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,
#11551
Józef Marcinkiewicz
1910 - 1940 (30 years)
Józef Marcinkiewicz was a Polish mathematician. He was a student of Antoni Zygmund; and later worked with Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Kaczmarz and Raphaël Salem. He was a professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno.
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Albert Ingham
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Albert Edward Ingham was an English mathematician. Early life and education Ingham was born in Northampton. He went to Stafford Grammar School and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1919 after service in the British Army in World War I. Ingham received a distinction as a Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1922. He also received an 1851 Research Fellowship.
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Arne Beurling
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Arne Carl-August Beurling was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.
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Ralph Palmer Agnew
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ralph Palmer Agnew was an American mathematician. Agnew was born in Poland, Ohio, and did his undergraduate studies at Allegheny College. After completing a master's degree at Iowa State College he moved to Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1930. He was appointed to the Cornell faculty in 1931. He chaired the mathematics department at Cornell from 1940 to 1950, and was responsible for bringing William Feller and Mark Kac to Cornell.
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Billy James Pettis
1913 - 1979 (66 years)
Billy James Pettis , was an American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis. See also Dunford–Pettis propertyDunford–Pettis theoremMilman–Pettis theoremOrlicz–Pettis theoremPettis integralPettis theorem
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Oswald Veblen
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Oswald Veblen was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905; while this was long considered the first rigorous proof of the theorem, many now also consider Camille Jordan's original proof rigorous.
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E. J. G. Pitman
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Edwin James George Pitman was an Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to statistics and probability theory. In particular, he is remembered primarily as the originator of the Pitman permutation test, Pitman nearness and Pitman efficiency.
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Jacques Hadamard
1865 - 1963 (98 years)
Jacques Salomon Hadamard was a French mathematician who made major contributions in number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry and partial differential equations. Biography The son of a teacher, Amédée Hadamard, of Jewish descent, and Claire Marie Jeanne Picard, Hadamard was born in Versailles, France and attended the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his father taught. In 1884 Hadamard entered the École Normale Supérieure, having placed first in the entrance examinations both there and at the École Polytechnique. His teachers included Tannery, Hermite, Darboux, Appell, Goursat and Picard.
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Zdeněk Frolík
1933 - 1989 (56 years)
Zdeněk Frolík was a Czech mathematician. His research interests included topology and functional analysis. In particular, his work concerned covering properties of topological spaces, ultrafilters, homogeneity, measures, uniform spaces. He was one of the founders of modern descriptive theory of sets and spaces.
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Theodore Motzkin
1908 - 1970 (62 years)
Theodore Samuel Motzkin was an Israeli-American mathematician. Biography Motzkin's father Leo Motzkin, a Ukrainian Jew, went to Berlin at the age of thirteen to study mathematics. He pursued university studies in the topic and was accepted as a graduate student by Leopold Kronecker, but left the field to work for the Zionist movement before finishing a dissertation.
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Felix Hausdorff
1868 - 1942 (74 years)
Felix Hausdorff was a German mathematician, pseudonym Paul Mongré, who is considered to be one of the founders of modern topology and who contributed significantly to set theory, descriptive set theory, measure theory, and functional analysis.
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Jacob Bronowski
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Jacob Bronowski was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher. He was known to friends and professional colleagues alike by the nickname Bruno. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man. This endeavour propelled him into the esteemed position of being widely regarded as "one of the most revered intellectuals on the global stage."
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Dunham Jackson
1888 - 1946 (58 years)
Dunham Jackson was a mathematician who worked within approximation theory, notably with trigonometrical and orthogonal polynomials. He is known for Jackson's inequality. He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1935. His book Fourier Series and Orthogonal Polynomials was reprinted in 2004.
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Melvin R. Novick
1932 - 1986 (54 years)
Melvin R. Novick was an American statistician. He was a professor of Statistics at the University of Iowa, and a consultant for the Educational Testing Service . Books
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Rolf Nevanlinna
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Rolf Herman Nevanlinna was a Finnish mathematician who made significant contributions to complex analysis. Background Nevanlinna was born Rolf Herman Neovius, becoming Nevanlinna in 1906 when his father changed the family name.
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George Forsythe
1917 - 1972 (55 years)
George Elmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist and numerical analyst who founded and led Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Forsythe is often credited with coining the term "computer science" and is recognized as a founding figure in the field.
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Abraham Robinson
1918 - 1974 (56 years)
Abraham Robinson was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of nonstandard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were reincorporated into modern mathematics. Nearly half of Robinson's papers were in applied mathematics rather than in pure mathematics.
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Irving Reiner
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Irving Reiner was a mathematician at the University of Illinois who worked on representation theory. He solved the problem of finding which abelian groups have a finite number of indecomposable modules. His book with Charles W. Curtis, , was for many years the standard text on representation theory.
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Kenneth O. May
1915 - 1977 (62 years)
Kenneth O. May was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who developed May's theorem. May was a prime mover behind the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, and was the first editor of its journal Historia Mathematica. Every four years the ICHM awards the Kenneth O. May Prize for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics.
