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,
#11451
Udny Yule
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
George Udny Yule FRS , usually known as Udny Yule, was a British statistician, particularly known for the Yule distribution and proposing the preferential attachment model for random graphs. Personal life Yule was born at Beech Hill, a house in Morham near Haddington, Scotland and died in Cambridge, England. He came from an established Scottish family composed of army officers, civil servants, scholars, and administrators. His father, Sir George Udny Yule was a brother of the noted orientalist Sir Henry Yule . His great uncle was the botanist John Yule.
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Włodzimierz Stożek
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Włodzimierz Stożek was a Polish mathematician of the Lwów School of Mathematics. Head of the Mathematics Faculty on the Lwów University of Technology. He was arrested and murdered together with his two sons: the 29-year-old engineer Eustachy and 24-year-old Emanuel, graduate of the Institute of Technology by Nazis during the Second World War on 3 or 4 July in Lviv, during the Massacre of Lviv professors.
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Johann Christian Martin Bartels
1769 - 1836 (67 years)
Johann Christian Martin Bartels was a German mathematician. He was the tutor of Carl Friedrich Gauss in Brunswick and the educator of Lobachevsky at the University of Kazan. Biography Bartels was born in Brunswick, in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg , the son of pewterer Heinrich Elias Friedrich Bartels and his wife Johanna Christine Margarethe Köhler. In his childhood he showed a great interest in mathematics. In 1783 he was employed as an assistant to the teacher Büttner in the Katherinenschule in Brunswick. He became acquainted with Carl Friedrich Gauss there and encouraged his talent and...
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Paul Stäckel
1862 - 1919 (57 years)
Paul Gustav Samuel Stäckel was a German mathematician, active in the areas of differential geometry, number theory, and non-Euclidean geometry. In the area of prime number theory, he used the term twin prime for the first time.
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Samuel Dickstein
1851 - 1939 (88 years)
Samuel Dickstein was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin. He was one of the founders of the Jewish party Zjednoczenie , which advocated the assimilation of Polish Jews. He was born in Warsaw and was killed there by a German bomb at the beginning of World War II. All the members of his family were murdered during the Holocaust.
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Nicolas Minorsky
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Nicolas Minorsky was a Russian American control theory mathematician, engineer and applied scientist. He is best known for his theoretical analysis and first proposed application of PID controllers in the automatic steering systems for U.S. Navy ships.
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Christian Zeller
1822 - 1899 (77 years)
Julius Christian Johannes Zeller was a German mathematician. He was born to Gottlob Zeller and Christiana Friedrike Moser. Originally trained in mathematics, geography and theology, in 1874 Zeller became Director of the Seminary in Markgröningen and a girls' orphanage. In 1882 he became a member of the Société Mathématique de France. The following year, on 16 March 1883, he delivered a short account of his congruence relation , which was published in the society's journal.
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Konstantin Posse
1847 - 1928 (81 years)
Konstantin Alexandrovich Posse was a Russian mathematician known for contributions to analysis and in particular approximation theory. Veniamin Kagan and D. D. Morduhai-Boltovskoi were among his students.
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Ludolph van Ceulen
1540 - 1610 (70 years)
Ludolph van Ceulen was a German-Dutch mathematician from Hildesheim. He emigrated to the Netherlands. Biography Van Ceulen moved to Delft most likely in 1576 to teach fencing and mathematics and in 1594 opened a fencing school in Leiden. In 1600 he was appointed the first professor of mathematics at the Engineering School, Duytsche Mathematique, established by Maurice, Prince of Orange, at the relatively new Leiden University. He shared this professorial level at the school with the surveyor and cartographer, , which shows that the intention was to promote practical, rather than theoretical...
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Luigi Guido Grandi
1671 - 1742 (71 years)
Dom Guido Grandi, O.S.B. Cam. was an Italian monk, priest, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and engineer. Life Grandi was born on 1 October 1671 in Cremona, Italy and christened Luigi Francesco Lodovico. When he was of age, he was educated at the Jesuit college there. After he completed his studies there in 1687, he entered the novitiate of the Camaldolese monks at Ferrara and took the name of Guido. In 1693 he was sent to the Monastery of St. Gregory the Great, the Camaldolese house in Rome, to complete his studies in philosophy and theology in preparation for Holy Orders. A year later, Grandi was assigned as professor of both fields at the Camaldolese Monastery of St.
