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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#11351

John Wilkes Booth

John Wilkes Booth

1838 - 1865 (27 years)

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing President Lincoln, he lamented the then-recent abolition of slavery in the United States.

#11352

Reinhold Strassmann

1893 - 1944 (51 years)

Reinhold Strassmann was a German mathematician who proved Strassmann's theorem. His Ph.D. advisor at University of Marburg was Kurt Hensel. Born into a Jewish family, Strassmann refused to leave Nazi Germany, and he was eventually detained and deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. On October 23, 1944, he was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered soon after.

#11353

Francis Grant Ogilvie

1858 - 1930 (72 years)

Sir Francis Grant Ogilvie CB FRSE was a Scottish educator, museum director, and scientist. Birth, parentage and early career Ogilvie was born in Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, the eldest son of the Reverend Alexander Ogilvie, headmaster of Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen, and his wife Maria Matilda . His younger sister, Dame Maria Gordon, was an eminent scientist in the fields of geology and palaeontology.

#11354

Mildred Sanderson

1889 - 1914 (25 years)

Mildred Leonora Sanderson was an American mathematician, best known for her mathematical theorem concerning modular invariants. Life Sanderson was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1889 and was the valedictorian of her class at the Waltham High School. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1910, winning Senior Honors in Mathematics. She obtained her Ph.D degree from the University of Chicago in 1913, publishing the thesis in which she set forth her mathematical theorem. She was Leonard Eugene Dickson's first female doctoral student.

#11355

Harry Schmidt

1894 - 1951 (57 years)

Harry Schmidt was a German mathematician. Core areas of his research were experimental physics, as well as the theory of boundary layers and wings in aerodynamics. Biography In 1913 Schmidt began his study of physics, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy at the University of Leipzig. There he received in 1919 his Ph.D. in theoretical physics with dissertation Über die Möglichkeit und Stabilität von Gleichgewichtszuständen ruhender sowie rotierender Elektronengruppen innerhalb einer im allgemeinen nichtäquivalenten Kugel von homogener positiver Elektrizität . In 1926 he received his Habilitation at the University of Leipzig.

#11356

Vasco Núñez de Balboa

Vasco Núñez de Balboa

1475 - 1519 (44 years)

Vasco Núñez de Balboa was a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador. He is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have seen or reached the Pacific from the New World.

#11357

Ilie Popa

1907 - 1983 (76 years)

Ilie Popa was a Romanian mathematician and Head of the Mathematical Analysis Department at the University of Iași. He is known for his contributions to differential geometry, mathematical analysis, and the history of mathematics.

#11358

Anne Bosworth Focke

1868 - 1907 (39 years)

Anne Lucy Bosworth Focke was an American mathematician who became the first mathematics professor at what is now the University of Rhode Island, and later became the first female doctoral student of David Hilbert.

#11359

Charlotte Elvira Pengra

1875 - 1916 (41 years)

Charlotte Elvira Pengra was an American mathematician. In 1901, she became the third person to receive a Ph.D. in math at the University of Wisconsin, and the sixth American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics.

#11360

Louis Jolliet

1645 - 1700 (55 years)

Louis Jolliet was a French-Canadian explorer known for his discoveries in North America. In 1673, Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit Catholic priest and missionary, were the first non-Natives to explore and map the Upper Mississippi River.

#11361

Henry Dye

1926 - 1986 (60 years)

Henry Abel Dye Jr. was an American mathematician, specializing in operator algebras and ergodic theory. Education and career Dye received from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute a bachelor's degree and in 1950 a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. As a postdoc he was from 1950 to 1952 at California Institute of Technology and from 1952 to 1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was from 1953 to 1956 an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, from 1956 to 1959 an associate professor at the University of Southern California , and from 1959 to 1960 a full professor at the University of Iowa.

#11362

Sen no Rikyū

1522 - 1591 (69 years)

Sen no Rikyū, also known simply as Rikyū, is considered the historical figure with the most profound influence on chanoyu, the Japanese "Way of Tea", particularly the tradition of wabi-cha. He was also the first to emphasize several key aspects of the ceremony, including rustic simplicity, directness of approach and honesty of self. Originating from the Sengoku period and the Azuchi–Momoyama period, these aspects of the tea ceremony persist. Rikyū is known by many names; for consistency, he will be referred to as Rikyū in this article.

