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,
#11551
Erhard Weigel
1625 - 1699 (74 years)
Erhard Weigel was a German mathematician, astronomer and philosopher. Biography Weigel earned his M.A. and his habilitation from the University of Leipzig. From 1653 until his death he was professor of mathematics at Jena University. He was the teacher of Leibniz in summer 1663, and other notable students. He also worked to make science more widely accessible to the public, and what would today be considered a populariser of science.
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Vincenzo Riccati
1707 - 1775 (68 years)
Vincenzo Riccati was a Venetian Catholic priest, mathematician, and physicist. Life Vincenzo Riccati was born in 1707 in Castelfranco Veneto, a small town about 30 km north of Padua. He was the brother of Giordano Riccati, and the second son of Jacopo Riccati. He began his studies at the College of St. Francis Xavier in Bologna, under the guidance of Luigi Marchenti, a pupil of the French mathematician Pierre Varignon. He entered the Society of Jesus on December 20, 1726. He taught belles lettres in the colleges of the Order in Piacenza , Padua , and Parma . He then went to Rome to study theology.
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Volodymyr Levytsky
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Volodymyr Levytsky was a Ukrainian mathematician who taught mathematics and studied functions of a complex variable. Biography and education Volodymyr Levytsky finished his doctorate at the University of Lviv in 1901 and went on to teach mathematics and physics at high schools. After the First World War Ukrainian students were not allowed to enrol at the University and in 1920 Ukrainian professors were also banned leaving only Polish lecturers. As a result, the Ukrainian students set up an underground university at the University in July 1921. From the beginning Levytsky taught mathematics at this new underground university for a few years until it was forced to close in 1925.
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Jean-Étienne Montucla
1725 - 1799 (74 years)
Jean-Étienne Montucla was a French mathematician and historian. Montucla was born at Lyon, France. Career In 1754 he published an anonymous treatise on quadrature, Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle. Montucla's deep interest in history of mathematics became apparent with his publication of Histoire des Mathématiques, the first part appearing in 1758. According to George Sarton, the Histoire isa history of the mathematical sciences, and might almost be called a history of science from the mathematical angle, even as many histories of medicine are to some extent histories of sc...
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Matsusaburo Fujiwara
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Matsusaburo Fujiwara was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Fujiwara graduated in June 1902 from secondary school at the Third Higher School in Kyoto and then studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated in 1905. His most important teacher was Rikitaro Fujisawa . In 1906 he became a secondary school teacher at the First Higher School Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō in Tokyo. In 1908 Fujiwara and Tsuruichi Hayashi were appointed professors at Tohoku University in Sendai. To prepare for his professorial duties, Fujiwara was sent to study from 1908 to 1911 in Göttingen, Paris and Berlin.
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Conny Palm
1907 - 1951 (44 years)
Conrad "Conny" Rudolf Agaton Palm was a Swedish electrical engineer and statistician, known for several contributions to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory. Education and career Palm enrolled at the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1925, being awarded his M.Sc. and Ph.D on a dissertation entitled Intensitätsschwankungen im Fernsprechverkehr . Palm's work was also joint with L. M. Ericsson, cooperating with Christian Jacobæus. He attended Harald Cramér's queueing theory group, met William Feller . Later, Palm was in the Swedish Bo...
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Ferdinand Karl Schweikart
1780 - 1857 (77 years)
Ferdinand Karl Schweikart was a German jurist and amateur mathematician who developed an astral geometry before the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. Life and work Schweikart, son of an attorney in Hesse, was educated in the school of his town. He went to the high school in Hanau and Waldeck before entering in 1796 to study law in the university of Marburg, where he attended lectures of the mathematics professor J.K.F. Hauff. He was awarded a doctorate in law at the university of Jena in 1798.
