Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#1151

Péter Pál Pálfy

#23511

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Péter Pál Pálfy is a Hungarian mathematician, working in algebra, more precisely in group theory and universal algebra. Between 2006 and 2018 he served as the director of the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics.

#1152

Mahan Mj

#18465

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Mahan Mj , also known as Mahan Maharaj and Swami Vidyanathananda, is an Indian mathematician and monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He is a recipient of the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in mathematical sciences and the Infosys Prize 2015 for Mathematical Sciences. He is best known for his work in hyperbolic geometry, geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology and complex geometry.

#1153

Shinzo Watanabe

#23140

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Shinzō Watanabe is a Japanese mathematician, who has made fundamental contributions to probability theory, stochastic processes and stochastic differential equations. He is regarded and revered as one of the fundamental contributors to the modern probability theory and Stochastic calculus. The pioneering book “Stochastic Differential Equations and Diffusion Processes” he wrote with Nobuyuki Ikeda has attracted a lot of researchers into the area and is known as the “Ikeda-Watanabe” for researchers in the field of stochastic analysis. He had been served as the editor of Springer Mathematics.

#1154

Alan J. Goldman

#18047

Overall Influence

1932 - 2010 (78 years)

Alan J. Goldman was an American expert in operations research. Career Goldman was born in 1932 and grew up in Brooklyn, where his parents both worked for the public school system. In 1949, he was a winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He studied mathematics and physics at Brooklyn College, graduating in 1952. He went on to graduate study in mathematics at Princeton University, completing his doctorate in topology in 1957 under the supervision of Ralph Fox. Goldman worked at the National Bureau of Standards from 1956 until 1979, when he became a professor of mathematical sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

#1155

Masatoshi Gündüz Ikeda

Masatoshi Gündüz Ikeda

#22051

Overall Influence

1926 - 2003 (77 years)

Masatoşi Gündüz İkeda , was a Japanese-born Turkish mathematician known for his contributions to the field of algebraic number theory. Early years Ikeda was born on 25 February 1926 in Tokyo, Japan, to Junzo Ikeda, head of the statistics department of an insurance company, and his wife Yaeko Ikeda. He was the youngest child with a brother and two sisters. He grew up reading mathematics books belonging to his father. During his school years, he bought himself used books about mathematics and the life story of mathematicians. He was very impressed by the French mathematician Évariste Galois .

#1156

Alan Tucker

#17507

Overall Influence

Alan Curtiss Tucker is an American mathematician. He is a professor of applied mathematics at Stony Brook University, and the author of a widely used textbook on combinatorics; he has also made research contributions to graph theory and coding theory. He has had four children, Katie, Lisa, Edward, and James.

#1157

Karen E. Smith

#22536

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Karen Ellen Smith is an American mathematician, specializing in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. She completed her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University before earning her PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently she is the Keeler Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. In addition to being a researcher in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, Smith with others wrote the textbook An Invitation to Algebraic Geometry.

#1158

Caucher Birkar

#10103

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Caucher Birkar is an Iranian Kurdish mathematician and a professor at Tsinghua University and at the University of Cambridge. Birkar is an important contributor to modern birational geometry. In 2010 he received the Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for his contributions to algebraic geometry, and in 2016, shared the AMS Moore Prize for the article "Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type". He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018, "for his proof of boundedness of Fano varieties and contributions to the minimal model program". In his office at the University...

#1159

Uriel Feige

#14725

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Uriel Feige is an Israeli computer scientist who was a doctoral student of Adi Shamir. Life Uriel Feige currently holds the post of Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot in Israel.

#1160

Lenore Blum

#4928

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

#1161

George F. Simmons

#13124

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

George Finlay Simmons was an American mathematician who worked in topology and classical analysis. He is known as the author of widely used textbooks on university mathematics. Life He was born on 3 March 1925 in Austin, Texas.

#1162

Gilles Pisier

#18599

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gilles I. Pisier is a professor of mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a distinguished professor and A.G. and M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at the Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to several fields of mathematics, including functional analysis, probability theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory. He has also made fundamental contributions to the theory of C*-algebras. Gilles is the younger brother of French actress Marie-France Pisier.

