The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11401
Christian Beyel
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
Christian Beyel was a Swiss mathematician, professor in the Polytechnic of Zurich. Life and work Beyel, son of a bookseller, studied at Polytechnicum of Zuric from 1872 to 1876. The following year he worked as engineer in the Swiss Northeastern Railway Company, Schweizerische Nordostbahn only for one year but he moved to Göttingen University in 1877 in order to study mathematics. Returned to Polytechnicum in Zurich, he was assistant of the professors Wilhelm Fiedler and Wilhelm Ritter. In 1882 he was awarded a doctorate from Zurich University and the following year the venia legendi from the Polytechnicum.
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Conrad Dasypodius
1532 - 1601 (69 years)
Conrad Dasypodius was a professor of mathematics in Strasbourg, Alsace. He was born in Frauenfeld, Thurgau, Switzerland. His first name was also rendered as Konrad or Conradus or Cunradus, and his last name has been alternatively stated as Rauchfuss, Rauchfuß, and Hasenfratz. He was the son of Petrus Dasypodius , a humanist and lexicographer.
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Johann Christoph Heilbronner
1706 - 1745 (39 years)
Johann Christoph Heilbronner was a German mathematical historian and theologian. Literary works Versuch einer Geschichte der Mathematik and Arithmetik , 1739Historia matheseos universae a mundo condito ad seculum post Chr. Nat. XVI , 1742These two books are the first books that named and used the phrase "mathematical history ".
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Václav Láska
1862 - 1943 (81 years)
Václav Láska was a Czech astronomer, geophysicist, and mathematician. He was based mainly at Charles University, and was the founding director of the State Institute of Geophysics, which later became the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
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John Raymond Wilton
1884 - 1944 (60 years)
John Raymond Wilton was an Australian-born mathematician. In the period of 1926–1934 Wilton published 26 research papers on analysis and number theory. For which he gained the Doctorate in science from the University of Cambridge in 1930 and he was the first person to receive Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal in 1935 from the Australian National Research Council. On 12 April 1944, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried in West Terrace cemetery, Adelaide.
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Caspar Bartholin the Elder
1585 - 1629 (44 years)
Caspar Bartholin the Elder was a Danish physician, scientist and theologian. Biography Caspar Berthelsen Bartholin was born at Malmø, Denmark . His precocity was extraordinary; at three years of age he was able to read, and in his thirteenth year he composed Greek and Latin orations and delivered them in public. When he was about eighteen he went to the University of Copenhagen and afterwards studied at Rostock and Wittenberg.
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M. K. Fort Jr.
1921 - 1964 (43 years)
Marion Kirkland "Kirk" Fort Jr. was an American mathematician, specializing in general topology. The topological spaces called Fort space and Arens–Fort space are named after him. Fort was born in 1921 in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he graduated with an A.B. from Wofford College in 1941. He received an M.A. in 1944 from the University of Virginia, where he also received his Ph.D. in 1948, advised by Gordon Thomas Whyburn. He was at the University of Illinois from then until 1953, when he came to the University of Georgia . He later served as head of the UGA mathematics department, 1959–1963.
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Alexander Johnson
1830 - 1912 (82 years)
Alexander Johnson was an Irish mathematician and academic. Born in Ireland, Johnson was educated at Trinity College, Dublin where he was a Scholar in 1852 and received his B.A. in mathematics in 1855. TCD later awarded him M.A. and LL.D. . In 1857, he had emigrated to Canada and was appointed a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at McGill University. He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and a Vice-Principal from 1886 to 1903.
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Wilhelm Vauck
1896 - 1958 (62 years)
Wilhelm Vauck was a German mathematician, physicist and university lecturer in physics and electrical engineering. During World War II, Vauck was the director of the agents Referat within the Funkabwehr, the German Armies radio counter-intelligence organisation. As an anti-nazi, Vauck's work on the discovery of the Rote Kapelle anti-fascist resistance group during World War II, burdened him deeply until the end of his life.