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Johann Rahn
1622 - 1676 (54 years)
Johann Rahn was a Swiss mathematician who is credited with the first use of the division sign, ÷ and the therefore sign, ∴. The symbols were used in Teutsche Algebra, published in 1659. John Pell collaborated with Rahn in this book, which contains an example of the Pell equation. It is uncertain whether Rahn or Pell was responsible for introducing the symbols.
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Bruno Finzi
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Bruno Finzi was an Italian mathematician, engineer and physicist. Biography Born at Gardone Val Trompia, Finzi received in 1920 his Laurea as an engineer and in 1921 as a mathematician at the University of Pavia. In 1922 he became an assistant of Umberto Cisotti at the Polytecnico di Milano. In 1931 he became a professor of rational mechanics at the University of Milan, but returned in 1947 to the Polytecnico di Milano as the successor to Cisotti and became there director of the Mathematical Institute. From 1949 he was the head of the newly founded Institute of Aeronautics and in 1967 he bec...
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William Playfair
1759 - 1823 (64 years)
William Playfair , a Scottish engineer and political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As a secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency.
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Heinrich Burkhardt
1861 - 1914 (53 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Karl Ludwig Burkhardt was a German mathematician. He famously was one of the two examiners of Albert Einstein's PhD thesis Eine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen. Of Einstein's thesis he stated: "The mode of treatment demonstrates fundamental mastery of the relevant mathematical methods" and "What I checked, I found to be correct without exception."
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Michio Kuga
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
was a mathematician who received his Ph.D. from University of Tokyo in 1960. His work helped lead to a proof of the Ramanujan conjecture which partly follows from the proof of the Weil conjectures by .
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Émilie du Châtelet
1706 - 1749 (43 years)
Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet was a French natural philosopher and mathematician from the early 1730s until her death due to complications during childbirth in 1749.
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Gabrio Piola
1791 - 1850 (59 years)
Gabrio Piola was an Italian mathematician and physicist, member of the Lombardo Institute of Science, Letters and Arts. He studied in particular the mechanics of the continuous, linking his name to the tensors called Piola–Kirchhoff.
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Christian Heinrich von Nagel
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Christian Heinrich von Nagel was a German geometer. After attending the gymnasium, Nagel went in 1817 to Evangelical Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren. From 1821 to 1825, he took a four-year course of theology at the Tübinger Stift. Soon after his graduation, he became interested in mathematics. He became mathematics and science teacher at the Lyceum and at the Secondary school in Tübingen. Already in 1826, he earned doctorate at the local Faculty of Philosophy on a theme De triangulis rectangulis ex algebraica aequatione construendis . Until 1830, he held post of a private lecturer in Tübingen.
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Victor Gustave Robin
1855 - 1897 (42 years)
Victor Gustave Robin was a French mathematical analyst and applied mathematician who lectured in mathematical physics at the Sorbonne in Paris and also worked in the area of thermodynamics. He is known especially for the Robin boundary condition. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Prix Francœur for 1893 and again for 1897 and the Prix Poncelet for 1895.
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Mehmet Nadir
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Mehmet Nadir was a Turkish mathematician and educator. Early life He was born in Sakız island then a part of the Ottoman Empire, to a poor family. He was adopted by a sea captain, who would be his father-in-law in the future. He studied in the military high school in Bursa. Then, he went to Istanbul to study in the military college and then the naval academy. After completing his education with honours, he was appointed teacher of mathematics at the naval academy, and later at Darüşşafaka High School, one of the most prominent schools in Istanbul. In 1879, together with one of his friends, he travelled to England for advanced studies.
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Alfred George Greenhill
1847 - 1927 (80 years)
Sir Alfred George Greenhill , was a British mathematician. George Greenhill was educated at Christ's Hospital School and from there he went to St John's College, Cambridge in 1866. In 1876, Greenhill was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, London, UK. He held this chair until his retirement in 1908, when he was knighted.