#11363

Walter Brown

1886 - 1957 (71 years)

Walter Brown FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and engineer. Life The younger son of Hugh A. Brown, a headmaster in Paisley, Walter was educated at Allan Glen's School and then studied at the University of Glasgow . He began his career as a teacher at Allan Glen's. Brown became a member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in March 1911.

#11364

Lu Jiaxi

1935 - 1983 (48 years)

Lu Jiaxi was a self-taught Chinese mathematician who made important contributions in combinatorial design theory. He was a high school physics teacher in a remote city and worked in his spare time on the problem of large sets of disjoint Steiner triple systems.

#11365

Bohdan Stefanowski

Bohdan Stefanowski

1883 - 1976 (93 years)

Bohdan Stefanowski was a Polish expert in thermodynamics, one of founders of the Warsaw school of thermodynamics, the first rector of Lodz University of Technology. After graduation from the Mechanical Engineering Department of Lviv Polytechnic in 1904, Bohdan Stefanowski pursued a career in industry as a specialist in heat management and then spent several years furthering his education under the supervision of Prof. Mollier in Dresden and Prof. Joss at Königliche Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg.

#11366

Ignazio Danti

1536 - 1586 (50 years)

Ignazio Danti, O.P. , born Pellegrino Rainaldi Danti, was an Italian Roman Catholic prelate, mathematician, astronomer, and cosmographer, who served as Bishop of Alatri . Early life Danti was born in Perugia in 1536 to a family of artists and scientists. As a boy he learned the rudiments of painting and architecture from his father Giulio, an architect and engineer who studied under Antonio da Sangallo, and his aunt Teodora, who was said to have studied under the painter Perugino and also wrote a commentary on Euclid. His older brother Vincenzo Danti became one of the leading court sculptors...

#11367

Pietro Paolo Caravaggio

1617 - 1688 (71 years)

Pietro Paolo Caravaggio or Petro Paulo Caravagio was an Italian mathematician. Life Citizen of the Duchy of Milan during the Spanish domination, he was a professor of mathematics at the Palatine School and a close friend of the poet and mathematician Tommaso Ceva. He corresponded with Vincenzo Viviani, Antonio Magliabechi and Pietro Mengoli. Caravaggio is well known for the work In geometria male restaurata that he dedicated to king Philip IV of Spain, in which he introduces geometry as the queen of arts, architecture, industry, and domain of the territory.

#11368

Bill Ferrar

1893 - 1990 (97 years)

Dr William Leonard Ferrar FRSE was an English mathematician. He focused on interpolation theory and number theory. Early life Ferrar was born on 21 October 1893 in St Pauls, Bristol, the son of Maria Susannah Ferrar and her husband George William Persons Ferrar, a lamplighter.

#11369

Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud

1001 - 1084 (83 years)

Abu Amir Yusuf ibn Ahmad ibn Hud , more commonly known as al-Mu'taman, was a mathematician, and also one of the kings of the Taifa of Zaragoza. The name al-Mu'taman is itself a shortening of his full regnal name al-Mu'taman Billah .

#11370

Edward M. Hartwell

Edward M. Hartwell

1850 - 1922 (72 years)

Edward Mussey Hartwell was an American academic who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Biography He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire to parents Josiah Shattuck Hartwell and Catherine Stone Hartwell on May 29, 1850, as the eldest of eight children. Edward M. Hartwell attended Lawrence Academy and the Groton School, before graduating from the Boston Latin School, after which he enrolled at Amherst College. Hartwell received his bachelor's degree in 1873, and became vice principal at a school in New Jersey before taking a position at the Boston Latin School. He left Boston to pursue medical st...

#11371

Abu al-Wafa' al-Buzjani

Abu al-Wafa' al-Buzjani

940 - 998 (58 years)

Abū al-Wafāʾ Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā ibn Ismāʿīl ibn al-ʿAbbās al-Būzjānī or Abū al-Wafā Būzhjānī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer who worked in Baghdad. He made important innovations in spherical trigonometry, and his work on arithmetic for businessmen contains the first instance of using negative numbers in a medieval Islamic text.

