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,
#11501
Aurelio Baldor
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Aurelio Ángel Baldor de la Vega was a Cuban mathematician, educator and lawyer. Baldor is the author of a secondary school algebra textbook, titled Álgebra, used throughout the Spanish-speaking world and published for the first time in 1941.
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Seki Takakazu
1642 - 1708 (66 years)
Seki Takakazu, also known as Seki Kōwa, was a Japanese mathematician and author of the Edo period. Seki laid foundations for the subsequent development of Japanese mathematics, known as wasan. He has been described as "Japan's Newton".
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S. R. Ranganathan
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Librarian Day in India.
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Ashraf Huseynov
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Ashraf Iskandar oglu Huseynov was an Azerbaijani mathematician . His area of contributions embraced nonlinear singular integral equations, differential equations, potential theory and functional analysis.
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Thomas Kirkman
1806 - 1895 (89 years)
Thomas Penyngton Kirkman FRS was a British mathematician and ordained minister of the Church of England. Despite being primarily a churchman, he maintained an active interest in research-level mathematics, and was listed by Alexander Macfarlane as one of ten leading 19th-century British mathematicians. In the 1840s, he obtained an existence theorem for Steiner triple systems that founded the field of combinatorial design theory, while the related Kirkman's schoolgirl problem is named after him.
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Philipp Furtwängler
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
Friederich Pius Philipp Furtwängler was a German number theorist. Biography Furtwängler wrote an 1896 doctoral dissertation at the University of Göttingen on cubic forms , under Felix Klein. Most of his academic life, from 1912 to 1938, was spent at the University of Vienna, where he taught for example Kurt Gödel, who later said that Furtwängler's lectures on number theory were the best mathematical lectures that he ever heard; Gödel had originally intended to become a physicist but turned to mathematics partly as a result of Furtwängler's lectures. From 1916, Furtwängler became increasingly ...
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James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
James Whitbread Lee Glaisher FRS FRSE FRAS , son of James Glaisher and Cecilia Glaisher, was a prolific English mathematician and astronomer. His large collection of English ceramics was mostly left to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
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Alicia Boole Stott
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
Alicia Boole Stott was a British mathematician. She made a number of contributions to the field and earned an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen. She grasped four-dimensional geometry from an early age, and introduced the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four or more dimensions.
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Georg Rasch
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Georg William Rasch was a Danish mathematician, statistician, and psychometrician, most famous for the development of a class of measurement models known as Rasch models. He studied with R.A. Fisher and also briefly with Ragnar Frisch, and was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute in 1948.
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Dmitry Mirimanoff
1861 - 1945 (84 years)
Dmitry Semionovitch Mirimanoff became a doctor of mathematical sciences in 1900, in Geneva, and taught at the universities of Geneva and Lausanne. Mirimanoff made notable contributions to axiomatic set theory and to number theory . In 1917, he introduced, though not as explicitly as John von Neumann later, the cumulative hierarchy of sets and the notion of von Neumann ordinals; although he introduced a notion of regular he did not consider regularity as an axiom, but also explored what is now called non-well-founded set theory and had an emergent idea of what is now called bisimulation.
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William Edward Story
1850 - 1930 (80 years)
William Edward Story was an American mathematician who taught at Johns Hopkins University and Clark University. William was born in Boston to Isaac Marion Story and Elizabeth Bowen Woodberry . He attended high school in Somerville, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard University in the fall of 1867. He graduated with honors in mathematics and began graduate study in Germany in September 1871. In Berlin he attended lectures of Weierstrass, Ernst Kummer, Helmholtz and Dove. In Leipzig he heard Karl Neumann, Bruhns, Mayer, Van der Müll, and Engelmann. He earned a Ph.D. in Leipzig in 1875 with a d...
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Caleb Gattegno
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Caleb Gattegno was an Egyptian educator, psychologist, and mathematician. He is considered one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educatorss of the twentieth century. He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics , foreign languages and reading . Gattegno also developed pedagogical materials for each of these approaches, and was the author of more than 120 books and hundreds of articles largely on the topics of education and human development.
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József Kürschák
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
József Kürschák was a Hungarian mathematician noted for his work on trigonometry and for his creation of the theory of valuations. He proved that every valued field can be embedded into a complete valued field which is algebraically closed. In 1918 he proved that the sum of reciprocals of consecutive natural numbers is never an integer. Extending Hilbert's argument, he proved that everything that can be constructed using a ruler and a compass, can be constructed by using a ruler and the ability of copying a fixed segment. He was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1897. H...
