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,
#11651
Thomas William Edmondson
1869 - 1938 (69 years)
Thomas William Edmondson, Ph. D., was an Anglo-American mathematician, born at Skipton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, England. He graduated from the University of London, studied at Cambridge, and also at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. He was an associate professor at NYU from 1896 to 1905, and a professor of mathematics afterwards. He wrote mathematical textbooks; his publications include:Worked Examples in Coördinate Geometry Mensuration and Spherical Geometry , with W. BriggsDeductions in Euclid He married the former Minnie Ramsden in 1897 in Perth, Ontario.
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Jerzy Słupecki
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Jerzy Słupecki was a Polish mathematician and logician. Life He attended the seminar of, and wrote a 1938 doctorate under, Jan Łukasiewicz. During WWII he was active in Żegota. In 1963, when at Wroclaw University, where he had been since 1945, he became editor of Studia Logica.
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Mary Gertrude Haseman
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Mary Gertrude Haseman was an American mathematician known for her work in knot theory. Biography Mary Gertrude Haseman was born in or near the small town of Linton, Indiana, the seventh of nine children, to Elizabeth Christine and John Dieterich Haseman. Despite being raised on a farm, she and her siblings all pursued higher education; they all attended college, five had master's degrees, and five, including Mary, earned PhDs.
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Carl D. Olds
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Carl Douglas Olds was a New Zealand-born American mathematician specializing in number theory. Biography Carl Olds was born in 1912 in Wanganui, New Zealand. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University, and continued at Stanford as a graduate student, defending his Ph.D. thesis On the Number of Representations of the Square of an Integer as the Sum of an Odd Number of Squares at Stanford University in 1943 under the supervision of James V. Uspensky.
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Estienne de La Roche
1470 - 1530 (60 years)
Estienne de La Roche was a French mathematician. Sometimes known as Estienne de Villefranche, La Roche was born in Lyon, but his family also owned property in Villefranche-sur-Saône, where he lived during his youth. He studied mathematics with Nicolas Chuquet. Having in his possession Chuquet's manuscripts, it is probable that La Roche was on good terms with Chuquet. He taught commercial mathematics in Lyon for 25 years. He is regarded today as a professor of arithmetic .
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Eleanor Pairman
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Eleanor "Nora" Pairman, also known as Nora Brown, was a Scottish mathematician and only the third woman to receive a doctorate in math from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. Later in life she developed novel methods to teach mathematics to blind students.
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Eduard Heis
1806 - 1877 (71 years)
Eduard Heis was a German mathematician and astronomer. He completed his education at the University of Bonn in 1827, then taught mathematics at a school in Cologne. In 1832 he taught at Aachen, and remained there until 1852. He was then appointed by King Frederick William IV to a chair position at the Academy of Münster in 1852. In 1869 he became rector of the Academy.
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Clara Eliza Smith
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
Clara Eliza Smith was an American mathematician specializing in complex analysis who became the Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College. Smith was the daughter of Georgiana and Edward Smith, of Northford, Connecticut. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, then a seminary, while also studying art at Yale University. Her studies in the seminary program included geometry and trigonometry, but the college did not offer degrees at that time. She completed the program in 1885. After working as an art teacher at the Bloomsburg State Normal School in Pennsylvania from 1889 until...
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Jan Piekałkiewicz
1892 - 1943 (51 years)
Jan Piekałkiewicz was a Polish economist and statistician, politician and the Polish Underground State's Government Delegate. Biography Jan Piekałkiewicz was born on the 19 September 1892 in Kursk, to a Polish intelligentsia family. He studied in St. Petersburg and in Poznań.
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Josephine Burns Glasgow
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Josephine Elizabeth Burns Glasgow was an American mathematician whose Ph.D. thesis, "The abstract definitions of the groups of degree 8" was published in the American Journal of Mathematics. She was the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Illinois.
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Honoré Fabri
1607 - 1688 (81 years)
Honoré Fabri was a French Jesuit theologian, also known as Coningius. He was a mathematician, physicist and controversialist. Life He entered the Society of Jesus at Avignon, in 1626. For eight years he taught philosophy and for six years mathematics at the Jesuit college at Lyons, attracting many pupils. Called to Rome, he became the theologian of the court of the papal penitentiary in the Vatican basilica, a position he held for thirty years.