#11372

John Leigh Smeathman Hatton

1865 - 1933 (68 years)

Professor John Leigh Smeathman was a mathematician and Principal of East London College, England, one of the founding colleges of what is now Queen Mary College, part of London University. He was also Vice Chancellor of London University in the 1930s.

#11373

Arnold Droz-Farny

1856 - 1912 (56 years)

Arnold Droz-Farny was a Swiss mathematician, professor in High School of Porrentruy . Life and work Arnold Droz changed his family name later in his life when he married Lisa Farny. He studied in the high school of Neuchâtel and then in the Technical School of Stuttgart and in the university of Munich. After graduating in mathematics in Munich, he began to teach in a private school. Soon, in 1880, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in the Lycée Cantonal of Porrentruy, where he remained till 1908 when his ill health forced him to retire.

#11374

Georg Tannstetter

Georg Tannstetter

1482 - 1535 (53 years)

Georg Tannstetter , also called Georgius Collimitius, was a humanist teaching at the University of Vienna. He was a medical doctor, mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and the personal physician of the emperorss Maximilian I and Ferdinand I. He also wrote under the pseudonym of "Lycoripensis". His Latin name "Collimitius" is derived from limes meaning "border" and is a reference to his birth town: "Rain" is a German word for border or boundary.

#11375

Stanisław Knapowski

1931 - 1967 (36 years)

Stanisław Knapowski was a Polish mathematician who worked on prime numbers and number theory. Knapowski published 53 papers despite dying at only 36 years old. Life and education Stanisław Knapowski was the son of Zofia Krysiewicz and Roch Knapowski. His father, Roch Knapowski was a lawyer in Poznań but later taught at Poznań University. The family moved to the Kielce province in south-eastern Poland after the German invasion of 1939 but returned to Poznań after the war.

#11376

Harvie Branscomb

Harvie Branscomb

1894 - 1998 (104 years)

Bennett Harvie Branscomb was an American theologian and academic administrator. He served as the fourth chancellor of Vanderbilt University, a private university in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1946 to 1963. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, he was the director of the Duke University Libraries and dean of the Duke Divinity School. Additionally, he served as a professor of Christian theology at Southern Methodist University. He was the author of several books about New Testament theology.

#11377

Nicolas Vilant

1737 - 1807 (70 years)

Nicolas Vilant FRSE was a mathematician from Scotland in the 18th century, known for his textbooks. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. Life He was baptised in Ferryport-on-Tay on 12 June 1737, the son of Rev William Vilant, the local minister , and his second wife, Jean Wilson. He studied Mathematics at St Andrews University from 1752 under Prof David Gregory.

#11378

Henry Gellibrand

1597 - 1637 (40 years)

Henry Gellibrand was an English mathematician. He is known for his work on the Earth's magnetic field. He discovered that magnetic declination – the angle of dip of a compass needle – is not constant but changes over time. He announced this in 1635, relying on previous observations by others, which had not yet been correctly interpreted.

#11379

Giambattista Benedetti

Giambattista Benedetti

1530 - 1590 (60 years)

Giambattista Benedetti was an Italian mathematician from Venice who was also interested in physics, mechanics, the construction of sundials, and the science of music. Science of motion In his works Resolutio omnium Euclidis problematum and Demonstratio proportionum motuum localium , Benedetti proposed a new doctrine of the speed of bodies in free fall. The accepted Aristotelian doctrine at that time was that the speed of a freely falling body is directly proportional to the total weight of the body and inversely proportional to the density of the medium. Benedetti's view was that the speed depends on just the difference between the specific gravity of the body and that of the medium.

#11380

Joseph Langley Burchnall

1892 - 1975 (83 years)

Professor Joseph Langley Burchnall was an English mathematician who introduced the Burchnall–Chaundy theory. Life Burchnall was born in Whichford, Warwickshire, the son of Walter Henry Burchnall, a schoolmaster, and Ann Newport. He was the eldest of six children.

