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
Virgil Snyder
1869 - 1950 (81 years)
Virgil Snyder was an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. In 1886, Snyder matriculated at Iowa State College and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1889. He attended Cornell University as a graduate student from 1890 to 1892, leaving to study mathematics in Germany on an Erastus W. Brooks fellowship. In 1895, he received a doctorate from the University of Göttingen under Felix Klein. In 1895, Snyder returned to Cornell as an instructor, becoming an assistant professor in 1905 and a full professor in 1910. In 1938, he retired as professor emeritus, having supervised 39 doctoral students, 13 of whom were women.
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Joseph Kampé de Fériet
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Marie-Joseph Kampé de Fériet was a French mathematician at Université Lille Nord de France from 1919 to 1969. Besides his works on mathematics and fluid mechanics, he directed the Institut de mécanique des fluides de Lille and taught fluid dynamics and information theory at École centrale de Lille from 1930 to 1969.
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Jean Paul de Gua de Malves
1710 - 1786 (76 years)
Jean Paul de Gua de Malves was a French mathematician who published in 1740 a work on analytical geometry in which he applied it, without the aid of differential calculus, to find the tangents, asymptotes, and various singular points of an algebraic curve.
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François-Joseph Servois
1767 - 1847 (80 years)
François-Joseph Servois was a French priest, military officer and mathematician. His most notable contribution came in his publication of Essai sur un nouveau mode d’exposition des principes du calcul différentiel in 1814, where he first introduced the mathematical terms for commutative and distributive.
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Georg Bohlmann
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
Georg Bohlmann was a German mathematician who specialized in probability theory and actuarial mathematics. Life and career Georg Bohlmann went to school in Berlin and Leipzig and took his Abitur at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin in 1888. After that, he began studying mathematics at the University of Berlin under Leopold Kronecker, Lazarus Fuchs, and Wilhelm Dilthey. As he advanced in his studies, Lie groups became the focus of his interest. Since this area was poorly represented at Berlin, he moved to the University of Halle, where he obtained his doctorate in 1892 under Albert Wangerin wit...
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Giovanni Salvemini
1708 - 1791 (83 years)
Giovanni Francesco Mauro Melchiorre Salvemini di Castiglione FRS was an Italian mathematician and astronomer. Life Salvemini was born on 15 January 1708 in Castiglione del Valdarno in Arezzo. His father, Giuseppe Salvemini of Castiglion Fiorentino, was a diplomat and jurist, and an ambassador for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. His mother was Maria Maddalena Lucia Braccesi whose family came from Pisa. Salvemini was home schooled by tutors and then attended a seminary in Florence.
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Francis Guthrie
1831 - 1899 (68 years)
Francis Guthrie was a South African mathematician and botanist who first posed the Four Colour Problem in 1852. He studied mathematics under Augustus De Morgan, and botany under John Lindley at University College London. Guthrie obtained his B.A. in 1850, and LL.B. in 1852 with first class honours. While colouring a map of the counties of England, he noticed that at least four colours were required so that no two regions sharing a common border were the same colour. He postulated that four colours would be sufficient to colour any map. This became known as the Four Color Problem, and remaine...
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Gustav Roch
1839 - 1866 (27 years)
Gustav Adolph Roch was a German mathematician who made significant contributions to the theory of Riemann surfaces. His promising career was cut short by untimely death at the age of 26. Biography Born in Leipzig, Roch attended the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden, initially focusing on chemistry, encouraged by his father. However the mathematician Oscar Schlömilch identified his exceptional talents and guided him towards a mathematical career. Combining studies at the Polytechnic Institute with private studies at another institute enabled Roch to be already publishing original research on t...
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Charles Méray
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Hugues Charles Robert Méray was a French mathematician. He is noted as the first to publish an arithmetical theory of irrational numbers. His work did not have much of a role in the history of mathematics because France, at that time, was less interested in such matters than Germany.