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Karel Petr
1868 - 1950 (82 years)
Karel Petr was a Czech mathematician. He was one of the most renowned Czech mathematicians of the first half of the 20th century. Biography Petr is known for the Petr–Douglas–Neumann theorem in plane geometry, which he proved in 1908, and was independently rediscovered by Jesse Douglas in 1940 and Bernhard Neumann in 1941.
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James Pierpont
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
James P. Pierpont was a Connecticut-born American mathematician. His father Cornelius Pierpont was a wealthy New Haven businessman. He did undergraduate studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, initially in mechanical engineering, but turned to mathematics. He went to Europe after graduating in 1886. He studied in Berlin, and later in Vienna. He prepared his PhD at the University of Vienna under Leopold Gegenbauer and Gustav Ritter von Escherich. His thesis, defended in 1894, is entitled Zur Geschichte der Gleichung fünften Grades bis zum Jahre 1858. After his defense, he returned to New Haven and was appointed as a lecturer at Yale University, where he spent most of his career.
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Oenopides
490 BC - 420 BC (70 years)
Oenopides of Chios was an ancient Greek geometer, astronomer and mathematician, who lived around 450 BCE. Biography Only limited information are known about the early life of Oenopides except his birthplace which was the island of Chios around 490 BCE. It is believed that Oenopides spent time in Athens but there is only circumstantial evidence to support this. Plato mentions him in Erastae: A Dialogue On Philosophy which places him in Athens. The English translator of the same book reveals one other aspect in Oenopides life which was his travel in Egypt in which he enriched his knowledge in ...
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John Couch Adams
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. He was born in Laneast, near Launceston, Cornwall, and died in Cambridge. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would send his coordinates to Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, who confirmed the existence of the planet on 23 Septemb...
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Étienne Bézout
1730 - 1783 (53 years)
Étienne Bézout was a French mathematician who was born in Nemours, Seine-et-Marne, France, and died in Avon , France. Work In 1758 Bézout was elected an adjoint in mechanics of the French Academy of Sciences. Besides numerous minor works, he wrote a Théorie générale des équations algébriques, published at Paris in 1779, which in particular contained much new and valuable matter on the theory of elimination and symmetrical functions of the roots of an equation: he used determinants in a paper in the Histoire de l'académie royale, 1764, but did not treat the general theory.
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Ljubomir Chakaloff
1886 - 1963 (77 years)
Ljubomir Chakaloff was a Bulgarian mathematician. He was born in 1886 in Samokov and died in 1963 at the age of 77. He was unmarried at the time of his death. He graduated from Sofia University in June 1908, with an honors degree in mathematics and physics. In 1925, he received a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Naples defending a thesis about Riccati equations, having as advisor Ernesto Pascal.
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Jean-Marie Duhamel
1797 - 1872 (75 years)
Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel was a French mathematician and physicist. His studies were affected by the troubles of the Napoleonic era. He went on to form his own school École Sainte-Barbe. Duhamel's principle, a method of obtaining solutions to inhomogeneous linear evolution equations, is named after him. He was primarily a mathematician but did studies on the mathematics of heat, mechanics, and acoustics. He also did work in calculus using infinitesimals. Duhamel's theorem for infinitesimals says that the sum of a series of infinitesimals is unchanged by replacing the infinitesimal with its...
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Friedrich Schottky
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Friedrich Hermann Schottky was a German mathematician who worked on elliptic, abelian, and theta functions and introduced Schottky groups and Schottky's theorem. He was born in Breslau, Germany and died in Berlin. Schottky was a professor at the University of Zurich from 1882-1892.