#11381

Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt

Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt

1728 - 1810 (82 years)

Marcin Odlanicki Poczobutt was a Polish–Lithuanian Jesuit, astronomer and mathematician. He was professor of Vilnius University for over 50 years, serving as its rector from 1780 to 1799. The crater Poczobutt on the Moon is named after him.

#11382

Carl Severin Wigert

1871 - 1941 (70 years)

Carl Severin Wigert was a Swedish mathematician who created Stieltjes–Wigert polynomials and worked on the divisor function, including correctly describing its maximal order of growth. Wigert proved that

#11383

Theodorus Moretus

1602 - 1667 (65 years)

Theodorus Moretus, also known as Theodor or Theodore Moretus was a Flemish Jesuit priest who was also a mathematician, geometer, theologian and philosopher. He spent most of his working life in Prague and Breslau where he taught philosophy, theology and mathematics. He published a number of treatises on these three subjects and also on physics and music theory.

#11384

Richard Beez

1827 - 1902 (75 years)

Richard Beez was a German mathematician who proved Beez's theorem. He studied at the University of Leipzig where in 1850 he obtained a Ph.D. Later, Beez was a Gymnasium teacher in Plauen. Notes External links

#11385

Jean François Niceron

Jean François Niceron

1613 - 1646 (33 years)

Jean-François Niceron was a French mathematician, Minim friar, and painter of anamorphic art, on which he wrote the ground-breaking book La Perspective Curieuse . Biography Jean-François Niceron was a mathematical prodigy. He studied under Father Marin Mersenne, a famed mathematician and Minim friar, at the College de Nevers. In 1632, at the age of nineteen, he joined the Order of Minims.

#11386

Frederick Hertz

1878 - 1964 (86 years)

Frederick Hertz was a British sociologist, economist and historian of Austrian origin. Life and work Hertz attended the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium in Vienna and studied after the Matura law and economics at the University of Vienna. 1901-1902 he continued his studies at the University of Munich, 1903, he was in Vienna with a thesis on the discount and foreign exchange policy of the Austro-Hungarian Bank PhD. During his studies, Hertz joined the Austrian Social Democracy.

#11387

Shams al-Din al-Samarqandi

1250 - 1310 (60 years)

Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ashraf al-Ḥusaynī al-Samarqandī was a 13th century Persian astronomer and mathematician from Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan. Life Little is known of al-Samarqandi's life, who composed his most important works during the 13th and 14th centuries. He wrote works on theology, logic, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy which are important in their own right, but also provide information about the works of other astronomers.His treatise, , is a discussion of dialectic reasoning as used by the ancient Greeks. He wrote Synopsis of Astronomy, and produced a star catalogue for...

#11388

Viktor Vinogradov

1894 - 1969 (75 years)

Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov was a Soviet linguist and philologist who presided over Soviet linguistics after World War II. Life and career Vinogradov was born at Zaraysk in 1895. His teachers at the Petrograd Institute of History and Philology included Lev Shcherba and Aleksey Shakhmatov, but Charles Bally's ideas influenced him the most deeply during his formative years. He made his mark as a scholar of Russian literature with a series of works examining the style and language of Russian classical writers, including Alexander Pushkin , Nikolai Gogol , Mikhail Lermontov , and Anna Akhmatova .

#11389

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi

1834 - 1904 (70 years)

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a French sculptor and painter. He is best known for designing Liberty Enlightening the World, commonly known as the Statue of Liberty. Early life and education Bartholdi was born in Colmar, France, 2 August 1834. He was born to a family of Alsatian Protestant heritage, with his family name adopted from Barthold. His parents were Jean Charles Bartholdi and Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi . Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was the youngest of their four children, and one of only two to survive infancy, along with the oldest brother, Jean-Charles, who became a lawyer and e...

#11390

Henry Hamilton

1794 - 1880 (86 years)

Rev Henry Parr Hamilton FRS FRSE was a Scots-born clergyman and mathematician, who was Dean of Salisbury for 30 years. Life He was born at Blandfield House, between Edinburgh and Leith, the son of Alexander Hamilton, Professor of Midwifery at Edinburgh University. He was educated at Edinburgh University and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1816 and MA in 1819.