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Edward Ardizzone
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone, , who sometimes signed his work "DIZ", was a British painter, printmaker and war artist, and the author and illustrator of books, many of them for children. For Tim All Alone , which he wrote and illustrated, Ardizzone won the inaugural Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. For the 50th anniversary of the Medal in 2005, the book was named one of the top ten winning titles, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for public election of an all-time favourite.
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William Hincks
1794 - 1871 (77 years)
William Hincks was an Irish Unitarian minister, theologian and professor of natural history. He was the first professor of natural history at University College, Toronto and president of the Canadian Institute . He was also the first editor of the Unitarian magazine The Inquirer.
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Hemachandra
1089 - 1172 (83 years)
Hemachandra was a 12th century Indian Jain saint, scholar, poet, mathematician, philosopher, yogi, grammarian, law theorist, historian, lexicographer, rhetorician, logician, and prosodist. Noted as a prodigy by his contemporaries, he gained the title kalikālasarvajña, "the knower of all knowledge in his times" and father of the Gujarati language.
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Priscilla Braislin
1838 - 1888 (50 years)
Priscilla Harris Braislin Merrick was the first mathematics professor at Vassar College. Early life Braislin was originally from Burlington, New Jersey, the eldest of six children. Her father was Catholic and her mother Quaker, but with five of her siblings she became a Baptist; one of her brothers, Edward Braislin , became a Baptist minister.
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John Gibson
1790 - 1866 (76 years)
John Gibson was a Welsh Neoclassical sculptor who studied in Rome under Canova. He excelled chiefly in bas-relief, notably the two life-size works The Hours Leading the Horses of the Sun and Phaethon driving the Chariot of the Sun, but was also proficient in monumental and portrait statuary. He is famous for his statues of Sir Robert Peel , William Huskisson and Queen Victoria . Gibson was elected a Royal Academician in 1836, and left the contents of his studio to the Royal Academy, where many of his marbles and casts are currently on display.
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Herman Hollerith
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
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Jim Bridger
1804 - 1881 (77 years)
James Felix "Jim" Bridger was an American mountain man, trapper, Army scout, and wilderness guide who explored and trapped in the Western United States in the first half of the 19th century. He was known as Old Gabe in his later years. He was from the Bridger family of Virginia, English immigrants who had been in North America since the early colonial period.
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Mathieu Weill
1851 - 1939 (88 years)
Isaac Mathieu Weill was a French mathematician and principal of the Collège Chaptal. Biography Mathieu Weill was born to a Jewish family in Haguenau, the son of Valentine and Isidore Weill, a mathematics teacher. He was educated in the lyceums of Burg and Strasburg, and was admitted to the École Polytechnique in 1870. He received a degree in mathematics in November 1872, and a degree in physical sciences in November 1876. Meanwhile, Weill began studies at the military school in Fontainebleau in 1872. He attained the rank of lieutenant of artillery, but resigned in April 1877.
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John Dawson
1734 - 1820 (86 years)
John Dawson was both an English mathematician and physician. He was born at Raygill in Garsdale, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where "Dawson's Rock" celebrates the site of his early thinking about conic sections. After learning surgery from Henry Bracken of Lancaster, he worked as a surgeon in Sedbergh for a year, then went to study medicine at Edinburgh, walking 150 miles there with his savings stitched into his coat. Despite a very frugal lifestyle, he was unable to complete his degree, and had to return to Garsdale until he earned enough as a surgeon and as a private tutor in Mat...
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François Cosserat
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
François Cosserat was a French engineer and mathematician known by his theories about deformable bodies written with his brother Eugène. Life and work François Cosserat was the eldest of the three sons of François-Constant Cosserat, a textile manufacturer in Amiens. The three sons achieved to study in one of the grandes écoles of Paris. François studied at the École Polytechnique from 1870 to 1872 and then in the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées until 1875. François Cosserat followed a typical career as civil engineer in the French East Railroad Company constructing and designing bridges, tunnels, etc.
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Emanuel Björling
1808 - 1872 (64 years)
Emanuel Gabriel Björling was a Swedish mathematician. He was the father of mathematician Carl Fabian Björling. Career In 1836, he became the associate professor of mechanics at the University of Uppsala. He was a lecturer and later a rector at Västerås grammar school. He is most well known for the Björling problem.