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John of Tynemouth
1300 - 1290 (-10 years)
John of Tynemouth was a 13th-century mathematician and geometer. Little is known of John's background, but he authored De curvis superficiebus or Liber de curvis superficiebus Archimenidis, a tract about Archimedes' measurements of spheres. This is an important work in the history of medieval geometry, as it helped transmit Archimedes' ideas to other medieval scholars. The work itself follows closely Archimedes' own reasoning, but with enough differences to lead modern historians to believe that John's work was dependent on a Greek text from late antiquity.
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Theodor von Oppolzer
1841 - 1886 (45 years)
Theodor von Oppolzer was an Austrian astronomer and mathematician of Bohemian origin. The son of the physician Johann Ritter von Oppolzer, Theodor was born in Prague. He completed his graduate studies in medicine at the University of Vienna, gaining a Ph.D. in 1865. He also owned a private observatory. He began teaching theoretical astronomy and geodesics at the University of Vienna in 1866. By 1875 he was appointed a professor. In 1873 he became the director of the Austrian Geodetic Survey, and in 1886 he was elected president of the International Geodetic Association.
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Niels Nielsen
1865 - 1931 (66 years)
Niels Nielsen was a Danish mathematician who specialised in mathematical analysis. Life and work Nielsen was the son of humble peasants and grew up in the western part of the island of Funen. In 1891 he graduated in mathematics from the University of Copenhagen and in 1895 obtained his doctorate. In 1909 he succeeded Julius Petersen as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen.
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Mary Landers
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Mary Kenny Landers was an American mathematician who taught for many years at Hunter College. She was also known as "an early advocate of academic collective bargaining". Early life and education Mary Kenny was born on February 5, 1905, in Fall River, Massachusetts, one of six children of an Anglo-Irish mailman. After attending public school in Fall River, she became a student at Brown University in 1922. Beyond mathematics, her interests at Brown included violin and debate. After graduating in 1926, she became an Anne Crosby Emery fellow at Brown and earned a master's degree in mathematics t...
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Louise Nevelson
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire , she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home.
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Giorgio Mortara
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Giorgio Mortara was an Italian economist, demographer, and statistician. He was the son of senator Lodovico Mortara, a noted jurist, magistrate and politician. Biography Giorgio held the academic rank of professor at the University of Messina from 1909 up 1914 in Rome and Milan and director of the Giornale degli economisti .
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Humphry Ditton
1675 - 1715 (40 years)
Humphry Ditton was an English mathematician. He was the author of several influential works. Life Ditton was born on 29 May 1675 in Salisbury, the only son of Humphry Ditton, gentleman and ardent nonconformist, and Miss Luttrell of Dunster Castle, near Taunton. He studied theology privately, and was for some time also a dissenting minister, at Tonbridge, where he married a Miss Ball.
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Gertrude Jekyll
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden. Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts.
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Charles Cobb
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Charles Wiggins Cobb was an American mathematician and economist and a 1912 Ph.D. graduate of the University of Michigan. He published many works on both subjects, however he is most famous for developing the Cobb–Douglas production function in economics. He worked on this project with the economist Paul H. Douglas while lecturing at Amherst College in Massachusetts. In 1928, Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas published a study in which they modeled the growth of the American economy during the period 1899–1922. They considered a simplified view of the economy in which production of output is determined by the amount of labor involved and the amount of capital used.
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Ivan Bubnov
1872 - 1919 (47 years)
Ivan Grigoryevich Bubnov was a Russian Empire marine engineer and designer of submarines for the Imperial Russian Navy. Bubnov was born in Nizhny Novgorod and graduated from the Marine Engineering College in Kronstadt in 1891. He graduated from the Nikolayev Marine Academy in 1896. He initially joined the Admiralty Shipyard in Saint Petersburg and worked as a constructor on the battleship Poltava.