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William Oughtred
1574 - 1660 (86 years)
William Oughtred , also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
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Gustav von Escherich
1849 - 1935 (86 years)
Gustav Ritter von Escherich was an Austrian mathematician. Biography Born in Mantua, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. From 1876 to 1879 he was professor at the University of Graz. In 1882 he went to the Graz University of Technology and in 1884 he went to the University of Vienna, where he also was president of the university in 1903/04.
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Menelaus of Alexandria
70 - 140 (70 years)
Menelaus of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician and astronomer, the first to recognize geodesics on a curved surface as natural analogs of straight lines. Life and works Although very little is known about Menelaus's life, it is supposed that he lived in Rome, where he probably moved after having spent his youth in Alexandria. He was called Menelaus of Alexandria by both Pappus of Alexandria and Proclus, and a conversation of his with Lucius, held in Rome, is recorded by Plutarch.
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Robert Rumsey Webb
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Robert Rumsey Webb , known as R. R. Webb, was a successful coach for the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. Webb coached 100 students to place in the top ten wranglerss from 1865 to 1909, a record second only to Edward Routh.
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Marcel Brillouin
1854 - 1948 (94 years)
Louis Marcel Brillouin was a French physicist and mathematician. Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy. There he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting. There he spent time teaching himself from his grandfather's philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878. He became a physics assistant to Éleuthère Mascart at the Collège de...
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Karl Mikhailovich Peterson
1828 - 1881 (53 years)
Karl Mikhailovich Peterson was a Russian mathematician, known by an earlier formulation of the Gauss–Codazzi equations. Life and work Peterson was born in a peasant family. He studied at the Gymnasium of Riga and, after, in the university of Dorpat
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Ludwig Schlesinger
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Ludwig Schlesinger , was a German mathematician known for the research in the field of linear differential equations. Biography Schlesinger attended the high school in Pressburg and later studied physics and mathematics in Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1887 he received his PhD His thesis advisors were Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs and Leopold Kronecker. In 1889 he became an associate professor at Berlin; in 1897 an invited professor in Bonn and in the same year, a full professor at the University of Kolozsvár, Hungary . From 1911 he was professor at the University of Giessen, where he taught until 1930.
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Kurt Heegner
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Kurt Heegner was a German private scholar from Berlin, who specialized in radio engineering and mathematics. He is famous for his mathematical discoveries in number theory and, in particular, the Stark–Heegner theorem.
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Jacques Feldbau
1914 - 1945 (31 years)
Jacques Feldbau was a French mathematician, born on 22 October 1914 in Strasbourg, of an Alsatian Jewish traditionalist family. He died on 22 April 1945 at the Ganacker Camp, annex of the concentration camp of Flossenbürg in Germany. As a mathematician he worked on differential geometry and topology. He was the first student of Charles Ehresmann.
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Zhu Shijie
1249 - 1314 (65 years)
Zhu Shijie , courtesy name Hanqing , pseudonym Songting , was a Chinese mathematician and writer. He was a Chinese mathematician during the Yuan Dynasty. Zhu was born close to today's Beijing. Two of his mathematical works have survived. Introduction to Computational Studies , and Jade Mirror of the Four Unknowns.
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Jenő Egerváry
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Jenő Elek Egerváry was a Hungarian mathematician. Biography Egerváry was born in Debrecen in 1891. In 1914, he received his doctorate at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, where he studied under the supervision of Lipót Fejér. He then worked as an assistant at the Seismological Observatory in Budapest, and since 1918 as a professor at the Superior Industrial School in Budapest. In 1938 he was appointed Privatdozent at the Pázmány Péter University in Budapest.
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Pandrosion
400 - Present (1625 years)
Pandrosion of Alexandria was a mathematician in fourth-century-AD Alexandria, discussed in the Mathematical Collection of Pappus of Alexandria and known for developing an approximate method for doubling the cube. Although there is disagreement on the subject, Pandrosion is believed by many current scholars to have been female. If so, she would be an earlier female contributor to mathematics than Hypatia.
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Georg Ohm
1789 - 1854 (65 years)
Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist and mathematician. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm found that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relation is called Ohm's law, and the ohm, the unit of electrical resistance, is named after him.