#11391

Eižens Ārinš

1911 - 1987 (76 years)

Eižens Ārinš was a mathematician and computer scientist. He was one of those who contributed to the return of Emanuel Grinberg to the University of Latvia. Education and career Ārinš was born on 16 May 1911 in Krasnojarsk, Siberia, where his father was in exile. In 1920 the family returned to Riga. He graduated from the University of Latvia in 1941 during the German occupation of Latvia. After Second World War, Ārinš had to graduate again because the Soviet authorities refused to recognise his degree. He graduated again in 1946 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Latvian State University.

#11392

Taylor Booth

1933 - 1986 (53 years)

Taylor Lockwood Booth was a mathematician known for his work in automata theory. One of his fundamental works is Sequential Machines and Automata Theory . It is a wide-ranging book meant for specialists, written for both theoretical computer scientists as well as electrical engineers. It deals with state minimization techniques, Finite state machines, Turing machines, Markov processes, and undecidability.

#11393

Gaston Albert Gohierre de Longchamps

1842 - 1906 (64 years)

Gaston Albert Gohierre de Longchamps was a French mathematician. Gohierre de Longchamps was born on 1 March 1842 in Alençon. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure beginning in 1863, and began a career as a teacher beginning in 1866. He retired from the Lycée Saint-Louis, his final teaching position, in 1897, and died in Paris on 9 July 1906.

#11394

Vladimir Alekseev

1932 - 1980 (48 years)

Vladimir Mikhailovich Alekseev was a Russian mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and dynamical systems. He attended secondary school in Moscow at one of the special schools of mathematics affiliated with Moscow State University and participated in several mathematical olympiads. From 1950 he studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Moscow State University, where he worked as a student of Andrei Kolmogorov on the asymptotic behavior in the three-body problem of celestial mechanics. Already as an undergraduate, Alekseev proved significant new results on quasi-random motion associated with the three-body problem.

#11395

Evan William Evans

1827 - 1874 (47 years)

Evan William Evans was a Welsh-American mathematician and the first professor at Cornell University. Evans, son of William and Catharine , was born Jan. 6, 1827 in Llangyfelach, near Swansea, South Wales. His parents moved to Bradford County, Pa., in 1831, where he obtained his early education. He graduated from Yale College in 1851. He studied theology at New Haven for about a year, and then became principal of the Delaware Literary Institute, in Franklin, N. Y. From this position he was called to a tutorship at Yale, which he resigned, however, after one year's service . In 1857 he was ap...

#11396

Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg

1889 - 1963 (74 years)

Lieutenant-General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg, was a British-born New Zealand soldier and Victoria Cross recipient, who served as the 7th governor-general of New Zealand from 1946 to 1952.

#11397

Qāḍī Zāda al-Rūmī

1364 - 1437 (73 years)

, whose actual name was Salah al-Din Musa Pasha , was a Turkish astronomer and mathematician who worked at the observatory in Samarkand. He computed sin 1° to an accuracy of 10−12. Together with Ulugh Beg, al-Kāshī and a few other astronomers, Qāḍī Zāda produced the Zij-i-Sultani, the first comprehensive stellar catalogue since the Maragheh observatory's Zij-i Ilkhani two centuries earlier. The Zij-i Sultani contained the positions of 992 stars.

#11398

Bernardino Baldi

Bernardino Baldi

1553 - 1617 (64 years)

Bernardino Baldi was an Italian mathematician, poet, translator and priest. Biography Baldi descended from a noble family from Urbino, Marche, where he was born. He pursued his studies at Padua, and is said to have spoken about sixteen languages during his lifetime, though according to Tiraboschi the inscription on his tomb limits the number to twelve.

#11399

Alonzo Potter

1800 - 1865 (65 years)

Alonzo Potter was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States who served as the third bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. Potter "identified himself with all the best interests of society."

#11400

Robert Judson Aley

1863 - 1935 (72 years)

Robert Judson Aley was an American mathematician and university president. Aley served as the fifth President of the University of Maine from January 1911 to August 1921 and then as President of Butler College in Indiana from 1921 to 1931.

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