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Eelco Alta
1723 - 1798 (75 years)
Eelco Alta was a Frisian clergyman, theologian, and veterinarian. Education Eelco Alta was born in 1723 in the coastal village of Makkum, and studied theology at the University of Franeker from 1737 until 1745, when he started as a minister in the nearby villages of Beers and Jellum. After nine years he moved to the main protestant church of Boazum, where he was to spend almost all of the next fifty years. He was politically active in the last years of the Dutch Republic, siding with the forces of republican "Patriotism", partly for religious reasons. During the royalist backlash of the late...
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Emily Kathryn Wyant
1897 - 1942 (45 years)
Emily Kathryn Wyant was an American mathematician known as the founder of Kappa Mu Epsilon, a mathematical honor society focusing on undergraduate education. Early life and education Wyant was born on January 16, 1897, in Ipava, Illinois. Her father was a student in Illinois and later a shopkeeper in Bolivar, Missouri, where she graduated from high school in 1914. She attended the University of Missouri on a part time and summer basis while supporting herself as a school teacher, finally completing a bachelor's degree in education in 1921.
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Georgia Caldwell Smith
1909 - 1961 (52 years)
Georgia Caldwell Smith was one of the first African-American women to gain a bachelor's degree in mathematics. When she was 51, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, one of the earliest by an African-American woman, awarded posthumously in 1961. Smith was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College.
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Giovanni Camillo Glorioso
1572 - 1643 (71 years)
Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. He was a friend of Marino Ghetaldi and successor of Galileo Galilei in Pisa, then in Padua. Life Giovanni Camillo Glorioso was born in the village of Mercato or Santa Maria a Vico of Giffoni Valle Piana. He had a correspondence with Galileo Galilei in 1604 and he replaced him at the University of Padua, with an income of 350 florins per year, in 1613. He led observations on the 1618 comet, on Mars, and on some aspects of Saturn. He came closer to Antonio Santini and he had contrasts with Scipione Chiaramonti and his successor at the university of Pisa, Barthélemy Souvey, student of Fortunio Liceti.
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Alphonse Mucha
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Alfons Maria Mucha , known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
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Frances Hardcastle
1866 - 1941 (75 years)
Frances Hardcastle was an English mathematician, in 1894 one of the founding members of the American Mathematical Society. Her work included contributions to the theory of point groups. Biography Born in Writtle, just outside Chelmsford, Essex, Hardcastle was a daughter of Henry Hardcastle, a barrister, by his marriage in 1865 to Maria Sophia Herschel, daughter of the astronomer, mathematician, and chemist Sir John Herschel.
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Pierre Humbert
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Pierre Humbert was a French mathematician who worked on the theory of elliptic functions and introduced Humbert polynomials. He was the son of the mathematician Georges Humbert and married the daughter of Henri Andoyer.
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Andries Mac Leod
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Andries Hugo Donald Mac Leod was a Belgian-Swedish philosopher and mathematician. Andries Mac Leod was born in Ledeberg, a suburb of Ghent, as a son of Julius Mac Leod, a botanist and professor at Ghent University, and of Fanny Mac Leod born Maertens, who was translator from English into Dutch of two books by Kropotkin.
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Giulio Pittarelli
1852 - 1934 (82 years)
Giulio Pittarelli was an Italian mathematician, specializing in descriptive geometry and algebraic geometry. Pittarelli received from the University of Naples his laurea in mathematics in 1874 and in engineering in 1876. For many years he was a professor of descriptive geometry at the Sapienza University of Rome. In addition to his mathematical career, he was a painter, an excellent pianist, and an author, who wrote a biography of Luigi Cremona.
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Jakob Amsler-Laffon
1823 - 1912 (89 years)
Jakob Amsler-Laffon was a mathematician, physicist, engineer and the founder of his own factory. Amsler was born on the Stalden near the village of Schinznach in the district of Brugg, canton Aargau, and died in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. His father was Jakob Amsler-Amsler .
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Arthur Buchheim
1859 - 1888 (29 years)
Arthur Buchheim was a British mathematician. His father Carl Adolf Buchheim was professor of German language at King's College London. After attending the City of London School, Arthur Buchheim obtained an open scholarship at New College, Oxford, where he was the favorite student of Henry John Stephen Smith. He then studied at the University of Leipzig as a student of Felix Klein. Eventually, he became mathematical master at the Manchester Grammar School.