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Paul Epstein
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Paul Epstein was a German mathematician. He was known for his contributions to number theory, in particular the Epstein zeta function. Epstein was born and brought up in Frankfurt, where his father was a professor. He received his PhD in 1895 from the University of Strasbourg. From 1895 to 1918 he was a Privatdozent at the University in Strasbourg, which at that time was part of the German Empire. At the end of World War I the city of Strasbourg reverted to France, and Epstein, being German, had to return to Frankfurt.
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Morgan Crofton
1826 - 1915 (89 years)
Morgan Crofton was an Irish mathematician who contributed to the field of geometric probability theory. He also worked with James Joseph Sylvester and contributed an article on probability to the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Crofton's formula is named in his honour.
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Jules Richard
1862 - 1956 (94 years)
Jules Richard was a French mathematician who worked mainly in geometry but his name is most commonly associated with Richard's paradox. Life and works Richard was born in Blet, in the Cher département.
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William Threlfall
1888 - 1949 (61 years)
William Richard Maximilian Hugo Threlfall was a British-born German mathematician who worked on algebraic topology. He was a coauthor of the standard textbook Lehrbuch der Topologie. In 1933 he signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.
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Thomas Craig
1855 - 1900 (45 years)
Thomas Craig was an American mathematician. He was a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a proponent of the methods of differential geometry. Biography Thomas Craig was born December 20, 1855, in Pittston, Pennsylvania. His father Alexander Craig immigrated from Scotland, and worked as an engineer in the mining industry.
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Autolycus of Pitane
360 BC - 290 BC (70 years)
Autolycus of Pitane was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer. He is known today for his two surviving works On the Moving Sphere and On Risings and Settings, both about spherical geometry.
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Louis Antoine
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Louis Antoine was a French mathematician who discovered Antoine's necklace, which J. W. Alexander used to construct Antoine's horned sphere. He lost his eyesight in the first World War, at the age of 29.
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K. Ananda Rau
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
K. Ananda Rau was an eminent Indian mathematician and a contemporary of Ramanujan. Though Rau was six years junior to Ramanujan, his mathematical trajectory, unlike Ramanujan's, was very much a conventional one and he had decided to pursue a career in mathematics well before Ramanujan's prowess became known.
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Christoph Gudermann
1798 - 1852 (54 years)
Christoph Gudermann was a German mathematician noted for introducing the Gudermannian function and the concept of uniform convergence, and for being the teacher of Karl Weierstrass, who was greatly influenced by Gudermann's course on elliptic functions in 1839–1840, the first such course to be taught in any institute.
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Donald B. Gillies
1929 - 1975 (46 years)
Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments. Early life and education Donald B. Gillies was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to John Zachariah Gillies and Anne Isabelle Douglas MacQueen . He attended the University of Toronto Schools, a laboratory school originally affiliated with the university. Gillies attended the University of Toronto from 1946 to 1950, majoring in mathematics.
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William Hopkins
1793 - 1866 (73 years)
William Hopkins FRS was an English mathematician and geologist. He is famous as a private tutor of aspiring undergraduate Cambridge mathematicians, earning him the sobriquet the "senior-wrangler maker."
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Theodor Reye
1838 - 1919 (81 years)
Karl Theodor Reye was a German mathematician. He contributed to geometry, particularly projective geometry and synthetic geometry. He is best known for his introduction of configurations in the second edition of his book, Geometrie der Lage . The Reye configuration of 12 points, 12 planes, and 16 lines is named after him.
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Alfred Pringsheim
1850 - 1941 (91 years)
Alfred Pringsheim was a German mathematician and patron of the arts. He was born in Ohlau, Prussian Silesia and died in Zürich, Switzerland. Family and academic career Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy Silesian merchant family with Jewish roots. He was the first-born child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim and his wife Paula, née Deutschmann . He had a younger sister, Martha.
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Jacob Lüroth
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Jacob Lüroth was a German mathematician who proved Lüroth's theorem and introduced Lüroth quartics. His name is sometimes written Lueroth, following the common printing convention for umlauted characters. He began his studies in astronomy at the University of Bonn, but switched to mathematics when his poor eyesight made taking astronomical observations impossible. He received his doctorate in 1865 from Heidelberg University, for a thesis on Pascal's theorem.