#1163

John Adrian Bondy

#21016

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

John Adrian Bondy is a retired English mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics and graph theory. Career Bondy received his Ph.D. in graph theory from the University of Oxford in 1969. His advisor was Dominic Welsh. Between 1969 and 1994, Bondy was Professor of Graph Theory at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and then, until his retirement, at Université Lyon 1 in France. From 1976, he was managing editor, and, between 1979 and 2004, co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B. Throughout his career, Bondy has authored over 100 publications with 51 co-autho...

#1164

András Gyárfás

#26380

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

András Gyárfás is a Hungarian mathematician who specializes in the study of graph theory. He is famous for two conjectures:Together with Paul Erdős he conjectured what is now called the Erdős–Gyárfás conjecture which states that any graph with minimum degree 3 contains a simple cycle whose length is a power of two.He and David Sumner independently formulated the Gyárfás–Sumner conjecture according to which, for every tree T, the T-free graphs are χ-bounded.Gyárfás began working as a researcher for the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1968. He earned a candidate degree in 1980, and a doctorate in 1992.

#1165

Jeffrey Brock

#24031

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jeffrey Farlowe Brock is an American mathematician, working in low-dimensional geometry and topology. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and the geometry of Teichmüller spaces.

#1166

Jiří Matoušek

#24182

Overall Influence

1963 - 2015 (52 years)

Jiří Matoušek was a Czech mathematician working in computational geometry and algebraic topology. He was a professor at Charles University in Prague and the author of several textbooks and research monographs.

#1167

Goro Azumaya

#24973

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

was a Japanese mathematician who introduced the notion of Azumaya algebra in 1951. His advisor was Shokichi Iyanaga. At the time of his death he was an emeritus professor at Indiana University. External links Biography of Azumaya by BiRep, Bielefeld University

#1168

Mikhail Zelikin

#19662

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Mikhail Il'ich Zelikin is a Russian mathematician, who works on differential equations , optimal control theory, differential games , the theory of fields of extremals for multiple integrals, the geometry of Grassmannians. He proposed an explanation of ball lightning based on the hypothesis of plasma superconductivity.

#1169

Peter Rosenthal

#21345

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Peter Michael Rosenthal is Canadian-American Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and a lawyer in private practice.

#1170

Mehdi Behzad

#16703

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Mehdi Behzad is an Iranian mathematician specializing in graph theory. He introduced his total coloring theory during his Ph.D. studies in 1965. Despite the active work during the last 50 years this conjecture remains as challenging as it is open. In fact, Behzad's conjecture now belongs to mathematics’ classic open problems.

#1171

William S. Cleveland

#5756

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

William Swain Cleveland II is an American computer scientist and Professor of Statistics and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, known for his work on data visualization, particularly on nonparametric regression and local regression.

#1172

Richard Peto

#7539

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sir Richard Peto is an English statistician and epidemiologist who is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, England. Education He attended Taunton's School in Southampton and subsequently studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge followed by a Master of Science degree in Statistics at Imperial College London.

#1173

Nigel Kalton

#26588

Overall Influence

1946 - 2010 (64 years)

Nigel John Kalton was a British-American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis. Career Kalton was born in Bromley and educated at Dulwich College, where he excelled at both mathematics and chess. After studying mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he received his PhD, which was awarded the Rayleigh Prize for research excellence, from Cambridge University in 1970. He then held positions at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Warwick, Swansea, University of Illinois, and Michigan State University, before becoming full professor at the University of Missouri, Col...

#1174

John Hammersley

John Hammersley

#14887

Overall Influence

1920 - 2004 (84 years)

John Michael Hammersley, was a British mathematician best known for his foundational work in the theory of self-avoiding walks and percolation theory. Early life and education Hammersley was born in Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, and educated at Sedbergh School. He started reading mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge but was called up to join the Royal Artillery in 1941. During his time in the army he worked on ballistics. He graduated in mathematics in 1948. He never studied for a PhD but was awarded an ScD by Cambridge University and a DSc by Oxford University in 1959.

#1175

Frank Morgan

#18648

Overall Influence

Frank Morgan is an American mathematician and the Webster Atwell '21 Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at Williams College. He is known for contributions to geometric measure theory, minimal surfaces, and differential geometry, including the resolution of the double bubble conjecture. He was vice-president of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America.