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Joseph Jean Baptiste Neuberg
1840 - 1926 (86 years)
Joseph Jean Baptiste Neuberg was a Luxembourger mathematician who worked primarily in geometry. Biography Neuberg was born on 30 October 1840 in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. He first studied at a local school, the Athénée de Luxembourg, then progressed to Ghent University, studying at the École normale des Sciences of the science faculty. After graduation, Neuberg taught at several institutions. Between 1862 and 1865, he taught at the École Normale de Nivelle. For the next sixteen years, he taught at the Athénée Royal d'Arlon, though he also taught at the École Normale at Bruges from 1868 onw...
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Takeo Nakasawa
1913 - 1946 (33 years)
Takeo Nakasawa was a Japanese mathematician who independently invented the theory of matroids, though his work was forgotten for many years. He published four papers of which the first three introduce the subject of matroid theory during 1935–1938, when he worked as an assistant in the Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences . After his last paper was published, he left for Manchuria at the age of 25 in 1938, then ruled by Japan, and worked as a bureaucrat there. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Soviets took control of Manchuria and Nakasawa was carted off to Siberia. He died of dystrophi...
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Julius Weisbach
1806 - 1871 (65 years)
Julius Ludwig Weisbach was a German mathematician and engineer. Life and work Weisbach was born on 10 August 1806 in Mittelschmiedeberg . He studied at the Bergakademie in Freiberg from 1822 to 1826. After that, he studied with Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen and with Friedrich Mohs in Vienna.
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Edward Copson
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Edward Thomas Copson FRSE was a British mathematician who contributed widely to the development of mathematics at the University of St Andrews, serving as Regius Professor of Mathematics amongst other positions.
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Karl Zsigmondy
1867 - 1925 (58 years)
Karl Zsigmondy was an Austro-Hungarian mathematician. He was a son of Adolf Zsigmondy from Pozsony, Kingdom of Hungary and his mother was Irma von Szakmáry of Martonvásár, Kingdom of Hungary. He studied and worked at the University of Vienna. After his PhD, in 1890, he studied at the University of Berlin, University of Göttingen and at the Sorbonne in Paris, but came back to Vienna in 1894. He discovered Zsigmondy's theorem in 1892.
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William Pitt Durfee
1855 - 1941 (86 years)
William Pitt Durfee was an American mathematician who introduced Durfee squares. He was a student of James Sylvester, and after obtaining his degree in 1883 he became a professor at Hobart college in 1884 and became dean in 1888. Durfee House and Durfee Hall are named in his honor.
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Pavel Nekrasov
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
Pavel Alekseevich Nekrasov was a Russian mathematician and a Rector of the Imperial University of Moscow. Biography Nekrasov studied at the Orthodox theological seminary and from 1874 at the University of Moscow. There he was a pupil of the mathematician Nikolai Vasilievich Bugaev. Several years after his graduation, he became a Privatdozent there in 1885 and, in 1885 or 1886, an associate professor at Moscow University . In 1890 he received a full professorship. In 1893 he became rector. After his term as rector, he actually wanted to retire, but was not allowed to. He also taught 1885–1891 Probability Theory and Higher Mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Land Surveying.
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Arthur Korn
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Arthur Korn was a German physicist, mathematician and inventor. He was involved in the development of the fax machine, specifically the transmission of photographs or telephotography, known as the Bildtelegraph, related to early attempts at developing a practical mechanical television system.
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Domninus of Larissa
420 - 480 (60 years)
Domninus of Larissa was an ancient Hellenistic Syrian mathematician. Life Domninus of Larissa, Syria was, simultaneously with Proclus, a pupil of Syrianus. Domninus is said to have corrupted the doctrines of Plato by mixing up with them his private opinions. This called forth a treatise from Proclus, intended as a statement of the genuine principles of Platonism. Marinus writes about a rivalry between Domninus and Proclus about how Plato's work should be interpreted, [Syrianus] offered to discourse to them on either the Orphic theories or the oracles; but Domninus wanted Orphism, Proclus the oracles, and they had not agreed when Syrianus died...
