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,
#11851
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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Herbert Turnbull
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Prof Herbert Westren Turnbull FRS FRSE LLD was an English mathematician. From 1921 to 1950 he was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. Life He was born in the Tettenhall district, on the outskirts of Wolverhampton on 31 August 1885, the eldest of five sons of William Peveril Turnbull, HM Inspector of Schools. He was educated at Sheffield Grammar School then studied Mathematics at Cambridge University graduating MA.
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Raymond Louis Wilder
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Raymond Louis Wilder was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests. Life Wilder's father was a printer. Raymond was musically inclined. He played cornet in the family orchestra, which performed at dances and fairs, and accompanied silent films on the piano.
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Samarendra Nath Roy
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Samarendra Nath Roy was an Indian-born American mathematician and an applied statistician. Early life Roy was the first of three children of Kali Nath Roy and Suniti Bala Roy. His father, was a freedom fighter and the Chief Editor of the newspaper The Tribune, then publishing from Lahore. During the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919, The Tribune published a news report titled "Prayer at the Jama Masjid", on 6 April 1919. For this "offence" Kali Nath Roy was sentenced to imprisonment of two years along with a fine of one thousand rupees.
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Dudley E. Littlewood
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Dudley Ernest Littlewood was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. He read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was John Edensor Littlewood . He was a lecturer at University College, Swansea from 1928 to 1947, and in 1948 took up the chair of mathematics at University College of North Wales, Bangor, retiring in 1970.
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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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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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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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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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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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Oswald Veblen
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Oswald Veblen was an American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He proved the Jordan curve theorem in 1905; while this was long considered the first rigorous proof of the theorem, many now also consider Camille Jordan's original proof rigorous.
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Ralph Palmer Agnew
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Ralph Palmer Agnew was an American mathematician. Agnew was born in Poland, Ohio, and did his undergraduate studies at Allegheny College. After completing a master's degree at Iowa State College he moved to Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1930. He was appointed to the Cornell faculty in 1931. He chaired the mathematics department at Cornell from 1940 to 1950, and was responsible for bringing William Feller and Mark Kac to Cornell.
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Arne Beurling
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Arne Carl-August Beurling was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras, e.g. Håkan Hedenmalm's factorization theorem for Bergman spaces.
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Albert Ingham
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Albert Edward Ingham was an English mathematician. Early life and education Ingham was born in Northampton. He went to Stafford Grammar School and began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1919 after service in the British Army in World War I. Ingham received a distinction as a Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge. He was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1922. He also received an 1851 Research Fellowship.
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Józef Marcinkiewicz
1910 - 1940 (30 years)
Józef Marcinkiewicz was a Polish mathematician. He was a student of Antoni Zygmund; and later worked with Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Kaczmarz and Raphaël Salem. He was a professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno.
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Yudell Luke
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Yudell Leo Luke was an American mathematician who made significant contributions to MRIGlobal, was awarded the N. T. Veatch award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity in 1975, and appointed as Curator's Professor at the University of Missouri in 1978, a post he held until his death.
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Martin Beale
1928 - 1985 (57 years)
Evelyn Martin Lansdowne Beale FRS was an applied mathematician and statistician who was one of the pioneers of mathematical programming. Career He was educated at Winchester College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1949 and gaining a diploma in mathematical statistics in 1950. He then joined the Mathematics Group at the UK Admiralty Research Laboratory, working under Stephen Vajda for 11 years, except for a leave of absence in 1957/58 to assist the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton University. In 1955 he extended George ...
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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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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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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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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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Lawrence Wager
1904 - 1965 (61 years)
Lawrence Rickard Wager, commonly known as Bill Wager, was a British geologist, explorer and mountaineer, described as "one of the finest geological thinkers of his generation" and best remembered for his work on the Skaergaard intrusion in Greenland, and for his attempt on Mount Everest in 1933.
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Otto Toeplitz
1881 - 1940 (59 years)
Otto Toeplitz was a German mathematician working in functional analysis. Life and work Toeplitz was born to a Jewish family of mathematicians. Both his father and grandfather were Gymnasium mathematics teachers and published papers in mathematics. Toeplitz grew up in Breslau and graduated from the Gymnasium there. He then studied mathematics at the University of Breslau and was awarded a doctorate in algebraic geometry in 1905. In 1906 Toeplitz arrived at Göttingen University, which was then the world's leading mathematical center, and he remained there for seven years. The mathematics faculty included David Hilbert, Felix Klein, and Hermann Minkowski.
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Thoralf Skolem
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Thoralf Albert Skolem was a Norwegian mathematician who worked in mathematical logic and set theory. Life Although Skolem's father was a primary school teacher, most of his extended family were farmers. Skolem attended secondary school in Kristiania , passing the university entrance examinations in 1905. He then entered Det Kongelige Frederiks Universitet to study mathematics, also taking courses in physics, chemistry, zoology and botany.
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Gerhard Gentzen
1909 - 1945 (36 years)
Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.
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Barnet Woolf
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Barnet Woolf FRSE was a 20th-century British scientist, whose disciplines had a broad scope. He made lasting contributions to biochemistry, genetics, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, statistics, and computer science. His name appears in the Hanes-Woolf plot: a mathematical plotting of chemical reaction times.
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William Caspar Graustein
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
William Caspar Graustein was an American mathematician. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1910 and later became an instructor at Harvard University. In 1921, he married Mary Curtis Graustein , who was the first American woman to earn a mathematics Ph.D. from Radcliffe College.
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Emil Grosswald
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Emil Grosswald was a mathematician who worked primarily in number theory. Life and education Grosswald was born on December 15, 1912, in Bucharest, Romania. He received a master's degree in both mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Bucharest in 1933, spent six months in Italy and then received a Diplôme from École supérieure d'électricité in Paris.
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Leonard Blumenthal
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Leonard Mascot Blumenthal was a Jewish American mathematician. Career He received his Ph.D. in 1927 from Johns Hopkins University, under the supervision of Frank Morley; his dissertation was titled Lagrange Resolvents in Euclidean Geometry. He taught for the majority of his professional career at the University of Missouri and was the author of A Modern View of Geometry.
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Beniamino Segre
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Beniamino Segre was an Italian mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to algebraic geometry and one of the founders of finite geometry. Life and career He was born and studied in Turin. Corrado Segre, his uncle, also served as his doctoral advisor.
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Ott-Heinrich Keller
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Eduard Ott-Heinrich Keller was a German mathematician who worked in the fields of geometry, topology and algebraic geometry. He formulated the celebrated problem which is now called the Jacobian conjecture in 1939.
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Eugene Lukacs
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Eugene Lukacs was a Hungarian-American statistician notable for his work in characterization of distributions, stability theory, and being the author of Characteristic Functions, a classic textbook in the field.
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Constantine Gatsonis
Constantine Achilleos Gatsonis is a Greek-born biostatistician, currently the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor of Biostatistics, Chair of Biostatistics and Founding Director for the Center for Statistical Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health. He is well known for his work with evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests.
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Max Deuring
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Max Deuring was a German mathematician. He is known for his work in arithmetic geometry, in particular on elliptic curves in characteristic p. He worked also in analytic number theory. Deuring graduated from the University of Göttingen in 1930, then began working with Emmy Noether, who noted his mathematical acumen even as an undergraduate. When she was forced to leave Germany in 1933, she urged that the university offer her position to Deuring. In 1935 he published a report entitled Algebren , which established his notability in the world of mathematics. He went on to serve as Ordinarius at ...
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László Rédei
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
László Rédei was a Hungarian mathematician. Rédei graduated from the University of Budapest and initially worked as a schoolteacher. In 1940 he was appointed professor in the University of Szeged and in 1967 moved to the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.
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Thomas Muirhead Flett
1923 - 1976 (53 years)
Thomas Muirhead Flett was an English mathematician at Sheffield University working on analysis. Biography Thomas Muirhead Flett was born on 28 July 1923, in London, England, when his parents moved from Scotland to London. At age 11, he won a scholarship by the County of Middlesex from a state primary school to University College School , Hampstead.
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Pavel Alexandrov
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov , sometimes romanized Paul Alexandroff , was a Soviet mathematician. He wrote roughly three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology. In topology, the Alexandroff compactification and the Alexandrov topology are named after him.
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Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid
1927 - 1985 (58 years)
Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid was an American mathematician and theorist who worked extensively on probability theory, Markov chains, and statistics. The author of more than 70 papers and 6 books, his work touched on such diverse fields as economics, physics, and biology.
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Paul Althaus Smith
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Paul Althaus Smith was an American mathematician. His name occurs in two significant conjectures in geometric topology: the Smith conjecture, which is now a theorem, and the Hilbert–Smith conjecture, which was proved in dimension 3 in 2013. Smith theory is a theory about homeomorphisms of finite order of manifolds, particularly spheres.
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Leo Moser
1921 - 1970 (49 years)
Leo Moser was an Austrian-Canadian mathematician, best known for his polygon notation. A native of Vienna, Leo Moser immigrated with his parents to Canada at the age of three. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Manitoba in 1943, and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto in 1945. After two years of teaching he went to the University of North Carolina to complete a PhD, supervised by Alfred Brauer. There, in 1950, he began suffering recurrent heart problems. He took a position at Texas Technical College for one year, and joined the faculty of the Uni...
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Allan Birnbaum
1923 - 1976 (53 years)
Allan Birnbaum was an American statistician who contributed to statistical inference, foundations of statistics, statistical genetics, statistical psychology, and history of statistics. Life and career Birnbaum was born in San Francisco. His parents were Russian-born Orthodox Jews. He studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, doing a premedical programme at the same time. After taking a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1945, he spent two years doing graduate courses in science, mathematics and philosophy, planning perhaps a career in the philosophy of science. One of h...
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Solomon Mikhlin
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Solomon Grigor'evich Mikhlin was a Soviet mathematician of who worked in the fields of linear elasticity, singular integrals and numerical analysis: he is best known for the introduction of the symbol of a singular integral operator, which eventually led to the foundation and development of the theory of pseudodifferential operators.
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Hyman Levy
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Prof Hyman Levy was a Scottish-Jewish philosopher, Emeritus Professor of Imperial College London, mathematician, political activist and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life The son of Minna Cohen and Marcus Levy, a picture-framer and occasional art dealer in Edinburgh, Hyman was the third oldest of eight children. They lived at 70 Bristo Street in Edinburgh's South Side.
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Hans Heilbronn
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Hans Arnold Heilbronn was a mathematician. Education He was born into a German-Jewish family. He was a student at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg and Göttingen, where he met Edmund Landau, who supervised his doctorate. In his thesis, he improved a result of Hoheisel on the size of prime gaps.
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Frigyes Riesz
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Frigyes Riesz was a Hungarian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to functional analysis, as did his younger brother Marcel Riesz. Life and career He was born into a Jewish family in Győr, Austria-Hungary and died in Budapest, Hungary. Between 1911 and 1919 he was a professor at the Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary. The post-WW1 Treaty of Trianon transferred former Austro-Hungarian territory including Kolozsvár to the Kingdom of Romania, whereupon Kolozsvár's name changed to Cluj and the University of Kolozsvár moved to Szeged, Hungary, becoming the University of Szeged.
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Franz Rellich
1906 - 1955 (49 years)
Franz Rellich was an Austrian-German mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equations. The Rellich–Kondrachov theorem is named after him.
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Georg Hamel
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Georg Karl Wilhelm Hamel was a German mathematician with interests in mechanics, the foundations of mathematics and function theory. Biography Hamel was born in Düren, Rhenish Prussia. He studied at Aachen, Berlin, Göttingen, and Karlsruhe. His doctoral adviser was David Hilbert. He taught at Brünn in 1905, Aachen in 1912, and at the Technical University of Berlin in 1919. In 1927, Hamel studied the size of the key space for the Kryha encryption device. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1932 at Zurich and in 1936 at Oslo. He was the author of several important treatises on mechanics. He...
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John Charles Burkill
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
John Charles Burkill was an English mathematician who worked on analysis and introduced the Burkill integral. He was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Burkill was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1953. In 1948, Burkill won the Adams Prize. He was Master of Peterhouse until 1973. His doctoral students include Frederick Gehring.
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Alexander Doniphan Wallace
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Alexander Doniphan Wallace was an American mathematician who introduced proximity spaces. Wallace received from the University of Virginia B.A. in 1935, M.A. in 1936 and Ph.D. in 1940. He was an instructor at Princeton University in 1940–1941 and became an assistant professor in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 and remained there until 1947. He was a professor and chair of the mathematics department at Tulane University in 1947–1963. From 1963 until his retirement in 1973 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Florida.
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Lipót Fejér
1880 - 1959 (79 years)
Lipót Fejér was a Hungarian mathematician of Jewish heritage. Fejér was born Leopold Weisz, and changed to the Hungarian name Fejér around 1900. Biography He was born in Pécs, Austria-Hungary, into the Jewish family of Victoria Goldberger and Samuel Weiss. His maternal great-grandfather Samuel Nachod was a doctor and his grandfather was a renowned scholar, author of a Hebrew-Hungarian dictionary. Leopold's father, Samuel Weiss, was a shopkeeper in Pecs. In primary schools Leopold was not doing well, so for a while his father took him away to home schooling. The future scientist developed his ...
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