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Julian Sochocki
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Julian Karol Sochocki was a Polish-Russian mathematician. His name is sometimes transliterated from Russian in several different ways . Life and work Sochocki was born in Warsaw under the Russian domination to a Polish family, where he attended state gymnasium. In 1860 he registered at the physico-mathematical department of St Petersburg University. His study there was interrupted for the period 1860–1865 because of his involvement with Polish patriotic movement: he had to return to Warsaw to escape prosecution.
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John Leslie
1766 - 1832 (66 years)
Sir John Leslie, FRSE KH was a Scottish mathematician and physicist best remembered for his research into heat. Leslie gave the first modern account of capillary action in 1802 and froze water using an air-pump in 1810, the first artificial production of ice.
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Jordanus de Nemore
1225 - 1235 (10 years)
Jordanus de Nemore , also known as Jordanus Nemorarius and Giordano of Nemi, was a thirteenth-century European mathematician and scientist. The literal translation of Jordanus de Nemore would indicate that he was an Italian. He wrote treatises on at least 6 different important mathematical subjects: the science of weights; “algorismi” treatises on practical arithmetic; pure arithmetic; algebra; geometry; and stereographic projection. Most of these treatises exist in several versions or reworkings from the Middle Ages. We know nothing about him personally, other than the approximate date of hi...
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Olry Terquem
1782 - 1862 (80 years)
Olry Terquem was a French mathematician. He is known for his works in geometry and for founding two scientific journals, one of which was the first journal about the history of mathematics. He was also the pseudonymous author of a sequence of letters advocating radical reform in Judaism. He was French Jewish.
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Aleksander Rajchman
1890 - 1940 (50 years)
Aleksander Michał Rajchman was a mathematician of the Warsaw School of Mathematics of the Interwar period. He had origins in the Lwów School of Mathematics and contributed to real analysis, probability and mathematical statistics.
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Ernest William Brown
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Ernest William Brown FRS was an English mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States and became a naturalised American citizen in 1923. His life's work was the study of the Moon's motion and the compilation of extremely accurate lunar tables. He also studied the motion of the planets and calculated the orbits of Trojan asteroids.
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Jean Cavaillès
1903 - 1944 (41 years)
Jean Cavaillès was a French philosopher and logician who specialized in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. He took part in the French Resistance within the Libération movement and was arrested by the Gestapo on 17 February 1944 and shot on 4 April 1944.
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Stanisław Gołąb
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Stanisław Gołąb was a Polish mathematician from Kraków, working in particular on the field of affine geometry. In 1932, he proved that the perimeter of the unit disc respect to a given metric can take any value in between 6 and 8, and that these extremal values are obtained if and only if the unit disc is an affine regular hexagon resp. a parallelogram.
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Cassius Jackson Keyser
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Cassius Jackson Keyser was an American mathematician of pronounced philosophical inclinations. Life Keyser's initial higher education was at North West Ohio Normal School , then became a school teacher and principal. In 1885, he married a fellow student at the Normal School, Ella Maud Crow. He completed a second undergraduate degree, a BSc, at the University of Missouri in 1892. After teaching there, at the New York State Normal School , and at Washington University in St. Louis, he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, earning the MA in 1896 and the PhD in 1901. He spent th...
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Ethel M. Elderton
1878 - 1954 (76 years)
Ethel Mary Elderton was a British eugenics researcher who worked with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Biography Elderton was born on 31 December 1878 in Fulham, London. Her father, William Alexander Elderton was a private tutor and her mother, Sarah Isabella, née Lapidge was school headmistress. The couple had eight children, of which Elderton was the third and the eldest girl. Her eldest brother was William Palin Elderton, a statistician who worked as an actuary and became head of Equitable Life Assurance Society.
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John Colson
1680 - 1760 (80 years)
John Colson was an English clergyman, mathematician, and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Life John Colson was educated at Lichfield School before becoming an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, though he did not take a degree there. He became a schoolmaster at Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1713. He was Vicar of Chalk, Kent from 1724 to 1740. He relocated to Cambridge and lectured at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. From 1739 to 1760, he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He ...