#1176

Cem Yıldırım

#11649

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Cem Yalçın Yıldırım is a Turkish mathematician who specializes in number theory. Education Yıldırım obtained his B.Sc from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1990. His advisor was John Friedlander. He is currently a faculty member at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.

#1177

Ward Whitt

#18692

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Ward Whitt is an American professor of operations research and management sciences. He is the Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. His research focuses on queueing theory, performance analysis, stochastic models of telecommunication systems, and numerical transform inversion. He is recognized for his contributions to the understanding and analyses of complex queues and queuing networks, which led to advances in the telecommunications system. As of November 2, 2015, his publications have been cited over 25,000 times, and he has an h-i...

#1178

Viktor Sadovnichiy

Viktor Sadovnichiy

#4710

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Viktor Antonovich Sadovnichiy is a Russian mathematician, winner of the 1989 USSR State Prize, and since 1992 the rector of Moscow State University. One of the main opinion leaders in Russia, Sadovnichiy has significant political and social influence.

#1179

Lothar Göttsche

#23920

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Lothar Göttsche is a German mathematician, known for his work in algebraic geometry. He is a research scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. He is also editor for Geometry & Topology.

#1180

Pierre Berthelot

Pierre Berthelot

#21961

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Pierre Berthelot is a mathematician at the University of Rennes. He developed crystalline cohomology and rigid cohomology. Publications Berthelot, Pierre Cohomologie cristalline des schémas de caractéristique p>0. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 407. Springer-Verlag, Berlin-New York, 1974. 604 pp.Berthelot, Pierre; Ogus, Arthur Notes on crystalline cohomology. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.; University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, 1978. vi+243 pp.

#1181

Charles F. Van Loan

#12810

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Charles Francis Van Loan is an emeritus professor of computer science and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, He is known for his expertise in numerical analysis, especially matrix computations.

#1182

Gerald L. Alexanderson

#21868

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Gerald Lee Alexanderson was an American mathematician. He was the Michael & Elizabeth Valeriote Professor of Science at Santa Clara University, and in 1997–1998 was president of the Mathematical Association of America. He was also president of The Fibonacci Association from 1980 to 1984.

#1183

George G. Hall

#16130

Overall Influence

1925 - 2018 (93 years)

George Garfield Hall was a Northern Irish applied mathematician known for original work and contributions to the field of quantum chemistry. Independently from Clemens C. J. Roothaan, Hall discovered the Roothaan-Hall equations.

#1184

Bimal Kumar Roy

#13811

Overall Influence

Bimal Kumar Roy is a former Director of the Indian Statistical Institute. He is a cryptologist from the Cryptology Research Group of the Applied Statistics Unit of ISI, Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization in 1982 from the University of Waterloo under the joint supervision of Ronald C. Mullin and Paul Jacob Schellenberg.

#1185

Jakob Stix

#27505

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Jakob M. Stix is a German mathematician. He specializes in arithmetic algebraic geometry . Stix studied mathematics in Freiburg and Bonn and received his doctorate in 2002 from Florian Pop at the University of Bonn . His dissertation was awarded the best doctoral thesis of the year 2002 by the Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn. He was a post-doctoral student at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2008, he became junior research group leader at the Mathematics Center of the University of Heidelberg, where he habilitated in 2011 . Stix is now a professor at the University of Fra...

#1186

Godfried Toussaint

Godfried Toussaint

#7581

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Godfried Theodore Patrick Toussaint was a Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science, and the head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He is considered to be the father of computational geometry in Canada. He did research on various aspects of computational geometry, discrete geometry, and their applications: pattern recognition , motion planning, visualization , knot theory , linkage reconfiguration, the art gallery problem, polygon triangulation, the largest empty circle problem, unimodality , and others. O...

#1187

Irena Peeva

#23681

Overall Influence

Irena Vassileva Peeva is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, specializing in commutative algebra. She disproved the Eisenbud–Goto regularity conjecture jointly with Jason McCullough. Education and career Peeva did her graduate studies at Brandeis University, earning a Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of David Eisenbud with a thesis entitled Free Resolutions. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and a C. L. E. Moore instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Cornell Department of Mathematics faculty in 1998.