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Nikolay Gur'yevich Chetaev
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Nikolay Gur'yevich Chetaev was a Russian Soviet mechanician and mathematician. He was born in Karaduli, Laishevskiy uyezd, Kazan province, Russian Empire and died in Moscow, USSR. He belongs to the Kazan school of mathematics.
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Pál Medgyessy
1919 - 1977 (58 years)
Pál Medgyessy was a mathematician, Doctor of Mathematical Sciences . Biography He graduated at the University of Budapest as a student of Eötvös József Collegium. He started his career as a trainee at the Institute of Medical Physics at the University of Debrecen. Due to his illness, his scientific work was slow to develop.
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André Martineau
1930 - 1972 (42 years)
André Martineau was a French mathematician, specializing in mathematical analysis. Martineau studied at the École Normale Supérieure and received there, with Laurent Schwartz as supervisor, his Ph.D. with a thesis on analytic functionals and then worked for several years with Schwartz. Martineau became a professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. Shortly before his 42nd birthday, he died of cancer.
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Omar Khayyam
1048 - 1131 (83 years)
Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī , commonly known as Omar Khayyam , was a polymath, known for his contributions to mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and poetry. He was born in Nishapur, the initial capital of the Seljuk Empire. He lived during the rule of the Seljuk dynasty, around the time of the First Crusade.
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Hilda Phoebe Hudson
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Hilda Phoebe Hudson was an English mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry, in particular on Cremona transformations. Hudson was interested in the link between mathematics and her religious beliefs.
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William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker
1620 - 1684 (64 years)
William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker FRS was an Anglo-Irish peer and mathematician who served as the president of the Royal Society from 1662 to 1677. Best known for introducing Brouncker's formula, he also worked as a civil servant, serving as a commissioner in the Royal Navy. Brouncker was a friend and colleague of Samuel Pepys, and features prominently in the Pepys' diary.
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Lucien Godeaux
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Lucien Godeaux was a prolific Belgian mathematician. His total of more than 1000 papers and books, 669 of which are found in Mathematical Reviews, made him one of the most published mathematicians. He was the sole author of all but one of his papers.
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Eduard Ritter von Weber
1870 - 1934 (64 years)
Eduard Ritter von Weber was a German mathematician and Bavarian Royal Privy Counselor. He was a member of the noble Bavarian knightly family Ritter von Weber. Von Weber attended the and afterward from 1888-1894 pursued studies in mathematics in Munich, Göttingen, and Paris. In 1893 he was awarded the Ph.D. from the University of Munich . Habilitation followed at the University of Munich in 1895, becoming full professor there in 1903. He moved to the University of Würzburg in 1907.
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Johann II Bernoulli
1710 - 1790 (80 years)
Johann II Bernoulli was the youngest of the three sons of the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli. He studied law and mathematics, and, after travelling in France, was for five years professor of eloquence in the university of his native city. In 1736 he was awarded the prize of the French Academy for his suggestive studies of aether. On the death of his father he succeeded him as professor of mathematics in the University of Basel. He was thrice a successful competitor for the prizes of the Academy of Sciences of Paris. His prize subjects were the capstan, the propagation of light, and the magnet.
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C. P. Ramanujam
1938 - 1974 (36 years)
Chakravarthi Padmanabhan Ramanujam was an Indian mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and algebraic geometry. He was elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1973. Like his namesake Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ramanujam also had a very short life.
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Wilhelm Müller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Wilhelm Carl Gottlieb Müller was a German physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He is best known as the successor of Arnold Sommerfeld as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich.
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Ruth Teitelbaum
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Ruth Teitelbaum was one of the first computer programmers in the world. Teitelbaum was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
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John Harrison
1693 - 1776 (83 years)
John Harrison was an English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea. Harrison's solution revolutionized navigation and greatly increased the safety of long-distance sea travel. The problem he solved had been considered so important following the Scilly naval disaster of 1707 that the British Parliament was offering financial rewards of up to £20,000 under the 1714 Longitude Act, though Harrison was never fully able to receive these rewards due to political rivalries.