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Henry Burchard Fine
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Henry Burchard Fine was an American university dean and mathematician. Life and career Henry Burchard Fine played a critical role in modernizing the American university and raising American mathematics “from a state of approximate nullity to one verging on parity with the European nations”. This tribute in Oswald Veblen’s obituary [see in "Obituary" below] accurately recognized Fine’s role both in training American mathematicians to provide international leadership to this field and in building Princeton University’s reputation in mathematics and science. Fine’s efforts contributed greatly...
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Robert of Chester
1200 - 1200 (0 years)
Robert of Chester was an English Arabist of the 12th century. He translated several historically important books from Arabic to Latin, such as:Book on the Composition of Alchemy : translated in 1144, this was the first book on alchemy to become available in EuropeCompendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing : al-Khwārizmī's book about algebra, translated in 1145In the 1140s Robert worked in Spain, where the division of the country between Muslim and Christian rulers resulted in opportunities for interchange between the different cultures. However, by the end of the decade he had returned to England.
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Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut
1775 - 1832 (57 years)
Bernhard Friedrich Thibaut was a German mathematician. He was the younger brother of the famous jurist Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut. He studied at the University of Göttingen along with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Beckmann, and Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. In 1797 he became lecturer in Göttingen. In 1802 he became extraodinary and in 1805 ordinary professor of philosophy. Mathematics were his favourite field of lessons, and he was well-known as a brilliant lecturer, in contrast to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was professor for astronomy in Göttingen since 1807 and disliked giving lessons.
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Nicolas Chuquet
1445 - 1488 (43 years)
Nicolas Chuquet was a French mathematician. He invented his own notation for algebraic concepts and exponentiation. He may have been the first mathematician to recognize zero and negative numbers as exponents.
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Ludwig Burmester
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
Ludwig Ernst Hans Burmester was a German kinematician and geometer. His doctoral thesis concerned lines on a surface defined by light direction. After a period as a teacher in Łódź he became professor of synthetic geometry at Dresden where his growing interest in kinematics culminated in his of 1888, developing the approach to the theory of linkagess introduced by Franz Reuleaux, whereby a planar mechanism was understood as a collection of Euclidean planes in relative motion with one degree of freedom. Burmester considered both the theory of planar kinematics and practically all actual mechanisms known in his time.
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Augustus Edward Hough Love
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Augustus Edward Hough Love FRS , often known as A. E. H. Love, was a mathematician famous for his work on the mathematical theory of elasticity. He also worked on wave propagation and his work on the structure of the Earth in Some Problems of Geodynamics won for him the Adams prize in 1911 when he developed a mathematical model of surface waves known as Love waves. Love also contributed to the theory of tidal locking and introduced the parameters known as Love numbers, used in problems related to Earth tides, the tidal deformation of the solid Earth due to the gravitational attraction of the ...
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Callippus
370 BC - 300 BC (70 years)
Callippus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician. Biography Callippus was born at Cyzicus, and studied under Eudoxus of Cnidus at the Academy of Plato. He also worked with Aristotle at the Lyceum, which means that he was active in Athens prior to Aristotle's death in 322 BC. He observed the movements of the planets and attempted to use Eudoxus' scheme of connected spheres to account for their movements. However, he found that 27 spheres were insufficient to account for the planetary movements, and so he added seven more for a total of 34. According to the description in Aristotle's Metaphys...
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James Mercer
1883 - 1932 (49 years)
James Mercer FRS was a mathematician, born in Bootle, close to Liverpool, England. He was educated at University of Manchester, and then University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow, saw active service at the Battle of Jutland in World War I and, after decades of ill health, died in London.
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Johan Jensen
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen, mostly known as Johan Jensen , was a Danish mathematician and engineer. He was the president of the Danish Mathematical Society from 1892 to 1903. Biography Jensen was born in Nakskov, Denmark, but spent much of his childhood in northern Sweden, because his father obtained a job there as the manager of an estate. Their family returned to Denmark before 1876, when Jensen enrolled to the College of Advanced Technology. Although he studied mathematics among various subjects at college, and even published a research paper in mathematics, he learned advanced math topics later by himself and never held any academic position.
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John Graunt
1620 - 1674 (54 years)
John Graunt has been regarded as the founder of demography. Graunt was one of the first demographers, and perhaps the first epidemiologist, though by profession he was a haberdasher. He was bankrupted later in life by losses suffered during Great Fire of London and the discrimination he faced following his conversion to Catholicism.
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