The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11501
Samuel Klingenstierna
1698 - 1765 (67 years)
Samuel Klingenstierna was a renowned Swedish mathematician and scientist. He started his career as a lawyer but soon moved to natural philosophy. As a student he gave lectures on the then novel mathematical analysis of Newton and Leibniz. Klingenstierna was a professor of geometry at Uppsala University from 1728. In 1750 he moved to physics but retired two years later to become an advisor to the Commander of Artillery. In 1756 he assumed the post of the tutor of the Crown Prince, the future king Gustav III.
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Alfred North Whitehead
#11503
Edward Burns Ross
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Edward Burns Ross FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish mathematician who served as a professor of mathematics at the Madras Christian College. Life Ross was born on 28 September 1881 in Maud, Aberdeenshire the son of Ann and William Ross, an Inland Revenue supervisor. Following his father's death in 1887, his school teacher mother moved the family to Edinburgh in 1888. He was then educated at George Watson's School and was school dux in 1898. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Edinburgh graduating with an MA in 1902. He then continued with postgraduate studies, using a Fergu...
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Rudolf Luneburg
1903 - 1949 (46 years)
Rudolf Karl Lüneburg , after his emigration at first Lueneburg, later Luneburg, sometimes misspelled Luneberg or Lunenberg His work included an analysis of the geometry of visual space as expected from physiology and the assumption that the angle of vergence provides a constant measure of distance. From these premises he concluded that near field visual space is hyperbolic.
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Alfred Cardew Dixon
1865 - 1936 (71 years)
Sir Alfred Cardew Dixon, 1st Baronet Warford FRS was an English mathematician. Biography Dixon was born on 22 May 1865 in Northallerton, Yorkshire, England. He studied at the University of London and graduated with an MA. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1883 and graduated as Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1886. In 1888, Dixon was awarded the second Smith's Prize, and also appointed a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He took the degree of Sc.D. at Cambridge University in 1897. He was Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College, Galway, from 1893 to 1901. In 1901 h...
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Matthew O'Brien
1814 - 1855 (41 years)
Matthew O'Brien was an Irish mathematician. Life and work O'Brien was born at Ennis son of a medical doctor. In 1830 he was admitted in the Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1834 in the Caius College where he graduated in 1838 as third wrangler, as pupil of William Hopkins. During a brief period he was fellow of Caius College.
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Christian August Hausen
1693 - 1743 (50 years)
Christian August Hausen was a German mathematician who is known for his research on electricity. Biography Hausen studied mathematics at the University of Wittenberg and received his master's degree in 1712. He became an extraordinary professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig at the age of 21 and later became an ordinary professor.
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Irving Stringham
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Washington Irving Stringham was an American mathematician born in Yorkshire, New York. He was the first person to denote the natural logarithm is commonplace in digital calculators today. , made up of the initial letters of logarithm and of natural or Napierian."
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Wesley S. B. Woolhouse
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Wesley Stoker Barker Woolhouse was an English actuary with diverse interests in music theory, the design of steam locomotives, measurements, and many other fields, publishing books in all these fields.
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Pietro Cossali
1748 - 1815 (67 years)
Pietro Cossali was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer. From 1787 to 1805, he taught physics at the University of Parma. In 1805, Napoleon named Cossali a professor of higher calculus at the University of Padua.
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Georg Feigl
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Georg Feigl was a German mathematician. Life and work Georg Feigl started studying mathematics and physics at the University of Jena in 1909. In 1918, he obtained his doctorate under Paul Koebe. From 1928 he was editor of the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik . In 1935 he became a full professor at the University of Breslau. In 1937—1941, he was an editor of the journal Deutsche Mathematik.
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Jacobus Golius
1596 - 1667 (71 years)
Jacob Golius born Jacob van Gool was an Orientalist and mathematician based at the University of Leiden in Netherlands. He is primarily remembered as an Orientalist. He published Arabic texts in Arabic at Leiden, and did Arabic-to-Latin translations. His best-known work is an Arabic-to-Latin dictionary, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum , which he sourced for the most part from the Sihah dictionary of Al-Jauhari and the Qamous dictionary of Fairuzabadi.