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John Ross
1777 - 1856 (79 years)
Sir John Ross was a Scottish Royal Navy officer and polar explorer. He was the uncle of Sir James Clark Ross, who explored the Arctic with him, and later led expeditions to Antarctica. Biography Early life John Ross was born in Balsarroch, West Galloway, Scotland, on , the son of the Reverend Andrew Ross of Balsarroch, Minister of Inch in Wigtownshire, and Elizabeth Corsane, daughter of Robert Corsane, the Provost of Dumfries. His family home was on the shore of Loch Ryan, at Stranraer.
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Emmanuel Carvallo
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Emmanuel Carvallo was a French mathematician. He is notable for showing in 1897 that bicycles could be self-stable, for opposing wave models of X-rays in 1900, and for claiming in 1912 that Einstein's Theory of Relativity had been proven false.
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Charles Watkins Merrifield
1827 - 1884 (57 years)
Charles Watkins Merrifield FRS was a British mathematician. For the British Association's Section of Mechanical Science, he was in 1875 the Section's Vice-President at the Brighton meeting and then in 1876 the Section's President at the Glasgow meeting. He served on the British Association's committee given the task of reporting on Charles Babbage’s analytical machine. For the London Mathematical Society, he served as Vice-President in 1876–1878, as President in 1878–1880, and as Treasurer in 1880–1882.
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Nikolaos Ch. Nikolaidis
1826 - 1889 (63 years)
Nicolaos Ch. Nikolaidis Biography Nikolaidis was born in 1826 in Tripoli. His father, Christodoulos, was a member of an old Greek aristocratic family. Christodoulos migrated to Switzerland from Philippopolis. The family eventually settled in the Peloponnese region of Greece around the time of the Greek War of Independence. From a young age, Nikolaidis exhibited a high level of intelligence. He attended Greece's elite military school known as Evelpidon, graduating with honors. The Greek government sent him to Paris on a scholarship to study with the most brilliant minds of the time. He studied at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées and the École polytechnique.
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William Woolsey Johnson
1841 - 1927 (86 years)
William Woolsey Johnson was an American mathematician, who was one of the founders of the American Mathematical Society. Life and work Johnson, son of a farmer of Tioga County, New York, studied at Yale University where he received his BA in 1862. After two years serving in the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began his academic career as assistant professor in the Naval Academy in Newport, Rhode Island, but soon transferred to Annapolis, Maryland, from 1864 to 1869. In 1870 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Kenyon College and since 1872 at St. John's College .
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Henry Charles McWeeney
1867 - Present (159 years)
Henry Charles McWeeney was an Irish mathematician, who was Professor of Mathematics at University College Dublin from 1891 until his death in 1935. From 1909 on he served as vice president of UCD.
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Salomon Eduard Gubler
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Salomon Eduard Gubler was a Swiss mathematician. With Johann Heinrich Graf he published Einleitung in Die Theorie Der Bessel'schen Funktionen in two volumes . He was the author of very appreciated textbooks on mathematics and numerous reports about the methodology and organization on mathematics teaching, and he was a member of the Swiss commission for the teaching of mathematics and founder of the Swiss association of teachers of mathematics. His main research interest was the Bessel functions.
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Marino Pannelli
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Marino Pannelli was an Italian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Education and career After receiving his laurea from the Sapienza University of Rome, Pannelli became at the University of Pavia a libero docente of projective geometry and from 1893 to 1899 a libero docente of descriptive geometry. Later he taught at the Istituto Tecnico di Roma and held academic positions there. Francesco Severi stated that Pannelli was one of the best of those Italian algebraic geometers who were not appointed to a professorial chair. Some of Pannelli's publications in algebraic geometry rece...
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James Douglas Hamilton Dickson
1849 - 1931 (82 years)
James Douglas Hamilton Dickson FRSE MRI was a Scottish mathematician and expert in electricity. He was a Senior Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Glasgow University elected him an Eglinton Fellow. He was the elder brother of Charles Dickson, Lord Dickson.