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Jacques Ozanam
1640 - 1718 (78 years)
Jacques Ozanam was a French mathematician. Biography Jacques Ozanam was born in Sainte-Olive, Ain, France. In 1670, he published trigonometric and logarithmic tables more accurate than the existing ones of Ulacq, Pitiscus, and Briggs. An act of kindness in lending money to two strangers brought him to the attention of M. d'Aguesseau, father of the chancellor, and he secured an invitation to settle in Paris. There he enjoyed prosperity and contentment for many years. He married, had a large family, and derived an ample income from teaching mathematics to private pupils, chiefly foreigners.
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Ludwig Stickelberger
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Ludwig Stickelberger was a Swiss mathematician who made important contributions to linear algebra and algebraic number theory . Short biography Stickelberger was born in Buch in the canton of Schaffhausen into a family of a pastor. He graduated from a gymnasium in 1867 and studied next in the University of Heidelberg. In 1874 he received a doctorate in Berlin under the direction of Karl Weierstrass for his work on the transformation of quadratic forms to a diagonal form. In the same year, he obtained his Habilitation from Polytechnicum in Zurich . In 1879 he became an extraordinary professor in the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg.
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Hermann Brunn
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Karl Hermann Brunn was a German mathematician, known for his work in convex geometry and in knot theory. Brunnian links are named after him, as his 1892 article "Über Verkettung" included examples of such links.
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Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach
1800 - 1834 (34 years)
Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach was a German geometer and the son of legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, and the brother of philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. After receiving his doctorate at age 22, he became a professor of mathematics at the Gymnasium at Erlangen. In 1822 he wrote a small book on mathematics noted mainly for a theorem on the nine-point circle, which is now known as Feuerbach's theorem. In 1827 he introduced homogeneous coordinates, independently of Möbius.
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Hypsicles
190 BC - 120 BC (70 years)
Hypsicles was an ancient Greek mathematician and astronomer known for authoring On Ascensions and the Book XIV of Euclid's Elements. Hypsicles lived in Alexandria. Life and work Although little is known about the life of Hypsicles, it is believed that he authored the astronomical work On Ascensions. The mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria noted on a definition of polygonal numbers, due to Hypsicles:
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Thomas Archer Hirst
1830 - 1892 (62 years)
Thomas Archer Hirst FRS was a 19th-century English mathematician, specialising in geometry. He was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1883. Life Thomas Hirst was born in Heckmondwike, Yorkshire, England, where both his parents came from families in the wool trade. He was the youngest of four sons. The family moved to Wakefield so that the boys could attend a better school. Thomas attended Wakefield Proprietary School for four years from 1841. Of these days, he said "... I could obtain the most rudimentary and necessary instruction. I remember, however, that here mathematics was my fa...
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Heinrich Brandt
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Heinrich Brandt was a German mathematician who was the first to develop the concept of a groupoid. Brandt studied at the University of Göttingen and, from 1910 to 1913, at the University of Strasbourg. In 1912 he attained his doctorate; he was a student of Heinrich Martin Weber. From 1913 he was assistant at the University of Karlsruhe . He taught geometry and applied mathematics from 1921 at RWTH Aachen. From 1930 he was the chair for mathematics at the University of Halle.
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Frederick S. Woods
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Frederick Shenstone Woods was an American mathematician. He was a part of the mathematics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1895 to 1934, being head of the department of mathematics from 1930 to 1934 and chairman of the MIT faculty from 1931 to 1933.
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Bogdan Gavrilović
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Bogdan Gavrilović was a Serbian mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and educator. He received his doctorate in sciences mathematiques from the University of Budapest in 1887. He served twice as the Rector of the University of Belgrade and was elected three times as president of the Serbian Royal Academy .
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D. R. Kaprekar
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Dattatreya Ramchandra Kaprekar was an Indian recreational mathematician who described several classes of natural numbers including the Kaprekar, harshad and self numbers and discovered the Kaprekar's constant, named after him. Despite having no formal postgraduate training and working as a schoolteacher, he published extensively and became well known in recreational mathematics circles.
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Aleksey Letnikov
1837 - 1888 (51 years)
Aleksey Vasilyevich Letnikov was a Russian mathematician. After graduating from the Konstantinovsky Land-Surveying Institute in Moscow, Letnikov attended classes at Moscow University and the Sorbonne. In 1860 he became an Instructor of Mathematics at the Konstantinovsky Institute. He obtained the degrees of Master and Ph.D. from Moscow University in 1868 and 1874 respectively.