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Karl Mollweide
1774 - 1825 (51 years)
Karl Brandan Mollweide was a German mathematician and astronomer who taught in Halle and Leipzig. In trigonometry, he rediscovered the formula now known as Mollweide's formula. He invented a map projection called the Mollweide projection.
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William McFadden Orr
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
William McFadden Orr, FRS was a British and Irish mathematician. He was born in Comber, County Down and educated at Methodist College Belfast and Queen's College, Belfast under John Purser, before entering St John's College, Cambridge and graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1888. He was elected a fellow of his college, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1909.
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Sylvia Skan
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sylvia Winifred Skan was an English applied mathematician. She is known for her work on aerodynamics, and in particular for the Falkner–Skan boundary layer in the fluid mechanics of airflow past a wedge-shaped obstacle, which she wrote about with V. M. Falkner in 1930, and for the associated Falkner–Skan equation.
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Jérôme Franel
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Jérôme Franel was a Swiss mathematician who specialised in analytic number theory. He is mainly known through a 1924 paper, in which he establishes the equivalence of the Riemann hypothesis to a statement on the size of the discrepancy in the Farey sequences, and which is directly followed by a development on the same subject by Edmund Landau.
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James Short
1710 - 1768 (58 years)
James Short FRS was a Scottish mathematician and manufacturer of optical instruments, principally telescopes. During his 35-year career as a telescope-maker he produced approximately 1,360 scientific instruments.
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Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar , commonly addressed as P. L. Bhatnagar, was an Indian mathematician known for his contribution to the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook operator used in Lattice Boltzmann methods . Early years and career He was born in Kota in Rajasthan and was the second of five sons. He did his schooling in Rampura and later at Herberter College in Kota. After schooling he went to Maharajah's College in Jaipur where in 1935 he completed BSc with first rank, followed by MSc.
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Giordano Vitale
1633 - 1711 (78 years)
Giordano Vitale or Vitale Giordano was an Italian mathematician. He is best known for his theorem on Saccheri quadrilaterals. He may also be referred to as Vitale Giordani, Vitale Giordano da Bitonto, and simply Giordano.
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Alexandru Froda
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Alexandru Froda was a Romanian mathematician with contributions in the field of mathematical analysis, algebra, number theory and rational mechanics. In his 1929 thesis he proved what is now known as Froda's theorem.
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Carl Kostka
1846 - 1921 (75 years)
Carl Gottfried Franz Albert Kostka was a mathematician who introduced Kostka numbers in 1882. He lived and worked in Insterburg. See also Kostka polynomial
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Frank Vigor Morley
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Frank Vigor Morley was an American mathematician, author, editor and publishing executive. As had his two older brothers, Christopher and Felix, Morley attended Haverford College and then studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Morley worked in book publishing in London and New York and played a significant role in the early history of the publishing firm Faber and Faber, where he became a close friend of the poet T. S. Eliot.
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Frances Cope
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Frances Cope, also known as Frances Thorndike , was an American mathematician who published on irregular differential equations. The Thorndike nomogram, a two-dimensional diagram of the Poisson distribution, is named for her.
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Ivan Ivanov
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian-Soviet mathematician who worked in the field of number theory. Together with Georgy Voronoy he continued Pafnuty Chebyshev's work on the subject. Life and work Ivanov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He finished his studies in mathematics at Saint Petersburg University with his candidate thesis, "About prime numbers". In 1891 there followed his master thesis "integral complex numbers", and in 1901 his doctoral thesis, "About some questions in connection with the number of prime numbers".
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Evelyn Fix
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Evelyn Fix was a statistician. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and earned her A.B. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1924. One year later she earned at M.S. in education and became a high school teacher. She earned an M.A. in mathematics, also from the University of Minnesota in 1933. She obtained a Ph.D. in 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the statistics faculty there. She was appointed as an assistant professor in 1951 and in 1963 she was promoted to professor of statistics. She died of a heart attack on December 30, 1965.
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Willem Abraham Wythoff
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
Willem Abraham Wythoff, born Wijthoff , was a Dutch mathematician. Biography Wythoff was born in Amsterdam to Anna C. F. Kerkhoven and Abraham Willem Wijthoff, who worked in a sugar refinery. He studied at the University of Amsterdam, and earned his Ph.D. in 1898 under the supervision of Diederik Korteweg.
