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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11851
Hans Freudenthal
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Hans Freudenthal was a Jewish German-born Dutch mathematician. He made substantial contributions to algebraic topology and also took an interest in literature, philosophy, history and mathematics education.
Go to Profile#11852
Herman Otto Hartley
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Herman Otto Hartley was a German American statistician. He made significant contributions in many areas of statistics, mathematical programming, and optimization. He also founded Texas A&M University's Department of Statistics.
Go to Profile#11853
Elliott Waters Montroll
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
Elliott Waters Montroll was an American scientist and mathematician. Education Elliott Montroll was born on May 4, 1916, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and received his elementary and high school education at the Dormont Public Schools. In 1933 he entered the University of Pittsburgh and in 1937 he received a BS degree in Chemistry. From 1937 until 1939 he was a graduate assistant in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and during the first semester of the school year 1939–1940 he carried out research in the Chemistry Department of Columbia University. He was awarded a ...
Go to Profile#11854
George W. Snedecor
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
George Waddel Snedecor was an American mathematician and statistician. He contributed to the foundations of analysis of variance, data analysis, experimental design, and statistical methodology. Snedecor's F-distribution and the George W. Snedecor Award of the American Statistical Association are named after him.
Go to Profile#11855
Truman Lee Kelley
1884 - 1961 (77 years)
Truman Lee Kelley was an American researcher who made seminal contributions to statistics and psychology. Life He was born in Whitehall, Muskegon County, Michigan in 1884. He died in 1961. Career He received his A.M. degree in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1911, where he became one of the four founding students of Kappa Delta Pi. He completed his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1914 under the supervision of Edward Thorndike. After doing so, he worked as an instructor at the University of Texas and at Teachers College, and then in 1920 became a professor at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#11856
Raphaël Salem
1898 - 1963 (65 years)
Raphaël Salem was a Greek mathematician after whom are named the Salem numbers and Salem–Spencer sets, and whose widow founded the Salem Prize. Biography Raphaël Salem was born in Saloniki to Emmanuel and Fortunée Salem. His father was a well-known lawyer who dealt with international problems. Raphaël was brought up in a Jewish family who followed the traditions of their ancestors. At age 15, the family moved to France and Salem attended the Lycée Condorcet for two years. Believing that he would follow in his father's footsteps, Salem entered the Law Faculty of the University of Paris. His interests, though, were not in law but rather in mathematics and engineering.
Go to Profile#11857
Keith Stewartson
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
Keith Stewartson was an English mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. Early life The youngest of three children, Stewartson was born to an English baker in 1925. He was raised in Billingham, County Durham, where he attended Stockton Secondary School, and went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge in 1942. He won the Drury Prize in 1943 for his work in Mathematical Tripos.
Go to Profile#11858
Edward J. McShane
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Edward James McShane was an American mathematician noted for his advancements of the calculus of variations, integration theory, stochastic calculus, and exterior ballistics. His name is associated with the McShane–Whitney extension theorem and McShane integral. McShane was professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia, president of the American Mathematical Society, president of the Mathematical Association of America, a member of the National Science Board and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#11859
Kurt Gödel
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege.
Go to Profile#11860
James H. Wilkinson
1919 - 1986 (67 years)
James Hardy Wilkinson FRS was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.
Go to Profile#11861
William Reginald Dean
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
William Reginald Dean was a British applied mathematician and fluid dynamicist. His research interests included Stokes flow, solid mechanics, and flow in curved channels. The Dean number bears his name.
Go to Profile#11862
Luther P. Eisenhart
1876 - 1965 (89 years)
Luther Pfahler Eisenhart was an American mathematician, best known today for his contributions to semi-Riemannian geometry. Life Eisenhart was born in York, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Gettysburg College in 1896. He earned his doctorate in 1900 at Johns Hopkins University, where he was influenced by the work of Gaston Darboux and at shorter range by that of Thomas Craig. During the next two decades, Eisenhart's research focused on moving frames after the French school, but around 1921 took a different turn when he became enamored of the mathematical challenges and entrancing beauty of a...
Go to Profile#11863
Heinz Hopf
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Heinz Hopf was a German mathematician who worked on the fields of dynamical systems, topology and geometry. Early life and education Hopf was born in Gräbschen, German Empire , the son of Elizabeth and Wilhelm Hopf. His father was born Jewish and converted to Protestantism a year after Heinz was born; his mother was from a Protestant family.
Go to Profile#11864
John Williamson
1901 - 1949 (48 years)
John Williamson was a Scottish mathematician who worked in the fields of algebra, invariant theory, and linear algebra. Among other contributions, he is known for the Williamson construction of Hadamard matrices. Williamson graduated from the University of Edinburgh with first-class honours in 1922. Awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship in 1925, he studied at the University of Chicago under the direction of L. E. Dickson and E. H. Moore, receiving the Ph.D. in 1927. He held a Lectureship in Mathematics at the University of St Andrews and an Associate Professorship in Mathematics at Johns Hopk...
Go to Profile#11865
Oscar Zariski
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Oscar Zariski was a Russian-born American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century. Education Zariski was born Oscher Zaritsky to a Jewish family and in 1918 studied at the University of Kyiv. He left Kyiv in 1920 to study at the University of Rome where he became a disciple of the Italian school of algebraic geometry, studying with Guido Castelnuovo, Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi.
Go to Profile#11866
Helmut Hasse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Helmut Hasse was a German mathematician working in algebraic number theory, known for fundamental contributions to class field theory, the application of p-adic numberss to local class field theory and diophantine geometry , and to local zeta functions.
Go to Profile#11867
Solomon Lefschetz
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Solomon Lefschetz was a Russian-born American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations.
Go to Profile#11868
Antoni Zygmund
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Antoni Zygmund was a Polish mathematician. He worked mostly in the area of mathematical analysis, including especially harmonic analysis, and he is considered one of the greatest analysts of the 20th century. Zygmund was responsible for creating the Chicago school of mathematical analysis together with his doctoral student Alberto Calderón, for which he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1986.
Go to Profile#11869
Hans Rademacher
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Hans Adolph Rademacher was a German-born American mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and number theory. Biography Rademacher received his Ph.D. in 1916 from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; Constantin Carathéodory supervised his dissertation. In 1919, he became privatdozent under Constantin Carathéodory at University of Berlin. In 1922, he became an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg, where he supervised budding mathematicians like Theodor Estermann. He was dismissed from his position at the University of Breslau by the Nazis in 1933 due to his public supp...
Go to Profile#11870
Hans Lewy
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Hans Lewy was a Jewish American mathematician, known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables. Life Lewy was born in Breslau, Silesia, on October 20, 1904. He began his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1922, after being advised to avoid the more local University of Breslau because it was too old-fashioned, supporting himself during the Weimar hyperinflation by a side job doing railroad track maintenance. At Göttingen, he studied both mathematics and physics; his teachers there included Max Born, Richard Courant, James Franck, David Hilbert, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether, and Alexander Ostrowski.
Go to Profile#11871
Eduard Stiefel
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Eduard L. Stiefel was a Swiss mathematician. Together with Cornelius Lanczos and Magnus Hestenes, he invented the conjugate gradient method, and gave what is now understood to be a partial construction of the Stiefel–Whitney classes of a real vector bundle, thus co-founding the study of characteristic classes.
Go to Profile#11872
Emil Artin
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Emil Artin was an Austrian mathematician of Armenian descent. Artin was one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century. He is best known for his work on algebraic number theory, contributing largely to class field theory and a new construction of L-functions. He also contributed to the pure theories of rings, groups and fields.
Go to Profile#11873
Walter A. Shewhart
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Walter Andrew Shewhart was an American physicist, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control and also related to the Shewhart cycle. W. Edwards Deming said of him:
Go to Profile#11874
Henry Scheffé
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Henry Scheffé was an American statistician. He is known for the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and Scheffé's method. Education and career Scheffé was born in New York City on April 11, 1907, the child of German immigrants. The family moved to Islip, New York, where Scheffé went to high school. He graduated in 1924, took night classes at Cooper Union, and a year later entered the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics there in 1931. Staying at Wisconsin, he married his wife Miriam in 1934 and finished his...
Go to Profile#11875
Richard Brauer
1901 - 1977 (76 years)
Richard Dagobert Brauer was a leading German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.