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Ernst Kötter
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Ernst Kötter was a German mathematician. Education Kötter graduated in 1884 from the University of Berlin under the supervision of Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Career Kötter's treatise "Fundamentals of a purely geometrical theory of algebraic plane curves" gained the 1886 prize of the Berlin Royal Academy.
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Ulugh Beg
1394 - 1449 (55 years)
Mīrzā Muhammad Tāraghay bin Shāhrukh , better known as Ulugh Beg , was a Timurid sultan, as well as an astronomer and mathematician. Ulugh Beg was notable for his work in astronomy-related mathematics, such as trigonometry and spherical geometry, as well as his general interests in the arts and intellectual activities. It is thought that he spoke five languages: Arabic, Persian, Chaghatai Turkic, Mongolian, and a small amount of Chinese. During his rule the Timurid Empire achieved the cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance through his attention and patronage. Samarkand was captured and give...
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Rodolfo Benini
1862 - 1956 (94 years)
Rodolfo Benini was an Italian statistician and demographer. Biography At the beginning of his university career, Rodolfo Benini taught a history of commerce course at the University of Bari . Then he became a professor of economics at the University of Perugia , a professor of statistics at the University of Pavia and at the Bocconi University of Milan . Finally, he moved to the University of Rome, where he was the first professor of statistics and then professor of political economy . Benini held various positions at the national and international levels, including president of the Higher Council of Statistics and of the Commission of Statistics and Law at the Ministry of Justice.
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Johann Gustav Hermes
1846 - 1912 (66 years)
Johann Gustav Hermes was a German mathematician. Hermes is known for completion of a polygon with 65,537 sides. Early life On 20 June 1846, Hermes was born in Königsberg, a former German city . Hermes was educated at the Kneiphöfischen Gymnasium. He undertook his Abitur at the school in 1866. After completing his secondary education, he studied mathematics from 1866 to 1870, mostly in Königsberg. His studies were interrupted due to his participation in the Franco-Prussian War between 1870 and 1871.
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William Whiston
1667 - 1752 (85 years)
William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, natural philosopher, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus . He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth.
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Diocles
240 BC - 180 BC (60 years)
Diocles was a Greek mathematician and geometer. Life and work Although little is known about the life of Diocles, it is known that he was a contemporary of Apollonius and that he flourished sometime around the end of the 3rd century BC and the beginning of the 2nd century BC.
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Bryson of Heraclea
Bryson of Heraclea was an ancient Greek mathematician and sophist who studied the solving the problems of squaring the circle and calculating pi. Life and work Little is known about the life of Bryson; he came from Heraclea Pontica, and he may have been a pupil of Socrates. He is mentioned in the 13th Platonic Epistle, and Theopompus even claimed in his Attack upon Plato that Plato stole many ideas for his dialogues from Bryson of Heraclea. He is known principally from Aristotle, who criticizes his method of squaring the circle. He also upset Aristotle by asserting that obscene language does not exist.
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Maxime Bôcher
1867 - 1918 (51 years)
Maxime Bôcher was an American mathematician who published about 100 papers on differential equations, series, and algebra. He also wrote elementary texts such as Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry. Bôcher's theorem, Bôcher's equation, and the Bôcher Memorial Prize are named after him.
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Émile Lemoine
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine was a French civil engineer and a mathematician, a geometer in particular. He was educated at a variety of institutions, including the Prytanée National Militaire and, most notably, the École Polytechnique. Lemoine taught as a private tutor for a short period after his graduation from the latter school.
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Gian Francesco Malfatti
1731 - 1807 (76 years)
Giovanni Francesco Giuseppe Malfatti, also known as Gian Francesco or Gianfrancesco was an Italian mathematician. He was born in Ala, Trentino, Italy and died in Ferrara. Malfatti studied at the College of San Francesco Saverio in Bologna where his mentors included Vincenzo Riccati, F. M. Zanotti and Gabriele Manfredi. He moved to Ferrara in 1754, and became a professor at the University of Ferrara when it was re-established in 1771. In 1782 he was one of the founders of the Societa Italiana delle Scienze, later to become the Accademia nazionale delle scienze detta dei XL.