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Charles Auguste Briot
1817 - 1882 (65 years)
Charles Auguste Briot was a French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions. The Académie des Sciences awarded him the Poncelet Prize in 1882. See also Holomorphic functionTimeline of abelian varieties
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Dugald Stewart
1753 - 1828 (75 years)
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish philosopher and mathematician. Today regarded as one of the most important figures of the later Scottish Enlightenment, he was renowned as a populariser of the work of Francis Hutcheson and of Adam Smith. Trained in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, his lectures at the University of Edinburgh were widely disseminated by his many influential students. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In most contemporary documents he is referred to as Prof Dougal Stewart.
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Pedro Nunes
1502 - 1578 (76 years)
Pedro Nunes was a Portuguese mathematician, cosmographer, and professor, probably from a New Christian family. Considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, Nunes is best known for his contributions to the nautical sciences , which he approached, for the first time, in a mathematical way. He was the first to propose the idea of a loxodrome, and was the inventor of several measuring devices, including the nonius , named after his Latin surname.
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Maurice Solovine
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Maurice Solovine was a Romanian philosopher and mathematician. He is best known for his association with Albert Einstein. Biography Solovine was born in Iași, a university city in eastern Romania, near the border with Moldova. As a young student of philosophy in Bern, Solovine applied to study physics with Albert Einstein in response to an advertisement. The two men struck up a close relationship and Einstein was said to say to Solovine a few days after meeting him: "It is not necessary to give you lessons in physics. The discussion about the problems which we face in physics today is much more interesting; simply come to me when you wish.
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Robert Adrain
1775 - 1843 (68 years)
Robert Adrain was an Irish political exile who won renown as a mathematician in the United States. He left Ireland after leading republican insurgents in the Rebellion of 1798, and settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. With Nathaniel Bowditch, he shares the distinction of being the first scholar to publish original mathematical research in America. This included his formulation of the method of least squares while working on a surveying problem for which he is chiefly remembered. His fields of applied mathematical interest included physics, astronomy and geodesy. Many of his mathematical i...
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Diederik Korteweg
1848 - 1941 (93 years)
Diederik Johannes Korteweg was a Dutch mathematician. He is now best remembered for his work on the Korteweg–de Vries equation, together with Gustav de Vries. Early life and education Diederik Korteweg's father was a judge in 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. Korteweg received his schooling there, studying at a special academy which prepared students for a military career. However, he decided against a military career and, making the first of his changes of direction, he began his studies at the Polytechnical School of Delft. Korteweg originally intended to become an engineer but, although he ma...
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Irénée-Jules Bienaymé
1796 - 1878 (82 years)
Irénée-Jules Bienaymé was a French statistician. He built on the legacy of Laplace generalizing his least squares method. He contributed to the fields of probability and statistics, and to their application to finance, demography and social sciences. In particular, he formulated the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality concerning the law of large numbers and the Bienaymé formula for the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables.
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David Bierens de Haan
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
David Bierens de Haan was a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Biography Bierens de Haan was a son of the rich merchant Abraham Pieterszoon de Haan and Catharina Jacoba Bierens . In 1843 he completed a study in the exact sciences and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1847 under Gideon Janus Verdam for the work . After this he became a teacher of physics and mathematics at a gymnasium in Deventer. In 1852 he married Johanna Catharina Justina de Schepper in Deventer.
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Stanley Skewes
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Stanley Skewes was a South African mathematician, best known for his discovery of the Skewes's number in 1933. He was one of John Edensor Littlewood's students at Cambridge University. Skewes's numbers contributed to the refinement of the theory of prime numbers.
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Charles Jasper Joly
1864 - 1906 (42 years)
Charles Jasper Joly was an Irish mathematician and astronomer who became Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Life He was born at St Catherine's Rectory, Hop Hill, Tullamore, County Offaly, the eldest of six children of Rev. John Swift Joly and Elizabeth Slator .
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Henri Dulac
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Henri Claudius Rosarius Dulac was a French mathematician. Life Born in Fayence, France, Dulac graduated from École Polytechnique and obtained a Doctorate in Mathematics. He started to teach a class of mathematic analysis at University, in Grenoble , Algiers and Poitiers . Holder of a pulpit in pure mathematics in the Sciences University of Lyon in 1911, his teaching was suspended during the first world war and he had to serve as officer in the French army. After the war, he became holder of a pulpit of differential and integral calculus and also taught in École Centrale Lyon. He became examiner at École Polytechnique and President of the admission jury.
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Sergey Chaplygin
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Sergey Alexeyevich Chaplygin was a Russian and Soviet physicist, mathematician, and mechanical engineer. He is known for mathematical formulas such as Chaplygin's equation and for a hypothetical substance in cosmology called Chaplygin gas, named after him.
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Eugen Netto
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Eugen Otto Erwin Netto was a German mathematician. He was born in Halle and died in Giessen. Netto's theorem, on the dimension-preserving properties of continuous bijections, is named for Netto. Netto published this theorem in 1878, in response to Georg Cantor's proof of the existence of discontinuous bijections between the unit interval and unit square. His proof was not fully rigorous, but its errors were later repaired.
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Gyula Vályi
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Gyula Vályi was a Hungarian mathematician and theoretical physicist, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, known for his work on mathematical analysis, geometry, and number theory. Life and work Vályi was born in Marosvásárhely, the town of the famous mathematicians Farkas Bolyai and János Bolyai. He attended the Reformed College in Marosvásárhely . After graduating from school, he went to Kolozsvár, the capital of Transylvania, where he attended the Franz Joseph University.
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Raymond Clare Archibald
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Raymond Clare Archibald was a prominent Canadian-American mathematician. He is known for his work as a historian of mathematics, his editorships of mathematical journals and his contributions to the teaching of mathematics.
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Giuseppe Bruno
1828 - 1893 (65 years)
Giuseppe Bruno was an Italian mathematician, professor of geometry in the university of Turin. Life and work Bruno has born in a very poor family, but he won a stipend to study in the University of Turin, where he graduated in philosophy in 1846. The following years he was professor at secondary level, while he studied to graduate in engineering and to doctorate in mathematics .
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Yvon Villarceau
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Antoine-Joseph Yvon Villarceau was a French astronomer, mathematician, and engineer. He constructed an equatorial meridian-instrument and an isochronometric regulator for the Paris Observatory. He wrote Mécanique Céleste. Expose des Méthodes de Wronski et Composantes des Forces Perturbatrices suivant les Axes Mobiles and Sur l'établissement des arches de pont, envisagé au point de vue de la plus grande stabilité .
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Major Greenwood
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Major Greenwood FRS was an English epidemiologist and statistician. Biography Major Greenwood junior was born in Shoreditch in London's East End, the only child of Major Greenwood, a physician in general practice there and his wife Annie, daughter of Peter Lodwick Burchell, F.R.C.S., M.B., L.S.A. The Greenwood family is recorded back to the twelfth century in the person of Wyomarus Greenwode, of Greenwode Leghe, near Heptonstall, Yorkshire, caterer to the Empress Maude in 1154. Greenwood was educated on the classical side at Merchant Taylors' School and went on to study medicine at University College London and the London Hospital.
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Federico Amodeo
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
Federico Amodeo was an Italian mathematician, specializing in projective geometry, and a historian of mathematics. He received in 1883 his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Naples, where he became an instructor and from 1885 to 1923 taught projective geometry. He also taught as a professor in Naples at the Istituto Tecnico "Gianbattista Della Porta" from 1890 to 1923, when he retired. In 1890–1891 he visited the geometers at the University of Turin.