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Ludwig Bieberbach
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach was a German mathematician and Nazi. Biography Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, he studied at Heidelberg and under Felix Klein at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate in 1910. His dissertation was titled On the theory of automorphic functions . He began working as a Privatdozent at Königsberg in 1910 and as Professor ordinarius at the University of Basel in 1913. He taught at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and the University of Berlin from 1921–45.
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Kōsaku Yosida
1909 - 1990 (81 years)
Kōsaku Yosida was a Japanese mathematician who worked in the field of functional analysis. He is known for the Hille-Yosida theorem concerning C0-semigroups. Yosida studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, and held posts at Osaka and Nagoya Universities. In 1955, Yosida returned to the University of Tokyo.
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Leonard Jimmie Savage
1917 - 1971 (54 years)
Leonard Jimmie Savage was an American mathematician and statistician. Economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius." Education and career Savage was born and grew up in Detroit. He studied at Wayne State University in Detroit before transferring to University of Michigan, where he first majored in chemical engineering, then switched to mathematics, graduating in 1938 with a Bachelor's degree. He continued at the University of Michigan with a PhD on differential geometry in 1941 under the supervision of Sumner Byron Myers.
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Arnold Dresden
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Arnold Dresden was a Dutch-American mathematician, known for his work in the calculus of variations and collegiate mathematics education. He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America and a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Abram Besicovitch
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch was a Russiann mathematician, who worked mainly in England. He was born in Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov to a Karaite Jewish family. Life and career Abram Besicovitch studied under the supervision of Andrey Markov at the St. Petersburg University, graduating with a PhD in 1912. He then began research in probability theory. He converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, joining the Russian Orthodox Church, on marrying in 1916. He was appointed professor at the University of Perm in 1917, and was caught up in the Russian Civil War over the next two years. In 1920, he took a ...
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Alexander Dinghas
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Alexander Dinghas was a Greek mathematician. Biography Dinghas was born on February 9, 1908, in Smyrna , Turkey. He did his schooling in Smyrna. He and his family moved to Athens in 1922. Dinghas completed his secondary school and entered the National Technical University of Athens in 1925. He graduated with a diploma in electrical and mechanical engineering in 1930.
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Thomas Murray MacRobert
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Thomas Murray MacRobert was a Scottish mathematician. He became professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow and introduced the MacRobert E function, a generalisation of the generalised hypergeometric series.
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Charles B. Morrey Jr.
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the calculus of variations and the theory of partial differential equations. Life Charles Bradfield Morrey Jr. was born July 23, 1907, in Columbus, Ohio; his father was a professor of bacteriology at Ohio State University, and his mother was president of a school of music in Columbus, therefore it can be said that his one was a family of academicians. Perhaps from his mother's influence, he had a lifelong love for piano, even if mathematics was his main interest since his childhood. He was at firs...
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Louis J. Mordell
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Louis Joel Mordell was an American-born British mathematician, known for pioneering research in number theory. He was born in Philadelphia, United States, in a Jewish family of Lithuanian extraction.
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Pao-Lu Hsu
1910 - 1970 (60 years)
Pao-Lu Hsu or Xu Baolu was a Chinese mathematician noted for his work in probability theory and statistics. Life and career Pao-Lu Hsu was born in Beijing on September 1, 1910, with his ancestral home in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. He was from a prominent intellectual family. In his childhood, he received solid training in both traditional Chinese and modern western cultures. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933, majoring in mathematics. After his graduation, he worked at Peking University as a teacher. In the meantime, he published a joint paper with Tsai-han Kiang on the numbers ...
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Marshall Hall
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Marshall Hall Jr. was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to group theory and combinatorics. Education and career Hall studied mathematics at Yale University, graduating in 1932. He studied for a year at Cambridge University under a Henry Fellowship working with G. H. Hardy. He returned to Yale to take his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Øystein Ore.
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Sumner Byron Myers
1910 - 1955 (45 years)
Sumner Byron Myers was an American mathematician specializing in topology and differential geometry. He studied at Harvard University under H. C. Marston Morse, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1932. Myers then pursued postdoctoral studies at Princeton University before becoming a professor for mathematics at the University of Michigan. He died unexpectedly from a heart attack during the 1955 Michigan–Army football game at Michigan Stadium.
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Carl Ludwig Siegel
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Carl Ludwig Siegel was a German mathematician specialising in analytic number theory. He is known for, amongst other things, his contributions to the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem in Diophantine approximation, Siegel's method, Siegel's lemma and the Siegel mass formula for quadratic forms. He has been named one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.
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Douglas Hartree
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
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Reginald Ruggles Gates
1882 - 1962 (80 years)
Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian-born geneticist who published widely in the fields of botany and eugenics. Early life Reginald Ruggles Gates was born on May 1, 1882, near Middleton, Nova Scotia, to a family of English ancestry. He had a twin sister named Charlotte.