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Paolo Straneo
1874 - 1968 (94 years)
Paolo Pietro Straneo was an Italian mathematical physicist. Biography Straneo studied at ETH Zurich, where he met and was a friend of Einstein. In 1897 he received his Ph.D. in natural philosophy of the University of Zurich. From 1899 he was a libero docente in mathematical physics and for some years he was a docente incaricato in mathematical physics at the University of Turin. After a period of working as a libero professionista , in 1924 he again became a libero docente and was put in charge of mathematical physics at the University of Genoa. There, from 1925 he was a professor ordinari...
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Francesco Barozzi
1537 - 1604 (67 years)
Francesco Barozzi was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and humanist. Life Barozzi was born on the island of Crete, at Candia , at the time a Venetian possession. He was the son of Iacopo Barozzi, a Venetian nobleman, and Fiordiligi Dorro. Barozzi was educated at Padua, and studied mathematics at the University of Padua. The estate on Crete, inherited from his father, yielded him an income of 4,000 ducats, though he seems to have lived in Venice for most of his life. He was thus able to function as an independent scholar, and does not appear to have held any academic posts, although h...
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Amédée Mannheim
1831 - 1906 (75 years)
Victor Mayer Amédée Mannheim was the inventor of the modern slide rule. Around 1850, he introduced a new scale system that used a runner to perform calculations. This type of slide rule became known under the name of its inventor: the Mannheim.
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Mary Emily Sinclair
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Mary Emily Sinclair was an American mathematician whose research concerned algebraic surfaces and the calculus of variations. She was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, and became Clark Professor of Mathematics at Oberlin College.
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Giuseppe Biancani
1566 - 1624 (58 years)
Giuseppe Biancani, SJ was an Italian Jesuit astronomer, mathematician, and selenographer, after whom the crater Blancanus on the Moon is named. Biography Giuseppe Biancani was born in Bologna in 1566, entered the Jesuit Order in 1592, and studied at the College of Brescia with Marco Antonio De Dominis, and at the Academy of Mathematics in the Roman College with Clavius. Between 1596 and 1599 he lived in Padua, where he completed his studies and befriended Galileo, who had been appointed professor of mathematics at the local university in 1592. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Republic...
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James Williamson
1725 - Present (301 years)
James Williamson FRSE was a Scottish minister and mathematician, and joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life He was born in Dumfriesshire in 1725 the son of James Williamson of Tynron.
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Alexander Witting
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Carl Johann Adolf Alexander Witting was a German mathematician. Family Witting was born in Dresden as the first child of the musician Carl Witting and the painter Minna Witting, née Japha . Alexander Witting married the pianist Sophie Sebass in 1889. They had two daughters and a son: Tillyta , Lotte and the physicist Rudolf Witting . In view of the artistically affected family environment – father musician, mother painter, aunt Louise Japha pianist, sister Agnes Witting singer, brother Walther Witting painter – it does not surprise that Alexander Witting also painted sometimes and regula...
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Henry Farquharson
1674 - 1739 (65 years)
Henry Farquharson was a teacher who pioneered the study of mathematics in Russia. He was recruited by Peter the Great, who sought to introduce Western ideas and technology into Russia. He moved to Moscow where he established a school and later established a naval academy in Saint Petersburg. Farquharson had a profound effect on the intellectual life of Russia, not only by introducing mathematical ideas but by helping to create the first generation of explorers, surveyors, cartographers and astronomers.
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Isaac Barrow
1613 - 1680 (67 years)
Isaac Barrow was an English clergyman and Bishop, consecutively, of Sodor and Man and St Asaph, and also served as Governor of the Isle of Man. He was the founder of the Bishop Barrow Trust. During his time as Bishop of Sodor and Man and Governor of the Isle of Man, he enacted significant social, political, and ecclesiastical reforms. He is sometimes confused with his more famous namesake and nephew, Isaac Barrow , the mathematician and theologian.