#1188

David Conlon

#26025

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (42 years)

David Conlon is an Irish mathematician who is a Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics. He proved the first superpolynomial improvement on the Erdős–Szekeres bound on diagonal Ramsey numbers. He won the European Prize in Combinatorics in 2011 for his work in Ramsey theory and for his progress on Sidorenko's conjecture, and the Whitehead Prize in 2019.

#1189

Ana Caraiani

#24228

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (40 years)

Ana Caraiani is a Romanian-American mathematician, who is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include algebraic number theory and the Langlands program.

#1190

Peter McMullen

#24281

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Peter McMullen is a British mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at University College London. Education and career McMullen earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied at the University of Birmingham, where he received his doctorate in 1968. and taught at Western Washington University from 1968 to 1969. In 1978 he earned his Doctor of Science at University College London where he still works as a professor emeritus. In 2006 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

#1191

Herbert Koch

#28511

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Herbert Koch is a German mathematician active in the field of partial differential equations. He occupies the position of a professor at the University of Bonn. Together with Daniel Tataru, he is known for his work on the well-posedness of the Navier–Stokes equations, one of their results being known as Koch–Tataru solution.

#1192

Athanasios Papoulis

Athanasios Papoulis

#12199

Overall Influence

1921 - 2002 (81 years)

Athanasios Papoulis was a Greek-American engineer and applied mathematician. Life Papoulis was born in modern day Turkey in 1921, and his family was moved to Athens, Greece in 1922 as a consequence of the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. He earned his undergraduate degree from National Technical University of Athens. In 1945, he stowed away on a boat to escape the impending Greek Civil War and settled in the United States. He studied under the supervision of John Robert Kline at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1950. His dissertation was tit...

#1193

Chris Godsil

#26259

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Christopher David Godsil is a professor and the former Chair at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He wrote the popular textbook on algebraic graph theory, entitled Algebraic Graph Theory, with Gordon Royle, His earlier textbook on algebraic combinatorics discussed distance-regular graphs and association schemes.

#1194

Richard S. Ward

#15940

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Richard Samuel Ward FRS is a British mathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical & Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Durham. Work Ward earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1977, under the supervision of Roger Penrose. He is most famous for his extension of Penrose's twistor theory to nonlinear cases, which he with Michael Atiyah used to describe instantons by vector bundles on the three-dimensional complex projective space. He has related interests in the theory of monopoles, topological solitons and skyrmions.

#1195

Matthias Flach

#26916

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Matthias Flach is a German mathematician, professor and former executive officer for mathematics at California Institute of Technology. Professional overview Research interests includes:Arithmetic algebraic geometry .Special values of L-functions.Conjectures of:BlochBeilinsonDeligneBloch–Kato conjecture .Galois module theory.Motivic cohomology.

#1196

Hugo Duminil-Copin

Hugo Duminil-Copin

#13709

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (39 years)

Hugo Duminil-Copin is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022. Biography The son of a middle school sports teacher and a former female dancer who became a primary school teacher, Duminil-Copin grew up in the outer suburbs of Paris, where he played a lot of sports as a child, and initially considered attending a sports-oriented high school to pursue his interest in handball. He decided to attend a school focused on mathematics and science, and enrolled at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then at the École normale supérieure and the University Paris-Sud.

#1197

Gérard Cornuéjols

Gérard Cornuéjols

#15380

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Gérard Pierre Cornuéjols is the IBM University Professor of Operations Research in the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. His research interests include facility location, integer programming, balanced matrices, and perfect graphs.

#1198

Oleg Lupanov

#12201

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

Oleg Borisovich Lupanov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, dean of the Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics , head of the Chair of Discrete Mathematics of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics .

#1199

Stephanie B. Alexander

#24072

Overall Influence

Stephanie Brewster Brewer Taylor Alexander is an American mathematician, a professor emerita of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research concerns differential geometry and metric spaces.

#1200

Tomasz Łuczak

#22332

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Tomasz Łuczak is a Polish mathematician and professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Emory University. His main field of research is combinatorics, specifically discrete structures, such as random graphs, and their chromatic number.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions