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,
#11751
Helen Abbot Merrill
1864 - 1949 (85 years)
Helen Abbot Merrill was an American mathematician, educator and textbook author. Biography Merrill was born on March 30, 1864, in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey; her father was a New Jersey insurance claims adjustor of colonial stock. She moved to Massachusetts as a child. She entered Wellesley College in 1882, intending to major in Greek and Latin, but switching to mathematics after one year, and graduated in 1886. In 1893 she began teaching at Wellesley while also studying and guest lecturing abroad. In 1903 she earned a PhD in mathematics at Yale under the direction of James Pierpont. In 1920 she was appointed vice-president of the Mathematical Association of America.
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Magnus Georg Paucker
1787 - 1855 (68 years)
Magnus Georg von Paucker was a Baltic German astronomer and mathematician and the first Demidov Prize winner in 1832 for his work Handbuch der Metrologie Rußlands und seiner deutschen Provinzen. Biography Paucker was born in the small Estonian village of Sankt Simonis . In 1805, he began his studies in astronomy and physics at the University of Dorpat, where his professors included Georg Friedrich Parrot and Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff. Between 1808 and 1809, Paucker took part in the surveying of the Emajõgi river which was the first geodetic expedition on the territory of Estonia. In 1809 ...
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Hermann Kober
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Hermann Kober was a Jewish-German mathematician who introduced Erdélyi–Kober operators. He taught , up to the early 1960s, at some of the King Edward VI Foundation schools in Birmingham.
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Luigi Amoroso
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Luigi Amoroso was an Italian neoclassical economist influenced by Vilfredo Pareto. He provided support for and influenced the economic policy during the fascist regime. Work The microeconomical concept of the Amoroso–Robinson relation is named after him : according to paper he is one of the first economists to have studied the dynamical equilibrium theory by using an analogy between economic systems and classical mechanics, thus applying to theories of economical behaviour mathematical tools as the calculus of variation. In his young years he contributed to the theory of functions of several...
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Alberto Giacometti
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.
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L. M. Milne-Thomson
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Louis Melville Milne-Thomson CBE FRSE RAS was an English applied mathematician who wrote several classic textbooks on applied mathematics, including The Calculus of Finite Differences, Theoretical Hydrodynamics, and Theoretical Aerodynamics. He is also known for developing several mathematical tables such as Jacobian Elliptic Function Tables. The Milne-Thomson circle theorem and the Milne-Thomson method for finding a holomorphic function are named after him. Milne-Thomson was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1952.
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Bertel Thorvaldsen
1770 - 1844 (74 years)
Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen was a Danish and Icelandic sculptor and medalist of international fame, who spent most of his life in Italy. Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen into a working-class Danish/Icelandic family, and was accepted to the Royal Danish Academy of Art at the age of eleven. Working part-time with his father, who was a wood carver, Thorvaldsen won many honors and medals at the academy. He was awarded a stipend to travel to Rome and continue his education.
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Arthur Stafford Hathaway
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Arthur Stafford Hathaway was an American mathematician. Arthur was born September 15, 1855, in Keeler, Michigan. A student at Cornell University, Hathaway earned a bachelor's degree in 1879. For two years he was instructor in mathematics at Friends High School in Baltimore. Hathaway studied with James Joseph Sylvester at Johns Hopkins University. From Sylvester's lectures he learned some number theory and published notes on congruences.
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Paolo Frisi
1728 - 1784 (56 years)
Paolo Frisi was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. Biography Frisi was born in Melegnano in 1728; his sibling Antonio Francesco, born in 1735, went on to be a historian. Frisi was educated at the local Barnabite monastery and afterwards in that of Padua. When twenty-one years of age he composed a treatise on the figure of the earth, and the reputation which he soon acquired led to his appointment by the King of Sardinia to the professorship of philosophy in the College of Casale. His friendship with Radicati, a man of liberal opinions, occasioned Frisi's removal by his clerical superi...
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Constantin Le Paige
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
Constantin Marie Le Paige was a Belgian mathematician. Born in Liège, Belgium, Le Paige began studying mathematics in 1869 at the University of Liège. After studying analysis under Professor Eugène Charles Catalan, Le Paige became a professor at the Université de Liège in 1882.
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Thyra Eibe
1866 - 1955 (89 years)
Thyra Eibe was a Danish mathematician and translator, the first woman to earn a mathematics degree from the University of Copenhagen. She is known for her translation of Euclid's Elements into the Danish Language.
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Feodor Deahna
1815 - 1844 (29 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Feodor Deahna was a German mathematician. He is known for providing proof of what is now known as Frobenius theorem in differential topology, which he published in Crelle's Journal in 1840.
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John Franklin
1786 - 1847 (61 years)
Sir John Franklin was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. After serving in wars against Napoleonic France and the United States, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later and the ent...
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Thomas Barker
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Thomas Barker was a Scottish mathematician, professor of pure mathematics at Owens College. Life Born 9 September 1838, he was son of Thomas Barker, farmer, of Murcar, Balgonie, near Aberdeen, and of his wife Margaret. Three other children died in infancy. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, and at King's College in the same town, where he graduated in 1857 with distinction in mathematics.
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Ivan Zhegalkin
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Zhegalkin was a Russian and Soviet mathematician. He is best known for his formulation of Boolean algebra as the theory of the ring of integers mod 2, via what are now called Zhegalkin polynomials.
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Joseph Liberman
1917 - 1941 (24 years)
Joseph Liberman was a Soviet mathematician, a student of Aleksandrov, best known for Liberman's lemma. Biography In 1936 he entered Leningrad State University as one of the winners of the first city Mathematical Olimpiad.
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Anton von Braunmühl
1853 - 1908 (55 years)
Johann Anton Edler von Braunmühl was a German historian of mathematics and mathematician who worked on synthetic geometry and trigonometry. Braunmühl was born in Tiflis but came from a Bavarian family and his father had gone as an architect to build a palace. The death of his father in 1856 led to the mother and family moving to Munich where he went to school. His mother died in 1866 after which he was taken care of by an uncle. He passed school in 1873 and joined the University of Munich where he studied physics under G. Bauer, L. von Seidel, J. von Lamont, Philip Von Jolly, Friedrich Narr and history under M.
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Pierre Massé
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Pierre Benjamin Daniel Massé was an economist, engineer, applied mathematician, and high official in the French government. Education and career After graduation from l'École polytechnique, Massé became an engineer at l'École nationale des ponts et chaussées and a Doctor of Science. From 1928 he worked in the electrical industry and became at Électricité de France in 1946 the director of electrical equipment and operations and in 1948 the deputy general manager. In 1957 he became president of l'Électricité de Strasbourg. In 1959 Charles de Gaulle named him Commissaire général du Plan and he held this position until 1966.
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Alwin Korselt
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Alwin Reinhold Korselt was a German mathematician. He discovered Korselt's criterion, which provides a secondary definition for Carmichael numbers and also contributed an early result in algebraic logic.
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Grace Andrews
1869 - 1951 (82 years)
Grace Andrews was an American mathematician. She, along with Charlotte Angas Scott, was one of only two women listed in the first edition of American Men of Science, which appeared in 1906. Education Andrews was one of five children of Edward Gayer Andrews, a Methodist Episcopal bishop and school administrator; she was born in Brooklyn, and moved frequently as a child, including stays in Ohio, Iowa, Washington DC, and Europe. She was a student at Mount Vernon Seminary and College, and obtained her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1890, taking a five-year program at Wellesley th...
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Karl Gustav Reuschle
1812 - 1875 (63 years)
Karl Gustav Reuschle was a German mathematician, geographer and educator. Reuschle was born in Mehrstetten in Baden-Württemberg and studied math and theology at the University of Tübingen. After his graduation he continued his studies in mathematics for a year in Paris and for a year in Berlin. From 1837 onwards Reuschle worked as a teacher, first in Schöntal then in Tübingen and finally since 1840 at a gymnasium in Stuttgart, where he taught as professor for mathematics and geography.
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Franc Hočevar
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Franz Josef Hočevar, in Slovenian, Franc Jože Hočevar was an Austrian–Slovenian mathematician and author of mathematical books. After grammar school in Ljubljana Hočevar studied mathematics and physics in Vienna, where he got his Ph.D. in 1875. He worked as professor and director of the "Lehrkanzel für Mathematik I" at the Technical University of Graz from 1894 to 1918. He was dean of the "Maschinenbauschule" from 1896 to 1900, 1906 to 1908 and from 1910 to 1913.
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Alister Watson
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Alister George Douglas Watson was a mathematician who was identified by several writers as a key member of the Cambridge spy ring. Early years Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, Watson attended Winchester School and studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a fellow in 1933 and published two papers during his fellowship, Mathematics and its foundations, Mind, volume 47, pp. 440– 451 and Principal directions in a gravitational field. Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society 6.01 : 12-16.
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Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr.
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Isidore Isaac Hirschman Jr. was an American mathematician, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis working on analysis. Life Hirschman earned his Ph.D. in 1947 from Harvard under David Widder. After writing ten papers together, Hirschman and Widder published a book entitled The Convolution Transform. Hirschman spent most of his career at Washington University, where he published mainly in harmonic analysis and operator theory. Washington University holds a lecture series given by Hirschman, with one lecture given by Richard Askey. While Askey was at Washington University, Hirschman asked him to solve an ultraspherical polynomial problem.
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Orazio Tedone
1870 - 1922 (52 years)
Orazio Tedone was an Italian mathematical physicist. He is perhaps best known for the Larmor–Tedone formulae for solving Maxwell's equations. Biography Born and raised in Ruvo di Puglia, Tedone completed his undergraduate studies - his Laurea - in mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and there became an assistant and then a lecturer in rational mechanics. He became a docent at the Istituto Tecnico C. Cattaneo in Milan and then became a professor in the chair of mechanics at the University of Pavia. In 1899 he became a professor of higher analysis and static graphics at the Un...