Go to Profile#11876
Wilfrid Norman Bailey
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Wilfrid Norman Bailey was a mathematician who introduced Bailey's lemma and Bailey pairs into the theory of basic hypergeometric series. Bailey chains and Bailey transforms are named after him. External links
Go to Profile#11877
Bernard Koopman
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Bernard Osgood Koopman was a French-born American mathematician, known for his work in ergodic theory, the foundations of probability, statistical theory and operations research. Education and work After living in France and Italy, Koopman emigrated to the United States in 1915. Koopman was a student of George David Birkhoff and his initial work concentrated on dynamical systems and mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#11878
Stefan Bergman
1895 - 1977 (82 years)
Stefan Bergman was a Congress Poland-born American mathematician whose primary work was in complex analysis. His name is also written Bergmann; he dropped the second "n" when he came to the U. S. He is best known for the kernel function he discovered while at University of Berlin in 1922. This function is known today as the Bergman kernel. Bergman taught for many years at Stanford University, and served as an advisor to several students.
Go to Profile#11879
René Maurice Fréchet
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
René Maurice Fréchet was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionalss on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.
Go to Profile#11880
Rudolf Ernest Langer
1894 - 1968 (74 years)
Rudolf Ernest Langer was an American mathematician, known for the Langer correction and as a president of the Mathematical Association of America. Career Langer, the elder brother of William L. Langer, earned his PhD in 1922 from Harvard University under G. D. Birkhoff. He taught mathematics at Dartmouth College from 1922 to 1925. From 1927 to 1964 he was a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, from 1942 to 1952, the chair of the mathematics department. From 1956 to 1963 he was the director of the Army Mathematics Research Center; he was succeeded as director by J. Barkley Rosser.
Go to Profile#11881
Jacob Tamarkin
1888 - 1945 (57 years)
Jacob David Tamarkin was a Russian-American mathematician, best known for his work in mathematical analysis. Biography Tamarkin was born in Chernigov, Russian Empire , to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, David Tamarkin, was a physician and his mother, Sophie Krassilschikov, was from a family of a landowner. He shares a common ancestor with the Van Leer family, sometimes spelled Von Löhr or Valar. He moved to St. Petersburg as a child and grew up there. In high school, he befriended Alexander Friedmann, a future cosmologist, with whom he wrote his first mathematics paper in 1906, and remained friends and colleagues until Friedmann's sudden death in 1925.
Go to Profile#11882
Rensis Likert
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Rensis Likert was an American organizational and social psychologist known for developing the Likert scale, a psychometrically sound scale based on responses to multiple questions. The scale has become a method to measure people's thoughts and feelings from opinion surveys to personality tests. Likert also founded the theory of participative management, which is used to engage employees in the workplace. Likert's contributions in psychometrics, research samples, and open-ended interviewing have helped form and shape social and organizational psychology.
Go to Profile#11883
L. H. C. Tippett
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Leonard Henry Caleb Tippett , known professionally as L. H. C. Tippett, was an English statistician. Tippett was born in London but spent most of his early life in Cornwall and attended St Austell County Grammar School, where his contemporaries included the historian A. L. Rowse. Tippett graduated in physics in the early 1920s from Imperial College London. He studied for his Master of Science in statistics under Karl Pearson at the Galton Laboratory, University College London and R. A. Fisher at Rothamsted. He spent his entire career, 1925 to 1965, on the staff of the Shirley Institute, Manchester becoming in 1952 one of the first Assistant Directors.
Go to Profile#11884
Abraham Seidenberg
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Abraham Seidenberg was an American mathematician. Early life Seidenberg was born on June 2, 1916, to Harry and Fannie Seidenberg in Washington D.C. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Maryland in 1937. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University in 1943. His Ph.D. thesis, written under the direction of Oscar Zariski, was on Valuation Ideals in Rings of Polynomials in Two Variables.
Go to Profile#11885
Karol Borsuk
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Karol Borsuk was a Polish mathematician. His main interest was topology, while he obtained significant results also in functional analysis. Borsuk introduced the theory of absolute retracts and absolute neighborhood retracts , and the cohomotopy groups, later called Borsuk–Spanier cohomotopy groups. He also founded shape theory. He has constructed various beautiful examples of topological spaces, e.g. an acyclic, 3-dimensional continuum which admits a fixed point free homeomorphism onto itself; also 2-dimensional, contractible polyhedra which have no free edge. His topological and geometric...