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John M. Blatt
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
John Markus Blatt was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. Life Blatt was the son of a successful physician in Vienna. In 1938 the family immigrated to the US as Jews fleeing the Anschluss. Blatt studied physics at the University of Cincinnati with bachelor's degree in 1942 and received in 1946 two doctorates in physics, one from Cornell University and the other from Princeton University. He then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote, with Victor Weisskopf, the textbook Theoretical Nuclear Physics, which became a standard introduction to the subject. From 1948 to 1953 Blatt was at the University of Illinois, where the Illiac computer was being built.
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Eduard Selling
1834 - 1920 (86 years)
Eduard Selling was a German mathematician and inventor of calculating machines. Selling studied mathematics at the Universities of Göttingen and Munich . He obtained the doctorate in Munich in 1859, under the supervision of Bernhard Riemann. On recommendation of Leopold Kronecker he became professor extraordinarius of mathematics at the University of Würzburg in 1860 – against the will of the philosophical faculty and the mathematics professor Aloys Mayr. There, he also taught astronomy and became conservator-restorer at the astronomical department in 1879. In 1873 he wrote an important paper...
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Holbrook Mann MacNeille
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Holbrook Mann MacNeille was an American mathematician who worked for the United States Atomic Energy Commission before becoming the first Executive Director of the American Mathematical Society. Personal life MacNeille was born May 11, 1907, in New York City and was raised in Summit, New Jersey, the first of two brothers. His father was Perry Robinson MacNeille, an architect and urban planner and his mother Clausine Mann MacNeille who was active on the Summit Board of Education. His aunt was the Jungian analyst Kristine Mann.
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William Charles Brenke
1874 - 1964 (90 years)
William Charles Brenke was an American mathematician who introduced Brenke polynomials and wrote several undergraduate textbooks. He received his PhD in mathematics at Harvard under Maxime Bôcher. Brenke taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln mathematics department from 1908 to 1944 and was chair of the department from 1934 to 1944. He retired in 1943 but his successor, Ralph Hull, was put on official leave to do war work and returned from leave in 1945.
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Theophilos Corydalleus
1570 - 1646 (76 years)
Theophilos Corydalleus was a Greek Neo-Aristotelian philosopher who initiated the philosophical movement known as Korydalism or Corydalism. He was also an Eastern Orthodox cleric , physician, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, author, educator and geographer. His philosophical thought kept influencing Greek education for two hundred years after its inception.
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Robert Smithson
1938 - 1973 (35 years)
Robert Smithson was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums and is held in public collections. He was one of the founders of the land art movement whose best known work is the Spiral Jetty .
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Hermann Boerner
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Hermann Boerner, also written "Börner" was a German mathematician who worked on variation calculus, complex analysis, and group representation theory. Publications Boerner Eingang zur VariationsrechnungJahresbericht DMV 1953Boerner aus dem Stokesschen SatzMathematische Zeitschrift volume 46, 1940, page 709Boerner die Legendreschen Bedingungen und die Feldtheorie in der Variationsrechnung der mehrfachen IntegraleMathem.Zeitschrift 1940, page 720Boerner die Extremalen und geodätischen Felder in der Variationsrechnung der mehrfachen IntegraleMathematische Annalen volume 112, 1936, page 187Boerne...
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John Speidell
1600 - 1634 (34 years)
John Speidell was an English mathematician. He is known for his early work on the calculation of logarithms. Speidell was a mathematics teacher in London and one of the early followers of the work John Napier had previously done on natural logarithms. In 1619 Speidell published a table entitled "New Logarithmes" in which he calculated the natural logarithms of sines, tangents, and secants.
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Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
1767 - 1794 (27 years)
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just , sometimes nicknamed the Archangel of Terror, was a French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, a Jacobin club leader, and a major figure of the French Revolution. He was a close friend of Maximilien Robespierre and served as his most trusted ally during the period of Jacobin rule in the French First Republic. Saint-Just worked as a legislator and a military commissar, but he achieved a lasting reputation as the face of the Reign of Terror. He publicly delivered the condemnatory reports that emanated fr...
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