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Gerrit Bol
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Gerrit Bol was a Dutch mathematician who specialized in geometry. He is known for introducing Bol loops in 1937, and Bol’s conjecture on sextactic points. Life Bol earned his PhD in 1928 at Leiden University under Willem van der Woude. In the 1930s, he worked at the University of Hamburg on the geometry of webs under Wilhelm Blaschke and later projective differential geometry. In 1931 he earned a habilitation.
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Ernst Christian Julius Schering
1833 - 1897 (64 years)
Ernst Christian Julius Schering was a German mathematician. Early life and career Born in 1833 near Bleckede at the Elbe as the son of a forester, he attended Realschule in Lüneburg from 1845 to 1850, where he already showed a certain talent for mathematics. With the intention to engage in architectural engineering, he attended the Polytechnicum in Hannover from 1850 to 1852.
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Kurt Hirsch
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Kurt August Hirsch was a German mathematician who moved to England to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews. His research was in group theory. He also worked to reform mathematics education and became a county chess champion. The Hirsch length and Hirsch–Plotkin radical are named after him.
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Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī
1265 - 1319 (54 years)
Kamal al-Din Hasan ibn Ali ibn Hasan al-Farisi or Abu Hasan Muhammad ibn Hasan According to Encyclopædia Iranica, Kamal al-Din was the most prominent Persian author on optics. Optics His work on optics was prompted by a question put to him concerning the refraction of light. Shirazi advised him to consult the Book of Optics of Ibn al-Haytham , and Farisi made such a deep study of this treatise that Shirazi suggested that he write what is essentially a revision of that major work, which came to be called the Tanqih. Qutb al-Din Al-Shirazi himself was writing a commentary on works of Avicenn...
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Josef Finger
1841 - 1925 (84 years)
Josef Finger was an Austrian physicist and mathematician. Biography Joseph Finger was born the son of a baker in Pilsen. He attended high school in Pilsen. He studied mathematics and physics at Charles University in Prague from 1859 to 1862. In 1865 and for financial reason he acquired the qualification to teach mathematics and physics at secondary schools and went into the teaching profession. On 17 March 1875 Finger received his doctorate at the University of Vienna, in 1876 he was qualified for the subject of analytical mechanics. 1897 Finger publishes "On the internal virial of an elastic body".
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August Leopold Crelle
1780 - 1855 (75 years)
August Leopold Crelle was a German mathematician. He was born in Eichwerder near Wriezen, Brandenburg, and died in Berlin. He is the founder of Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik . He befriended Niels Henrik Abel and published seven of Abel's papers in the first volume of his journal.
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Wilhelm Süss
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Wilhelm Süss was a German mathematician. He was founder and first director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics. Biography He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and died in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
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Johann Friedrich Schultz
1739 - 1805 (66 years)
Johann Friedrich Schultz, also known as Johann Schultz , was a German Enlightenment Protestant theologian, mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as a close personal friend and trusted expositor of Immanuel Kant. Johann Schultz was a Hofprediger and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Königsberg.
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James MacCullagh
1809 - 1847 (38 years)
James MacCullagh was an Irish mathematician. Early life MacCullagh was born in Landahaussy, near Plumbridge, County Tyrone, Ireland, but the family moved to Curly Hill, Strabane when James was about 10. He was the eldest of twelve children and demonstrated mathematical talent at an early age. He entered Trinity College Dublin as a student in 1824, winning a scholarship in 1827 and graduating in 1829.
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Jabir ibn Aflah
1100 - 1150 (50 years)
Abū Muḥammad Jābir ibn Aflaḥ was an Arab Muslim astronomer and mathematician from Seville, who was active in 12th century al-Andalus. His work Iṣlāḥ al-Majisṭi influenced Islamic, Jewish, and Christian astronomers.
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