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James Morton Hyslop
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
James Morton Hyslop FRSE FRSA LLD was a Scottish mathematician and educationalist primarily linked to South Africa. He founded the Royal College of Nairobi in 1961. Life He was born in Dumbarton on 12 September 1908 the son of William Hyslop.
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Kajetan Garbiński
1796 - 1847 (51 years)
Kajetan Garbiński was a Polish mathematician and prominent professor at the University of Warsaw. Minister of religion and education in the revolutionary Polish National Government during the November Uprising in 1831.
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James Gregory
1753 - 1821 (68 years)
James Gregory FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish physician and classicist. Early life and education The eldest son of John Gregory and Elizabeth Forbes , he was born in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, King's College, University of Aberdeen, the University of Edinburgh , the University of Oxford, and Leyden University.
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N. M. H. Lightfoot
1902 - 1962 (60 years)
Nicholas Morpeth Hutchinson Lightfoot FRSE was a British mathematician and academic administrator. He was an expert on heat conduction. Life He was born in Jarrow in north-east England on 14 October 1902, the son of Thomas Lightfoot. He was educated locally, but excelled, winning a place at Cambridge University where he graduated BA in 1923 and continued as a postgraduate, gaining a further MA.
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Jean Christophe Fatio
1656 - 1720 (64 years)
Jean Christophe Fatio was a Genevan engineer, politician, and natural philosopher, who became Fellow of the Royal Society in 1706. He was the elder brother of Nicolas Fatio. He was elected F.R.S. on 3 April 1706 and published in the Philosophical Transactions a description of an eclipse of the sun which he had observed at Geneva on 12 May of that year. He died at Geneva in October 1720, survived by his wife Catherine, daughter of Jean Gassand of Forealquiere in Provence, to whom he was married in 1709. He left no issue.
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Pedro Ciruelo
1470 - 1548 (78 years)
Pedro Sánchez Ciruelo was a Spanish philosopher, theologian, mathematician, astrologer, astronomer and writer on topics of natural philosophy. Early life Ciruelo was born somewhere between 1460 and 1470 in Daroca, Spain. Ciruelo was born in the kingdom of Aragon where Daroca held political, military, and administrative significance for the kingdom. He came from a family of Jews and Judaizers according to papers that traced his genealogy during the Spanish Inquisition. Ciruelo claimed to be an orphan, but the validity of this claim is not well-supported as Ciruelo had living relatives and received an education which was costly at the time.
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François Nicole
1683 - 1758 (75 years)
François Nicole was a French mathematician, born in Paris and died there, who published his Traité du calcul des différences finies in 1717; it contains rules both for forming differences and for effecting the summation of given series. Besides this, in 1706 he wrote a work on roulettess, especially spherical epicycloids; and in 1729 and 1731 he published memoirs on Newton's essay on curves of the third degree.
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Ernst Julius Amberg
1871 - 1952 (81 years)
Ernst Julius Amberg was a Swiss mathematician and mountain climber. He is noteworthy as a mountain climber and as one of the organizers of the first International Congress of Mathematicians held in Zürich in 1897.
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Oskar Schlömilch
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Oskar Xavier Schlömilch was a German mathematician, born in Weimar, working in mathematical analysis. He took a doctorate at the University of Jena in 1842, and became a professor at Dresden Polytechnic in 1849.
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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
1827 - 1875 (48 years)
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter during the Second Empire under Napoleon III. Life Born in Valenciennes, Nord, son of a mason, his early studies were under François Rude. Carpeaux entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and won the Prix de Rome in 1854, and moving to Rome to find inspiration, he there studied the works of Michelangelo, Donatello and Verrocchio. Staying in Rome from 1854 to 1861, he obtained a taste for movement and spontaneity, which he joined with the great principles of baroque art. Carpeaux sought real life subjects in the streets and broke with t...
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Sankara Variar
1500 - 1560 (60 years)
Shankara Variyar was an astronomer-mathematician of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. His family were employed as temple-assistants in the temple at near modern Ottapalam. Mathematical lineage He was taught mainly by Nilakantha Somayaji , the author of the Tantrasamgraha and Jyesthadeva , the author of Yuktibhāṣā. Other teachers of Shankara include Netranarayana, the patron of Nilakantha Somayaji and Chitrabhanu, the author of an astronomical treaties dated to 1530 and a small work with solutions and proofs for algebraic equations.