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Franz Woepcke
1826 - 1864 (38 years)
Franz Woepcke was a German historian, Orientalist and mathematician. He is remembered for publishing editions and translations of medieval Arabic mathematical manuscripts and for his research on the propagation of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in the medieval era.
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Daniel Edwin Rutherford
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Daniel Edwin Rutherford FRSE was a Scottish mathematician, known for his work on the representation theory of symmetric groups. Biography Rutherford completed his secondary education at Perth Academy in 1924 and then, with the aid of a bursary, he went to the University of St Andrews, where he received his B.Sc. in 1927 and his M.A. in 1928 in mathematics. Upon the advice of Herbert Turnbull, Rutherford did his graduate work at the University of Amsterdam, where he wrote a doctorandus thesis under Roland Weitzenböck. Rutherford's dissertation was published in 1932 as Modular Invariants in the Cambridge Tracts.
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John Macnaghten Whittaker
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
John Macnaghten Whittaker FRS FRSE LLD was a British mathematician and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield from 1953 to 1965. Life Whittaker was born 7 March 1905 in Cambridge, the son of mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker and his wife, Mary Ferguson Macnaghten Boyd .
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André Tacquet
1612 - 1660 (48 years)
André Tacquet was a Brabantian mathematician and Jesuit priest. Tacquet adhered to the methods of the geometry of Euclid and the philosophy of Aristotle and opposed the method of indivisibles. Life André Tacquet was born in Antwerp, and entered the Jesuit Order in 1629. From 1631 to 1635, he studied mathematics, physics and logic at Leuven. Two of his teachers were Grégoire de Saint-Vincent and Francois d'Aguilon.
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Louis Couffignal
1902 - 1966 (64 years)
Louis Pierre Couffignal was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer, born in Monflanquin. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School.
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Jean Prestet
1648 - 1690 (42 years)
Jean Prestet was a French Oratorian priest and mathematician who contributed to the fields of combinatorics and number theory. Prestet grew up poor. As a teenager, he worked as a servant of the Oratory of Jesus in Paris. He was promoted to scribe for Nicolas Malebranche, who taught him mathematics.
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Robert Tucker
1832 - 1905 (73 years)
Robert Tucker was an English mathematician, who was secretary of the London Mathematical Society for more than 30 years. Life and work Son of a soldier who fought in the Peninsular War, Tucker studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was 35th wrangler in 1855. He mastered mathematics at University College London from 1865 to 1899.
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Claude Mylon
1618 - 1660 (42 years)
Claude Mylon was a French mathematician and member of the Académie Parisienne and the Académie des Sciences.
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Gemma Frisius
1508 - 1555 (47 years)
Gemma Frisius was a Dutch physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker. He created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation. Gemma's rings, an astronomical instrument, are named after him. Along with Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, Frisius is often considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography, and significantly helped lay the foundations for the school's golden age .
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Marília Chaves Peixoto
1921 - 1961 (40 years)
Marília Chaves Peixoto was a Brazilian mathematician and engineer who worked in dynamical systems. Peixoto was the first Brazilian woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first Brazilian woman to join the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
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Emilio Baiada
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Emilio Baiada was an Italian mathematician. Education and career He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he graduated with highest honors in June 1937 along with Leonida Tonelli, with whom he worked as an assistant from 1938 to 1941, when he left for the war. In 1945 he began to teach analysis, theory of functions, calculus and rational mechanics at the Scuola Normale. In 1948 he obtained a degree in Analysis; his Ph.D. thesis was written under the direction of Tonelli and Marston Morse.
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Willem van der Woude
1876 - 1974 (98 years)
Willem van der Woude was a Dutch mathematician and rector magnificus of the University of Leiden. Education and career Van der Woude studied at the University of Groningen, and subsequently, from 1901 to 1916, worked as a secondary school teacher in Deventer. In 1908 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen under Pieter Hendrik Schoute with a thesis titled Over elkaar snijdende normalen aan een ellipsoide en een hyperellipsoide . From 1916 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1947 he was professor of mathematics and mechanics at the University of Leiden.
