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,
#11701
Johannes Schilling
1828 - 1910 (82 years)
Johannes Schilling was a German sculptor. Life and work Johannes Schilling was the youngest of five children. A year after his birth, his family moved to Dresden, where he grew up. At the age of six, he was sent to a private school and, at fourteen, attended the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts where he was taught drawing by Karl Gottlieb Peschel. After graduating in 1845, he became one of the master pupils in the studio of sculptor Ernst Rietschel. In 1851 and 1852, he went to Berlin to continue his studies with Christian Daniel Rauch and Friedrich Drake.
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Georg Ferdinand Howaldt
1802 - 1883 (81 years)
Georg Ferdinand Howaldt was a German sculptor. Biography Howaldt was born in Braunschweig as the son of the silversmith David Ferdinand Howaldt. He learned silversmithing and went to Nuremberg, where he became friends with the sculptor Jacob Daniel Burgschmiet, who convinced him to change to modelling and sculpture. He became a teacher in modelling there and continued teaching modelling when he returned to Braunschweig in 1836. The success out of his cooperation with the famous sculptor Ernst Rietschel allowed him to start his own foundry casting sculptures for many known German sculptors of the nineteenth century.
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Sir William Fergusson, 1st Baronet
1808 - 1877 (69 years)
Sir William Fergusson, 1st Baronet FRCS FRS FRSE was a Scottish surgeon. Biography William Fergusson son of James Fergusson of Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, was born at Prestonpans, East Lothian on 20 March 1808, and was educated first at Lochmaben and afterwards at the high school and University of Edinburgh. At the age of fifteen he was placed by his own desire in a lawyer's office, but the work proved uncongenial, and at seventeen he exchanged law for medicine, in accordance with his father's original wishes. He became an assiduous pupil of Dr. Robert Knox the anatomist, who was much pleased w...
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John Martin
1789 - 1854 (65 years)
John Martin was an English painter, engraver, and illustrator. He was celebrated for his typically vast and dramatic paintings of religious subjects and fantastic compositions, populated with minute figures placed in imposing landscapes. Martin's paintings, and the prints made from them, enjoyed great success with the general public, with Thomas Lawrence referring to him as "the most popular painter of his day". He was also lambasted by John Ruskin and other critics.
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Johannes Finsterbusch
1855 - Present (171 years)
Johannes F. Finsterbusch was a German mathematician, known for his work on projective geometry. Finsterbusch studied from 1873 to 1880 at Dresden and Leipzig. From 1882 to 1900 he taught as a schoolmaster at the Realschule in Werdau. From 1900 he taught as a professor at the Gymnasium in Zwickau. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1904 at Heidelberg, in 1908 at Rome, and in 1912 at Cambridge UK.
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Ahmad al-Buni
1200 - 1225 (25 years)
Sharaf al-Din or Shihab al-Din or Muḥyi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Aḥmad ibn Ali ibn Yusuf al-Qurashi al-Sufi, better known as Ahmad al-Buni , was a mathematician and philosopher and a well known Sufi. Very little is known about him. His writings deal with the esoteric value of letters and topics relating to mathematics, sihr and spirituality. Born in Buna , al-Buni lived in Egypt and learned from many eminent Sufi masters of his time.
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William Parkinson Wilson
1826 - 1874 (48 years)
William Parkinson Wilson was an astronomer and professor of mathematics who was born in England but spent most of his career in Australia. Life and career William Parkinson Wilson was born in Peterborough, Northamptonshire to John Wilson, a silversmith, and his wife Elizabeth . He attended Cathedral Grammar School in Peterborough and in 1843 won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge where he earned his BA in 1847. In 1849 he became First Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College, Belfast . During his six years there he worked tirelessly to establish a Queens College astronomical observatory.
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Barry Pennington
1923 - 1968 (45 years)
William Barry Pennington was a British mathematician best known for his work on Ramanujan's tau function. Pennington was born in Bawtry, Yorkshire. He was educated at Loughborough Grammar School, and Jesus College, Cambridge. During World War II he served as a Radar Officer in the RNVR, before returning to Cambridge to complete his doctorate under Albert Edward Ingham. After completing his doctorate, he spent two years at Harvard University, returning to a Research Fellowship at Jesus in 1952. He was appointed Reader in mathematics at Westfield College, University of London in 1953. In 1...