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Robert Baldwin Hayward
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Robert Baldwin Hayward was an English educator and mathematician. Life Born on 7 March 1829, at Bocking, Essex, he was son of Robert Hayward by his wife Ann Baldwin; his father, from an old Quaker family, withdrew from the Quaker community on his marriage. Educated at University College, London, entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1846, graduating as fourth wrangler in 1850. He was fellow from 30 March 1852 till 27 March 1860, and from 1852 till 1855 assistant tutor.
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Charles L. Reason
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Charles Lewis Reason was an American mathematician, linguist, and educator. He was the first black college professor in the United States, teaching at New York Central College, McGrawville. Early life and education Charles Lewis Reason was born July 21, 1818, in New York City as one of three sons to Michel and Elizabeth Reason, free people of color .
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Giambattista Pianciani
1784 - 1862 (78 years)
Giambattista Pianciani was an Italian Jesuit scientist. Biography He entered the Society of Jesus on 2 June 1805; after having received the ordinary Jesuit training he was sent to various cities in the Papal States to teach mathematics and physics and finally was appointed professor in the Roman College, where he lectured and wrote on scientific subjects for twenty-four years. He was an active member of the Accademia d'Arcadia, his academical pseudonym being "Polite Megaride", of the Accademia de' Lincei, and of other scientific societies. His scientific labours were abruptly brought to an e...
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George Selwyn
1809 - 1878 (69 years)
George Augustus Selwyn was the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand. He was Bishop of New Zealand from 1841 to 1869. His diocese was then subdivided and Selwyn was Metropolitan of New Zealand from 1858 to 1868. Returning to Britain, Selwyn served as Bishop of Lichfield from 1868 to 1878.
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Marcus Jordanus
1531 - 1595 (64 years)
Marcus Jordanus was a Danish cartographer and mathematician. Jordanus studied at the University of Copenhagen, where in 1550 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics. Among other things, he gave lectures on geodesy and dealt with the geography of Ptolemy. In 1552, he published a map with the printer Hans Vingaard in Copenhagen. This was one of the first printed maps of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and Abraham Ortelius referred to it in his Catalogus Cartographorum. The map is now lost, and no copies survive.
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Victor Eberhard
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Victor Guido Feodor Eberhard was a blind German geometer, known for Eberhard's theorem partially characterizing the multisets of faces that can form convex polyhedra. Life Eberhard was born on 17 January 1861 in Pless, in the Prussian Province of Silesia , where his father Richard Eberhard was a jurist. he became blind in 1873.
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William Vernon Skiles
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
William Vernon Skiles was a professor of mathematics and dean at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He helped create what is now the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Education Skiles possessed a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Chicago, a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Georgia. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and the Georgia Academy of Science.
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Eugen Bracht
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Eugen Felix Prosper Bracht was a German landscape painter. Biography Bracht was born in Morges, Waadt of German parents. His family later moved to Darmstadt, Germany, where he became a pupil of Karl Ludwig Seeger at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe and later studied under Hans Gude in Düsseldorf. Dissatisfied with his work, he moved to Berlin in 1864 and became a merchant, but in 1876 he renewed his interest in painting and joined his former teacher Seeger in Karlsruhe.
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Johann Balthasar Lauterbach
1663 - 1694 (31 years)
Johann Balthasar Lauterbach was a German mathematician, architect and master builder at the Court in Braunschweig, from 1688 until his death. Life and work His father, Johann , was a shoemaker and guild master. His half-brother, from his father's second marriage, was the cartographer, . After grammar school, he studied theology at the University of Tübingen, then studied mathematics at the University of Jena.
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Giuseppe Moletti
1531 - 1588 (57 years)
Giuseppe Moletti was an Italian mathematician best known for his Dialogo intorno alla Meccanica . Though an obscure figure today, he was a renowned mathematician during his lifetime, and was even consulted by Pope Gregory XIII on his new calendar.
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