Go to Profile#11886
Richard von Mises
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Richard Edler von Mises was an Austrian scientist and mathematician who worked on solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He held the position of Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He described his work in his own words shortly before his death as:
Go to Profile#11887
Lothar Collatz
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Lothar Collatz was a German mathematician, born in Arnsberg, Westphalia. The "3x + 1" problem is also known as the Collatz conjecture, named after him and still unsolved. The Collatz–Wielandt formula for the Perron–Frobenius eigenvalue of a positive square matrix was also named after him.
Go to Profile#11888
D. R. Fulkerson
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
Delbert Ray Fulkerson was an American mathematician who co-developed the [[FordFulkerson algorithm]], one of the most well-known algorithms to solve the maximum flow problem in networkss. Early life and education D. R. Fulkerson was born in Tamms, Illinois, the third of six children of Elbert and Emma Fulkerson. Fulkerson became an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University. His academic career was interrupted by military service during World War II. Having returned to complete his degree after the war, he went on to do a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of Cyrus MacDuffee, who was a student of L.
Go to Profile#11889
Raj Chandra Bose
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Raj Chandra Bose was an Indian American mathematician and statistician best known for his work in design theory, finite geometry and the theory of error-correcting codes in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him. He also invented the notions of partial geometry, association scheme, and strongly regular graph and started a systematic study of difference sets to construct symmetric block designs. He was notable for his work along with S. S. Shrikhande and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that for no n do there exist two ...
Go to Profile#11890
Edward H. Bersoff
Edward H. Bersoff founded BTG, Inc. and served as its chief executive and president until 2001, when he sold the company to Titan Corporation. He was elected to the board of Titan in February 2002 and holds board positions with a number of other organizations.
Go to Profile#11891
Israel Nathan Herstein
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Israel Nathan Herstein was a mathematician, appointed as professor at the University of Chicago in 1951. He worked on a variety of areas of algebra, including ring theory, with over 100 research papers and over a dozen books.
Go to Profile#11892
Dorothy Maud Wrinch
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Dorothy Maud Wrinch was a mathematician and biochemical theorist best known for her attempt to deduce protein structure using mathematical principles. She was a champion of the controversial 'cyclol' hypothesis for the structure of proteins.
Go to Profile#11893
Harry Platt
1886 - 1986 (100 years)
Sir Harry Platt, 1st Baronet, FRCS, KStJ was an English orthopaedic surgeon, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England . He was a founder of the British Orthopaedic Association, of which he became president in 1934–1935.
Go to Profile#11894
Thomas Hakon Grönwall
1877 - 1932 (55 years)
Thomas Hakon Grönwall or Thomas Hakon Gronwall was a Swedish mathematician. He studied at the University College of Stockholm and Uppsala University and completed his Ph.D. at Uppsala in 1898. Grönwall worked for about a year as a civil engineer in Germany before he emigrated to the United States in 1904. He later taught mathematics at Princeton University and from 1925 he was a member of the physics department at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#11895
Władysław Orlicz
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Władysław Roman Orlicz was a Polish mathematician of Lwów School of Mathematics. His main interests were functional analysis and topology: Orlicz spaces are named after him. Education and career Orlicz was the third of Franciszek and Maria Orlicz's five children. His youngest brother died in the Polish-Soviet War, the eldest perished in the Stutthof concentration camp. The other brothers also became professors. The family moved several times. Orlicz attended school in Tarnów, Znojmo, and Lviv, where he finished school in 1920 and began studying mathematics at the Lviv Polytechnic University. He studied with Hugo Steinhaus, Antoni Łomnicki and Stanisław Ruziewicz, among others.
Go to Profile#11896
Jesse Douglas
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Jesse Douglas was an American mathematician and Fields Medalist known for his general solution to Plateau's problem. Life and career He was born to a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Sarah and Louis Douglas. He attended City College of New York as an undergraduate, graduating with honors in Mathematics in 1916. He then moved to Columbia University as a graduate student, obtaining a PhD in mathematics in 1920.
Go to Profile#11897
Harry Pollard
1919 - 1985 (66 years)
Harry Pollard was an American mathematician. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1942 under the supervision of David Widder. He then taught at Cornell University, and was Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University from 1961 until his death in 1985. He is known for his work on celestial mechanics, orthogonal polynomials and the n-body problem as well as for the several textbooks he authored or co-authored. In the theory of Orthogonal polynomials, Pollard solved a conjecture of Antoni Zygmund norms for the Legendre polynomials and Jacobi polynomials in a series of three papers in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#11898
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.
Go to Profile#11899
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.
Go to Profile#11900
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.
Go to Profile