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Martin Krause
1851 - 1920 (69 years)
Martin Krause was a German mathematician, specializing in analysis. Biography Martin Krause, the son of a landowner, studied from 1870 to 1874 at the University of Königsberg, where he was taught by Friedrich Julius Richelot and Franz Ernst Neumann, and also in Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1873 Krause received his doctorate from Heidelberg University. His doctoral thesis Zur Transformation der Modulargleichungen der elliptischen Functionen was supervised by Leo Königsberger. In 1875 Krause habilitated at Heidelberg University with thesis Über die Discriminante der Modulargleichungen der elliptischen Functionen.
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Nikolai Andreevich Lebedev
1919 - 1982 (63 years)
Nikolai Andreevich Lebedev was a Soviet mathematician who worked on complex function theory and geometric function theory. Jointly with Isaak Milin, he proved the Lebedev–Milin inequalities that were used in the proof of the Bieberbach conjecture.
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Abul Kalam Azad
1933 - 1971 (38 years)
Abul Kalam Azad was a Bangladesh mathematician. He was a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society of London, the Applied Mathematical Society of the United Kingdom and the American Meteorological Society. During the Bangladesh Liberation war on 15 December 1971, a group of local accomplices of the Pakistan Army abducted him from his home.
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Henry Priestley
1883 - 1932 (49 years)
Henry James Priestley was the first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Queensland. Education Henry James Priestley was born in Crouch Hill, London. He was educated at Mill Hill School and Jesus College, University of Cambridge, where he gained his B.A. with honours first class . He was fifth wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1905. In 1909 he received his M.A. from Cambridge.
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David Guest
1911 - 1938 (27 years)
David Guest was a British mathematician and philosopher who volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in Spain in 1938. He was the uncle of American-British musician, actor and director Christopher Guest.
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Serenus of Antinoöpolis
300 - 360 (60 years)
Serenus of Antinoöpolis was a Greek mathematician from the Late Antique Thebaid in Roman Egypt. Life and work Serenus came either from Antinoeia or from Antinoöpolis, a city in Egypt founded by Hadrian on top of an older settlement. Two sources confirm that he was born in Antinoöpolis. It was once believed that he was born in Antissa, but this has been shown to have been based on an error.
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Victor Jamet
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Émile Victor Jamet was a French mathematician. Education and career After study at ENS, Jamet became on 19 September 1876 a lecturer in mathematics at the lycée de Saint-Brieuc. On 21 September 1877 he became a professor of mathematics at the lycée de Nice. On 24 October 1878 he became a lecturer, with the title of substitute teacher, having the duties of a professor of mathematics at the lycée de Toulouse. On 6 September 1879 he became a professor of mathematics at the lycée de Pau. On 10 September 1881 he became a professor of mathematics at the lycée de Nantes. On 30 August 1889 he became ...
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Robert Forsyth Scott
1849 - 1933 (84 years)
Sir Robert Forsyth Scott was a mathematician, barrister and Master of St John's College, Cambridge Life Scott was born in Leith, near Edinburgh, the eldest son of Reverend George Scott, a Minister in the church at Dairsie and Mary Forsyth, daughter of the Edinburgh advocate Robert Forsyth.
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Anton Hanak
1875 - 1934 (59 years)
Anton Hanak was an Austrian sculptor and art Professor. His works tend to have a visionary-symbolic character, related to Expressionism. Biography He studied with Edmund von Hellmer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and was associated with the Vienna Secession. He was also a member of the Vienna Werkstätte, as well as having been a founding member of the . In 1913, he became a teacher at the Kunstgewerbeschule and, after 1932, a Professor at the Academy. His students included Karl Duldig, Fritz Wotruba, Oskar Icha, Ena Rottenberg, , , , and Pepi Weixlgärtner-Neutra.