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Guidobaldo del Monte
1545 - 1607 (62 years)
Guidobaldo del Monte , Marquis del Monte, was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and astronomer of the 16th century. Biography Del Monte was born in Pesaro. His father, Ranieri, was from a leading wealthy family in Urbino. Ranieri was noted for his role as a soldier and also as the author of two books on military architecture. The Duke of Urbino, Duke Guidobaldo II, honoured him with the title Marchese del Monte so the family had only become a noble one in the generation before Guidobaldo. On the death of his father Guidobaldo inherited the title of Marchese.
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Hayyim Selig Slonimski
1810 - 1904 (94 years)
Ḥayyim Selig ben Ya'akov Slonimski , also known by his acronym ḤaZaS , was a Hebrew publisher, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, science writer, and rabbi. He was among the first to write books on science for a broad Jewish audience, and was the founder of Ha-Tsfira, the first Hebrew-language newspaper with an emphasis on the sciences.
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Erasmus Reinhold
1511 - 1553 (42 years)
Erasmus Reinhold was a German astronomer and mathematician, considered to be the most influential astronomical pedagogue of his generation. He was born and died in Saalfeld, Saxony. He was educated, under Jacob Milich, at the University of Wittenberg, where he was first elected dean and later became rector. In 1536 he was appointed professor of higher mathematics by Philipp Melanchthon. In contrast to the limited modern definition, "mathematics" at the time also included applied mathematics, especially astronomy. His colleague, Georg Joachim Rheticus, also studied at Wittenberg and was appoin...
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Maurice Audin
1932 - 1957 (25 years)
Maurice Audin was a renowned French mathematics assistant at the University of Algiers, a member of the Algerian Communist Party and an activist in the anticolonialist cause, who died under torture by the French state during the Battle of Algiers.
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Rehuel Lobatto
1797 - 1866 (69 years)
Rehuel Lobatto was a Dutch mathematician. The Gauss-Lobatto quadrature method is named after him, as are his variants on the Runge–Kutta methods for solving ODEs, and the Lobatto polynomials. He was the author of a great number of articles in scientific periodicals, as well as various schoolbooks.
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Vincenzo Brunacci
1768 - 1818 (50 years)
Vincenzo Brunacci was an Italian mathematician born in Florence. He was professor of Matematica sublime in Pavia. He transmitted Lagrange's ideas to his pupils, including Ottaviano Fabrizio Mossotti, Antonio Bordoni and Gabrio Piola.
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Giovanni Battista Guccia
1855 - 1914 (59 years)
Giovanni Battista Guccia was an Italian mathematician. Biography Guccia was born in Palermo in a rich and aristocratic family. He graduated in mathematics in 1880 at the University of Rome, where he was a student of Luigi Cremona. His doctoral thesis was presented at the Reims scientific congress and then published with the title "On a class of surfaces representable point by point on a plane" in the "Comptes-rendus de l'Association française pour l'avancement des sciences". In 1887 the French journal Comptes Rendus published his article "Theorem on the singular points of an algebraic surface...
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M. C. Chakrabarti
Mukund Chand Chakrabarti a statistician from Bengal of the British India was the founder head of the department of statistics, University of Mumbai India. He nurtured the department from its birth in 1948 until he died in 1972. The department of mathematics at University of Mumbai was established later in 1963 under the guidance of Professor S. S. Shrikhande.
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John Greenleaf Whittier
1807 - 1892 (85 years)
John Greenleaf Whittier was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.
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Ernest Barnes
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Ernest William Barnes was a British mathematician and scientist who later became a liberal theologian and bishop. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Master of the Temple from 1915 to 1919. He was made Bishop of Birmingham in 1924, the only bishop appointed during Ramsay MacDonald's first term in office. His modernist views, in particular objection to Reservation, led to conflict with the Anglo-Catholics in his diocese. A biography by his son, Sir John Barnes, Ahead of His Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham, was published in 1979.
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Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt
1807 - 1851 (44 years)
Carl Wolfgang Benjamin Goldschmidt was a German astronomer, mathematician, and physicist of Jewish descent who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Göttingen. He is also known as Benjamin Goldschmidt, C. W. B. Goldschmidt, Carl Goldschmidt, and Karl Goldschmidt.
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Matthew Stewart
1717 - 1785 (68 years)
Matthew Stewart FRS FRSE was a Scottish mathematician and minister of the Church of Scotland. Life He was born in the manse at Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, on 15 January 1717, the son of Rev Dugald Stewart, the local minister, and his wife, Janet Bannantyne.
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