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Joseph Wedderburn
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn FRSE FRS was a Scottish mathematician, who taught at Princeton University for most of his career. A significant algebraist, he proved that a finite division algebra is a field, and part of the Artin–Wedderburn theorem on simple algebras. He also worked on group theory and matrix algebra.
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John Myhill
1923 - 1987 (64 years)
John R. Myhill Sr. was a British mathematician. Education Myhill received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities.
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Joseph Slepian
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Joseph Slepian was an American electrical engineer known for his contributions to the developments of electrical apparatus and theory. Born in Boston, MA of Jewish Russian immigrants, he studied mathematics at Harvard University, from which he was awarded a B.Sc. , a M.Sc. and Ph.D. on the thesis On the Functions of a Complex Variable Defined by an Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order and First Degree advised by George Birkhoff . Meanwhile, he also worked at Boston Elevated Railway.
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Stefan E. Warschawski
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Stefan Emanuel "Steve" Warschawski was a mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of California, San Diego.
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Cyrus Colton MacDuffee
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Cyrus Colton MacDuffee from Oneida, New York was a professor of mathematics at University of Wisconsin. He wrote a number of influential research papers in abstract algebra. MacDuffee served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society , was editor of the Transactions of the A.M.S., and served as president of the Mathematical Association of America .
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Ivan S. Sokolnikoff
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Ivan Stephan Sokolnikoff was a Russian-American applied mathematician, who specialized in elasticity theory and wrote several mathematical textbooks for engineers and physicists. Biography Born to a wealthy family in Tsarist Russia, Ivan Sokolnikoff was educated by private tutors and at Anders Classical Gymnasium in Kiev. During the Russian Revolution, as a Tsarist naval officer, he was wounded in combat off the Kuril Islands. With the victory of the Reds, he became a refugee in China. There he worked for a subsidiary of an American electrical firm until 1922 when he became an American immigrant in Seattle.
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Albert Charles Schaeffer
1907 - 1957 (50 years)
Albert Charles Schaeffer was an American mathematician who worked on complex analysis. Biography Schaeffer was the son of Albert John and Mary Plane Schaeffer . He studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and was, from 1930 to 1933, employed as a highway engineer. In 1936, he received a PhD in mathematics under Eberhard Hopf at MIT. From 1936 to 1939, he was an instructor at Purdue University. In 1939, he became an instructor at Stanford University where he became, in 1941, assistant professor, in 1943 associate professor and in 1946 professor. From 1947 to 1950, he was a professor at Purdue University.
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Gottfried Köthe
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Gottfried Maria Hugo Köthe was an Austrian mathematician working in abstract algebra and functional analysis. Scientific career In 1923 Köthe enrolled in the University of Graz. He started studying chemistry, but switched to mathematics a year later after meeting the philosopher Alfred Kastil. In 1927 he submitted his thesis Beiträge zu Finslers Grundlegung der Mengenlehre and was awarded a doctorate. After spending a year in Zürich working with Paul Finsler, Köthe received a fellowship to visit the University of Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Emmy Noether and Bartel van der Waerden on the emerging subject of abstract algebra.
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H. J. Ryser
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Herbert John Ryser was a professor of mathematics, widely regarded as one of the major figures in combinatorics in the 20th century. He is the namesake of the Bruck–Ryser–Chowla theorem, Ryser's formula for the computation of the permanent of a matrix, and Ryser's conjecture.
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Joseph Proudman
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Joseph Proudman , CBE, FRS was a distinguished British mathematician and oceanographer of international repute. His theoretical studies into the oceanic tides not only "solved practically all the remaining tidal problems which are soluble within the framework of classical hydrodynamics and analytical mathematics" but laid the basis of a tidal prediction service developed with Arthur Doodson of great international importance.
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Nelson Dunford
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Nelson James Dunford was an American mathematician, known for his work in functional analysis, namely integration of vector valued functions, ergodic theory, and linear operators. The Dunford decomposition, Dunford–Pettis property, and Dunford-Schwartz theorem bear his name.
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Orrin Frink
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Orrin Frink Jr. was an American mathematician who introduced Frink ideals in 1954. Frink earned a doctorate from Columbia University in 1926 or 1927 and worked on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University for 41 years, 11 of them as department chair. His time at Penn State was interrupted by service as assistant chief engineer at the Special Projects Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during World War II, and by two Fulbright fellowships to Dublin, Ireland in the 1960s.
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Shirley Jackson Case
1872 - 1947 (75 years)
Shirley Jackson Case was an historian of early Christianity, and a liberal theologian. He served as dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Biography Case was born on September 28, 1872, in Hatfield Point, New Brunswick. He received a BA and MA in mathematics from Acadia University. He taught mathematics at the New Hampton Library Institute. In 1904, he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1908. He was professor of New Testament literature and interpretation at University of Chicago Divinity School until 1925.
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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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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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W. V. D. Hodge
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Sir William Vallance Douglas Hodge was a British mathematician, specifically a geometer. His discovery of far-reaching topological relations between algebraic geometry and differential geometry—an area now called Hodge theory and pertaining more generally to Kähler manifolds—has been a major influence on subsequent work in geometry.
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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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