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Joseph-François Marie
1738 - 1801 (63 years)
Joseph-François Marie was a French mathematician. He was an abbot and professor of mathematics at the Collège Mazarin. Works
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James Thomson
1788 - 1850 (62 years)
James Thomson was a British engraver, known for his portraits. He completed his apprenticeship in engraving and then established himself independently, following the dot and stipple style. His engravings and paintings featured both leading figures of his day and those of previous periods.
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John Hoskin
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
John Hoskin was a British sculptor from Cheltenham. He began drawing when he returned from Germany after serving in the Second World War. Terry Frost, a painter from the St. Ives school encouraged him to become a sculptor. John while working as an architect's draftsman but longing to become an artist, knew of the group working in St.Ives and decided to hitch-hike there one day. By a remarkable co-incidence, he was picked up and given a lift by Terry. By the time they arrived, John knew being a sculptor was his destiny. It was he that said "as if up until that journey my life had been playing ...
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Charles J. Mendelsohn
1880 - 1939 (59 years)
Charles Jastrow Mendelsohn was an American cryptographer and classicist. He was the only child of Rabbi Samuel Mendelsohn and Esther Jastrow. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. Education He graduated from the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia in 1896. He was a Harrison Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1900 and a PhD in 1904. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He joined the faculty of College of the City of New York as a tutor in Greek in 1905, becoming an instructor in 1907. He was a professor of ancient languages in 1917.
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Howard Wright Alexander
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Howard Wright Alexander was a Canadian-American mathematician. Alexander emigrated from Canada to the United States in 1937. He received his Ph.D. in 1939 from Princeton University. As a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector during World War II and did alternative national service. At Earlham College he became an associate professor of mathematics in 1952 and retired there in 1976 as professor emeritus. He was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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William Percival Evans
1864 - 1959 (95 years)
William Percival Evans was a New Zealand chemist who specialised in the study of local brown coals. Biography Born in Melbourne, Australia to an English vicar, Evans moved to New Zealand with his family and they settled at Wakefield, south of Nelson. He was educated at Nelson College from 1876 to 1880, and then studied chemistry and mathematics at Canterbury University College, from where he graduated MA with first class honours in 1885. He completed a PhD in chemistry at the University of Giessen in Germany.
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Petrus de Dacia
1300 - 1400 (100 years)
Petrus de Dacia, also called Philomena and Peder Nattergal , was a Danish scholar who lived in the 13th century. He worked mainly in Paris and Italy, writing in Latin. He published a calendar of new moon dates for the years 1292-1367. In 1292, he published a book on mathematics that contained a new method for the calculation of cubic roots. He also described a mechanical instrument to predict solar and lunar eclipses as seen from Paris.
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Joseph Alphonso Pierce
1902 - 1969 (67 years)
Joseph Alphonso Pierce, Sr. was an American mathematician and statistician. He was one of the first African-Americans to earn a PhD in mathematics in the United States. He was an educator who had a long career as teacher, administrator, and researcher.
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Thomas Hill
1818 - 1891 (73 years)
Thomas Hill was an American Unitarian clergyman, mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and educator. Biography Taught to read at an early age, Hill read voraciously and was well regarded for his capacious and accurate memory. His father taught him botany, and he took a delight in nature and devised scientific instruments, one that calculated eclipses and was subsequently awarded the Scott Medal by the Franklin Institute.
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John Alexander Third
1865 - 1948 (83 years)
John Alexander Third was a Scottish mathematician. Life and work Third, son of a stonemason, was educated at Robert Gordon's College before entering in 1885 in the University of Aberdeen where he graduated D.Sc in 1889, after spending some time studying in Jena, Germany. He was appointed rector of Campbeltown Grammar School and, five years later, in 1895, headmaster of Spier's School.
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Giovanni di Casali
1320 - 1375 (55 years)
Giovanni di Casali was a friar in the Franciscan Order, a natural philosopher and a theologian, author of works on theology and science, and a papal legate. He was born in Casale Monferrato around 1320 and entered the Franciscan order in the Genoese province. He was lecturer in the Franciscan stadium at Assisi from 1335 to 1340. He subsequently was lector at Cambridge ca. 1340 to 1341, where he encountered the mathematical physics developed by the Oxford Calculators. He was also an inquisitor in Florence, and a lector in Bologna from 1346 to ca. 1352. In 1375 Pope Gregory XI appointed him ...