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Agnes Sime Baxter
1870 - 1917 (47 years)
Agnes Sime Baxter was a Canadian-born mathematician. She studied at Dalhousie University, receiving her BA in 1891, and her MA in 1892. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1895; her dissertation was "On Abelian integrals", a resume of Neumann's Abelian integral with comments and applications."
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Ziauddin Ahmad
1878 - 1947 (69 years)
Sir Ziauddin Ahmad was an Indian mathematician, parliamentarian, logician, natural philosopher, politician, political theorist, educationist and a scholar. He was a member of the Aligarh Movement and was a professor, principal of MAO College, first pro vice-chancellor, vice chancellor and rector of Aligarh Muslim University, India.
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Yoshida Mitsuyoshi
1598 - 1672 (74 years)
Yoshida Mitsuyoshi, also known as Yoshida Kōyū, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. His popular and widely disseminated published work made him the most well known writer about mathematics in his lifetime.
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Léopold Leau
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his ties to international auxiliary languages. The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded on 7 January 1901 on Leau's initiative. He co-wrote with Prof. Louis Couturat the monumental Histoire de la Langue Universelle and its supplement Les Nouvelles Langues Internationales .
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Victor Vâlcovici
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Victor Vâlcovici was a Romanian mechanician and mathematician. Biography Born into a modest family in Galați, he graduated first in his class in 1904 from Nicolae Bălcescu High School in Brăila. Entering the University of Bucharest on a scholarship, he attended its faculty of sciences, where he had as teachers Spiru Haret and Gheorghe Țițeica. After graduating in 1907 with a degree in mathematics, he taught high school for two years before leaving for University of Göttingen on another scholarship to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. He wrote his thesis under the direction of Ludwig Prandtl...
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Henry Forder
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Henry George Forder was a New Zealand mathematician. Academic career Born in Shotesham All Saints, near Norwich, he won a scholarships first to a Grammar school and then to University of Cambridge. After teaching mathematics at a number of schools, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics at Auckland University College in New Zealand in 1933. He was very critical of the state of the New Zealand curriculum and set about writing a series of well received textbooks.
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Rudolf Fueter
1880 - 1950 (70 years)
Karl Rudolf Fueter was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work on number theory. Biography After a year of graduate study of mathematics in Basel, Fueter began study in 1899 at the University of Göttingen and completed his Promotion in 1903 with dissertation Der Klassenkörper der quadratischen Körper und die komplexe Multiplikation under David Hilbert. After his Promotion, Fueter studied for 1 year in Paris, 3 months in Vienna, and 6 months in London. In 1905 he completed his Habilitierung at the University of Marburg. Fueter worked as a docent in 1907/1908 at Marburg and in the winter of 1907/1908 at the Bergakademie Clausthal.
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Edward Mann Langley
1851 - 1933 (82 years)
Edward Mann Langley was a British mathematician, author of mathematical textbooks and founder of the Mathematical Gazette. He created the mathematical problem known as Langley’s Adventitious Angles.
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Axel Sophus Guldberg
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
Axel Sophus Guldberg was a Norwegian mathematician. Biography Born in Christiania , Guldberg was the second oldest out of 11 siblings. He and his siblings were initially homeschooled, but he and his older brother, Cato Maximilian Guldberg, later began going to school in Fredrikstad, where they lived together with relatives. He completed his examen artium in 1856, cand.real. in 1863 and dr.philos. in 1867.
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William Garnett
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Dr. William Garnett was a British professor and educational adviser, specialising in physics and mechanics and taking a special interest in electric street lighting. Early years Garnett was born in Portsea, Portsmouth, England in 1850, the son of William Garnett. In January 1863 he entered the City of London School, where he was a pupil of Thomas Hall. In the May 1866 examination, he obtained the first Royal Exhibition, tenable at the Royal School of Mines and College of Chemistry, and during the winter session, he studied under Dr. Edward Frankland and Professor John Tyndall, but in the following year, resigned the Exhibition and returned to the City of London School.
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Ernest Shackleton
1874 - 1922 (48 years)
Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
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