henri Jean Charlot was a French-born American painter and illustrator, active mainly in Mexico and the United States. Life Charlot was born in Paris. His father, Henri, owned an import-export business and was a Russian-born émigré, albeit one who supported the Bolshevik cause. His mother Anna was an artist. His mother's family originated from Mexico City; his grandfather was a French-Indian mestizo. His great-grandfather had immigrated to Mexico in the 1820s shortly after the country's independence from Spain, and married a woman who was half-Aztec. This was likely the source of a myth ...
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