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Robert William Chapman
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Sir Robert William Chapman MIEAust was an Australian mathematician and engineer. History Chapman was born in Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, England, eldest son of Charles Chapman , a currier from Melbourne, Australia, and his wife Matilda, née Harrison . His parents returned to Melbourne in 1876, where he was educated at Wesley College and the University of Melbourne, graduating MA and BCE with first class honours in Physics and Mathematics.
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Karl von der Mühll
1841 - 1912 (71 years)
Karl von der Mühll was a Swiss mathematician and physicist. He was born into the Von der Mühll family, of the Basel patriciate , to Karl Georg and Emilie Merian, of the Merian family, a granddaughter of Peter Merian.
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Christian Wurstisen
1544 - 1588 (44 years)
Christian Wurstisen was a mathematician, theologian, historian from Basel. His name is also given as Wursteisen, Wurzticius, Ursticius, Urstisius, or Urstis. Life In 1565, he became professor of mathematics at the Basel University, and in 1585 professor of theology. The next year, the city magistrate appointed him to the academy as a town historian, a position he held until his death. He was buried in Münster.
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Walter Drowley Filmer
1865 - 1944 (79 years)
Walter Drowley Filmer was an early pioneer of X-rays in Australia, a wireless engineer, for a time ran the British Royal Train, and a world class entomologist that discovered several new species in his homeland. Filmer was a naturalist and established a private collection at his residence that thousands of people visited.
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Burchard de Volder
1643 - 1709 (66 years)
Burchard de Volder was a Dutch physicist. Biography He was born in a Mennonite family in Amsterdam. He earned an M.A. in philosophy at the University of Utrecht under in 1660. He earned his medical doctorate from the University of Leiden under Franciscus Sylvius in 1664. He became professor of physics at Leiden University in 1670. Thanks to the efforts of the Volder, a physics laboratory at the University of Leiden was established in 1675. He collected measuring instruments of all kinds and performed many physics demonstrations, particularly those illustrating the discoveries of Robert Boyle.
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Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
1292 - 1350 (58 years)
Shams ad-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Ayyūb az-Zurʿī d-Dimashqī l-Ḥanbalī , commonly known as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya or Ibn al-Qayyim for short, or reverentially as Imam Ibn al-Qayyim in Sunni tradition, was an important medieval Islamic jurisconsult, theologian, and spiritual writer. Belonging to the Hanbali school of orthodox Sunni jurisprudence, of which he is regarded as "one of the most important thinkers," Ibn al-Qayyim was also the foremost disciple and student of Ibn Taymiyyah, with whom he was imprisoned in 1326 for dissenting against established tradition during Ib...
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Franz Heinrich Reusch
1823 - 1900 (77 years)
Franz Heinrich Reusch was an Old Catholic theologian. He was born at Brilon, in Westphalia, studied general literature at Paderborn, and theology at Bonn, Tübingen and Munich. The friend and pupil of Döllinger, he took his degree of Doctor in Theology at Munich. He was ordained a priest in 1849, and was immediately made chaplain at Cologne. In 1854 he became Privatdozent in the exegesis of the Old Testament in the Catholic Theological Faculty at Bonn; in 1858 he was made extraordinary, and in 1861 ordinary, professor of theology in the same university. From 1866 to 1877 he was editor of the B...
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John Watt Butters
1863 - 1946 (83 years)
John Watt Butters FRSE FRSGS was a Scottish mathematician who served as Rector of Ardrossan Academy from 1899 to 1928. Early life and education He was born in Edinburgh in 1863, the son of Isabella Watt and John Butters, a tailor. His early education was at the Old High School in Edinburgh.