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Kurt Mahler
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Kurt Mahler FRS was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation, p-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers. Career Mahler was a student at the universities in Frankfurt and Göttingen, graduating with a Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in 1927; his advisor was Carl Ludwig Siegel. He left Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler and accepted an invitation by Louis Mordell to go to Manchester. However, at the start of World War II he was interned as an enemy alien in Central Camp in Douglas, Isle of Man, where he met Kurt Hirsch, although he was released after only three months.
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Eric Temple Bell
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.
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Harold Davenport
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Harold Davenport FRS was an English mathematician, known for his extensive work in number theory. Early life Born on 30 October 1907 in Huncoat, Lancashire, Davenport was educated at Accrington Grammar School, the University of Manchester , and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a research student of John Edensor Littlewood, working on the question of the distribution of quadratic residues.
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George Kingsley Zipf
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
George Kingsley Zipf , was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was chairman of the German department and university lecturer at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data.
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Harald Cramér
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Harald Cramér was a Swedish mathematician, actuary, and statistician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probabilistic number theory. John Kingman described him as "one of the giants of statistical theory".
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Theodore von Kármán
1881 - 1963 (82 years)
Theodore von Kármán , was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The human-defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
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Harry Bateman
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
Harry Bateman FRS was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in...
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John Edensor Littlewood
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
John Edensor Littlewood was a British mathematician. He worked on topics relating to analysis, number theory, and differential equations and had lengthy collaborations with G. H. Hardy, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Mary Cartwright.
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George David Birkhoff
1884 - 1944 (60 years)
George David Birkhoff was an American mathematician best known for what is now called the ergodic theorem. Birkhoff was one of the most important leaders in American mathematics in his generation, and during his time he was considered by many to be the preeminent American mathematician.
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Witold Hurewicz
1904 - 1956 (52 years)
Witold Hurewicz was a Polish mathematician. Early life and education Witold Hurewicz was born in Łódź, at the time one of the main Polish industrial hubs with economy focused on the textile industry. His father, Mieczysław Hurewicz, was an industrialist born in Wilno, which until 1939 was mainly populated by Poles and Jews. His mother was Katarzyna Finkelsztain who hailed from Biała Cerkiew, a town that belonged to the Kingdom of Poland until the Second Partition of Poland when it was taken by Russia.
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William J. Youden
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
William John Youden was an Australian-born American statistician who formulated new statistical techniques in statistical analysis and in design of experiments. He developed the "Youden square", an incomplete block design developed from a 1937 paper, "Use of Incomplete Block Replications in Estimating Tobacco Mosaic Virus". He also helped to introduce the concept of restricted randomization, which he called constrained randomization. He devised Youden's J statistic as a simple measure summarising the performance of a binary diagnostic test.
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Øystein Ore
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Øystein Ore was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in ring theory, Galois connections, graph theory, and the history of mathematics. Life Ore graduated from the University of Oslo in 1922, with a Cand.Real.degree in mathematics. In 1924, the University of Oslo awarded him the Ph.D. for a thesis titled Zur Theorie der algebraischen Körper, supervised by Thoralf Skolem. Ore also studied at Göttingen University, where he learned Emmy Noether's new approach to abstract algebra. He was also a fellow at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden, and spent some time at the University of Paris.
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Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi
1907 - 1966 (59 years)
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi was an Indian polymath with interests in mathematics, statistics, philology, history, and genetics. He contributed to genetics by introducing the Kosambi map function. In statistics, he was the first person to develop orthogonal infinite series expressions for stochastic processes via the Kosambi–Karhunen–Loève theorem. He is also well known for his work in numismatics and for compiling critical editions of ancient Sanskrit texts. His father, Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, had studied ancient Indian texts with a particular emphasis on Buddhism and its literature in the Pali language.
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John Wishart
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
John Wishart was a Scottish mathematician and agricultural statistician. He gave his name to the Wishart distribution in statistics. Life Wishart was born in Perth, Scotland on 28 November 1898, the son of Elizabeth Scott and John Wishart of Montrose. His father was a bootmaker. The family moved from Montrose to Perth around 1903, living at 36 Robertsons Buildings on Barrack Street. He was educated at Perth Academy.
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Alfred J. Lotka
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Alfred James Lotka was an American mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician, famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics. A biophysicist, Lotka is best known for his proposal of the predator–prey model, developed simultaneously but independently of Vito Volterra. The Lotka–Volterra model is still the basis of many models used in the analysis of population dynamics in ecology.
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Samuel S. Wilks
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Samuel Stanley Wilks was an American mathematician and academic who played an important role in the development of mathematical statistics, especially in regard to practical applications. Early life and education Wilks was born in Little Elm, Texas and raised on a farm. He studied Industrial Arts at the North Texas State Teachers College in Denton, Texas, obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1926. He received his master's degree in mathematics in 1928 from the University of Texas. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa under Everett F. Lindquist; his thesis dealt with a problem of st...
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