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Leonard Nelson
1882 - 1927 (45 years)
Leonard Nelson , sometimes spelt Leonhard, was a German mathematician, critical philosopher, and socialist. He was part of the neo-Friesian school of neo-Kantianism and a friend of the mathematician David Hilbert. He devised the Grelling–Nelson paradox in 1908 and the related idea of autological words with Kurt Grelling.
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Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette
1769 - 1834 (65 years)
Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette , French mathematician, was born at Mézières, where his father was a bookseller. For his early education he proceeded first to the college of Charleville, and afterwards to that of Reims. In 1788 he returned to Mézières, where he was attached to the school of engineering as draughtsman to the professors of physics and chemistry. In 1793 he became professor of hydrography at Collioure and Port-Vendre. While there he sent several papers, in which some questions of navigation were treated geometrically, to Gaspard Monge, at that time minister of marine, through whose ...
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Arthur Lyon Bowley
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley, FBA was an English statistician and economist who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys. Early life Bowley's father, James William Lyon Bowley, was a minister in the Church of England. He died at the age of 40 when Arthur was one, leaving Arthur's mother as mother or stepmother to seven children. Arthur was educated at Christ's Hospital, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics. He graduated as Tenth Wrangler.
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Carlo Severini
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Carlo Severini was an Italian mathematician: he was born in Arcevia and died in Pesaro. Severini, independently from Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov, proved and published earlier a proof of the theorem now known as Egorov's theorem.
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André Derain
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse. Biography Early years Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1895 he began to study on his own, contrary to claims that meeting Vlaminck or Matisse began his efforts to paint, and occasionally went to the countryside with an old friend of Cézanne's, Father Jacomin along with his two sons. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse. In 1900, he met and shar...
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David Gregory
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
David Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, and later Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford, and a proponent of Isaac Newton's Principia.
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Tommaso Boggio
1877 - 1963 (86 years)
Tommaso Boggio was an Italian mathematician. Boggio worked in mathematical physics, differential geometry, analysis, and financial mathematics. He was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians 1908 in Rome. He wrote, with Burali-Forti, Meccanica Razionale, published in 1921 by S. Lattes & Compagnia.
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William Mitchinson Hicks
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
William Mitchinson Hicks, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. He studied at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1873, and became a fellow at the college. Hicks spent most of his career at Sheffield, contributing to the development of the university there. He was principal of Firth College from 1892 to 1897. In 1897, Firth College merged with two other colleges to form the University College of Sheffield, and Hicks was its first principal until 1905, when the college received its own royal charter and became the University of Sheffield. Hicks was the first vice chancellor of...
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Mojżesz David Kirszbraun
1903 - 1942 (39 years)
Mojżesz David Kirszbraun was a Polish mathematician, mostly known for the Kirszbraun theorem on extensions of Lipschitz maps. This theorem appears in his master's thesis, defended in Warsaw in 1930.
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Simion Stoilow
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Simion Stoilow or Stoilov was a Romanian mathematician, creator of the Romanian school of complex analysis, and author of over 100 publications. Biography He was born in Bucharest, and grew up in Craiova. His father, Colonel Simion Stoilow, fought at the in the Romanian War of Independence. After studying at the Obedeanu elementary school and the Carol I High School, Stoilow went in 1907 to the University of Paris, where he earned a B.S. degree in 1910 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1916. His doctoral dissertation was written under the direction of Émile Picard.
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Georges Valiron
1884 - 1955 (71 years)
Georges Jean Marie Valiron was a French mathematician, notable for his contributions to analysis, in particular, the asymptotic behaviour of entire functions of finite order and Tauberian theorems. Biography Valiron obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1914, under supervision of Émile Borel. Since 1922 he held a professorship at the University of Strasbourg, and since 1931 a chair at the University of Paris. He gave a plenary speech at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich and was an invited speaker of the ICM in 1920 in Strasbourg and in 1928 in Bologna. H...
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