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Heinrich Behnke
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Heinrich Adolph Louis Behnke was a German mathematician and rector at the University of Münster. Life and career He was born into a Lutheran family in Horn, a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the University of Göttingen and submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Hamburg. He was noted for work on complex analysis with Henri Cartan and Peter Thullen. His first wife, Aenne Albersheim, was Jewish, but she died soon after the birth of their son. He was concerned about his son's ethnicity during the Nazi period. In 1936 he was elected a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Le...
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Ernst Anton Henrik Sinding
1839 - 1924 (85 years)
Ernst Anton Henrik Sinding was a Norwegian school director. Personal life He was born in Larvik as a son of vicar Otto Ludvig Sinding and Dorothea Magdalene Lammers. He was a brother of Elisabeth Sinding and Gustav Adolf Sinding, a nephew of Gustav Adolph Lammers and Matthias Wilhelm Sinding and a first cousin of Alfred Sinding-Larsen and the three siblings Christian, Otto and Stephan Sinding.
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Erich Hecke
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
Erich Hecke was a German mathematician known for his work in number theory and the theory of modular forms. Biography Hecke was born in Buk, Province of Posen, German Empire . He obtained his doctorate in Göttingen under the supervision of David Hilbert.
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Paola Sebastiani
Paola Sebastiani is a biostatistician and a professor at Boston University working in the field of genetic epidemiology, building prognostic models that can be used for the dissection of complex traits. Her research interests include Bayesian modeling of biomedical data, particularly genetic and genomic data.
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George Gallup
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. Life and career Gallup was born in Jefferson, Iowa, the son of Nettie Quella and George Henry Gallup, a dairy farmer. As a teen, George Jr., known then as "Ted", would deliver milk and used his salary to start a newspaper at the high school, where he also played football. His higher education took place at the University of Iowa, where he was a football player, a member of the Iowa Beta chapter of the Si...
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Erhard Schmidt
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Erhard Schmidt was a Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century. Schmidt was born in Tartu , in the Governorate of Livonia .
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Aleksandr Khinchin
1894 - 1959 (65 years)
Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin was a Soviet mathematician and one of the most significant contributors to the Soviet school of probability theory. Due to romanization conventions, his name is sometimes written as "Khinchin" and other times as "Khintchine".
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Heinz Rutishauser
1918 - 1970 (52 years)
Heinz Rutishauser was a Swiss mathematician and a pioneer of modern numerical mathematics and computer science. Life Rutishauser's father died when he was 13 years old and his mother died three years later, so together with his younger brother and sister he went to live in their uncle's home. From 1936, Rutishauser studied mathematics at the ETH Zürich where he graduated in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he was assistant of Walter Saxer at the ETH, and from 1945 to 1948, a mathematics teacher in Glarisegg and Trogen. In 1948, he received his Doctor of Philosophy from ETH with a well-received thesi...
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Hans Petersson
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Hans Petersson was a German mathematician. He introduced the Petersson inner product and is also known for the Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture. See also Weil–Petersson metric
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Charles Loewner
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Charles Loewner was an American mathematician. His name was Karel Löwner in Czech and Karl Löwner in German. Karl Loewner was born into a Jewish family in Lany, about 30 km from Prague, where his father Sigmund Löwner was a store owner.
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Mary Cartwright
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known as chaos theory. Along with J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.
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Joseph Miller Thomas
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Joseph Miller Thomas was an American mathematician, known for the Thomas decomposition of algebraic and differential systems. Thomas received his Ph.D., supervised by Frederick Wahn Beal, from the University of Pennsylvania with thesis Congruences of Circles, Studied with reference to the Surface of Centers. He was a mathematics professor at Duke University for many years. His graduate students include Mabel Griffin and Ruth W. Stokes. In 1935, he was one of the founders of the Duke Mathematical Journal. For the academic year 1936–1937, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced...
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L. E. J. Brouwer
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer , usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as the founder of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.
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Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski FRS was a German mathematician. Life Rogosinski was born in Breslau, into a Jewish family. His father, Hermann Rogosinski was Counsel in Wroclaw. Rogosinski studied at Mary Magdalen School from 1900 until 1913. He attended the University of Breslau, University of Freiburg and University of Göttingen, with Edmund Landau. His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which Rogosinski served as a medic.
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