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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#11901

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.

#11902

Solomon Mikhlin

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.

#11903

Otto Schreier

1901 - 1929 (28 years)

Otto Schreier was a Jewish-Austrian mathematician who made major contributions in combinatorial group theory and in the topology of Lie groups. Life His parents were the architect Theodor Schreier and his wife Anna . From 1920 Otto Schreier studied at the University of Vienna and took classes with Wilhelm Wirtinger, Philipp Furtwängler, Hans Hahn, Kurt Reidemeister, Leopold Vietoris, and Josef Lense. In 1923 he obtained his doctorate, under the supervision of Philipp Furtwängler, entitled On the expansion of groups . In 1926 he completed his habilitation with Emil Artin at the University o...

#11904

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...

#11905

William Frederick Eberlein

1917 - 1986 (69 years)

William Frederick Eberlein was an American mathematician, specializing in mathematical analysis and mathematical physics. Life Eberlein studied from 1936 to 1942 at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard University, where he received in 1942 a PhD for the thesis Closure, Convexity, and Linearity in Banach Spaces under the direction of Marshall Stone.

#11906

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...

#11907

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.

#11908

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.

#11909

John Greenlees Semple

1904 - 1985 (81 years)

John Greenlees Semple was a British mathematician working in algebraic geometry. Publications Algebraic Projective Geometry. By J. G. Semple and G. T. Kneebone. Pp. viii, 404. 35s. 1952. .

#11910

Stanisław Mazur

Stanisław Mazur

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Stanisław Mieczysław Mazur was a Polish mathematician and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Mazur made important contributions to geometrical methods in linear and nonlinear functional analysis and to the study of Banach algebras. He was also interested in summability theory, infinite games and computable functions.

#11911

Pavel Alexandrov

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.

#11912

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.

#11913

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.

#11914

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 ...

#11915

Robert Schatten

1911 - 1977 (66 years)

Robert Schatten was an American mathematician. Robert Schatten was born to a Jewish family in Lviv. His intellectual origins were at Lwów School of Mathematics, particularly well known for fundamental contributions to functional analysis. His entire family was murdered during World War II, he himself emigrated to the United States.

#11916

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.

#11917

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.

#11918

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.

#11919

Beniamino Segre

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.

#11920

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.

#11921

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.

#11922

William Caspar Graustein

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.

#11923

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.

#11924

Hans Hamburger

1889 - 1956 (67 years)

Hans Ludwig Hamburger was a German mathematician. He was a professor at universities in Berlin, Cologne and Ankara. Biography Hans was the elder son of Karl Hamburger and Margarethe Levy. He was of Jewish heritage, but baptised as a protestant. His father was a lawyer and mixed in learned circles in Berlin. Hans attended the Royal French Gymnasium in Berlin from 1898 to 1907. Hamburger obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1914 under the supervision of Alfred Pringsheim and after war service obtained his Habilitation for a thesis on Extensions of the Stieltjes moment problem. H...

#11925

John William Theodore Youngs

1910 - 1970 (60 years)

John William Theodore Youngs was an American mathematician. Youngs was the son of a missionary. He completed his undergraduate study at Wheaton College and received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1934 under Tibor Radó. He then taught for 18 years at Indiana University, where for eight years he was chair of the mathematics department. From 1964 he was a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he developed the mathematics faculty and was chair of the academic senate of the university.

#11926

Gerhard Gentzen

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.

#11927

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.

#11928

Gottfried Köthe

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.

#11929

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.

#11930

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.

#11931

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.

#11932

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.

#11933

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...

#11934

Dmitry Faddeev

1907 - 1989 (82 years)

Dmitry Konstantinovich Faddeev was a Soviet mathematician. Biography Dmitry was born June 30, 1907, about 200 kilometers southwest of Moscow on his father's estate. His father Konstantin Tikhonovich Faddeev was an engineer while his mother was a doctor and appreciator of music who instilled the love for music in Dmitry. Friends found his piano playing entertaining.

#11935

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 .

#11936

Aleksandr Khinchin

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".

#11937

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...

#11938

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

#11939

Dudley E. Littlewood

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.

#11940

Samarendra Nath Roy

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.

#11941

Raymond Louis Wilder

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.

#11942

Herbert Turnbull

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.

#11943

Leo Katz

1914 - 1976 (62 years)

Leo Katz was an American statistician. Katz largely contributed to the area of Social Network Analysis. In 1953, he introduced a centrality measure named Katz centrality that computes the degree of influence of an actor in a social network. The computation already outlined the algorithm today known as PageRank.

#11944

Paul Bernays

1888 - 1977 (89 years)

Paul Isaac Bernays was a Swiss mathematician who made significant contributions to mathematical logic, axiomatic set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He was an assistant and close collaborator of David Hilbert.

#11945

Emanuel Sperner

Emanuel Sperner

1905 - 1980 (75 years)

Emanuel Sperner was a German mathematician, best known for two theorems. He was born in Waltdorf , and died in Sulzburg-Laufen, West Germany. He was a student at Carolinum in Nysa and then Hamburg University where his advisor was Wilhelm Blaschke. He was appointed Professor in Königsberg in 1934, and subsequently held posts in a number of universities until 1974.

#11946

Ernst G. Straus

1922 - 1983 (61 years)

Ernst Gabor Straus was a German-American mathematician of Jewish origin who helped found the theories of Euclidean Ramsey theory and of the arithmetic properties of analytic functions. His extensive list of co-authors includes Albert Einstein, Paul Erdős, Richard Bellman, Béla Bollobás, Sarvadaman Chowla, Ronald Graham, Lee Albert Rubel, Mathukumalli V Subbarao, László Lovász, Carl Pomerance, Moshe Goldberg, and George Szekeres.

#11947

Michel Lazard

1924 - 1985 (61 years)

Michel Paul Lazard was a French mathematician who worked on the theory of Lie groups in the context of p-adic analysis. Career and research Born in Paris, Lazard studied at the University of Paris–Sorbonne, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1954 under the direction of Albert Châtelet, with thesis titled "Sur les groupes nilpotents et les anneaux de Lie". Subsequently he was a professor at the University of Poitiers and the University of Paris 7. He died of suicide at the age of 63.

#11948

Joseph Ritt

1893 - 1951 (58 years)

Joseph Fels Ritt was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century. He was born and died in New York. After beginning his undergraduate studies at City College of New York, Ritt received his B.A. from George Washington University in 1913. He then earned a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia University in 1917 under the supervision of Edward Kasner. After doing calculations for the war effort in World War I, he joined the Columbia faculty in 1921. He served as department chair from 1942 to 1945, and in 1945 became the Davies Professor of Mathematics. In 1932, Ge...

#11949

Stanisław Saks

1897 - 1942 (45 years)

Stanisław Saks was a Polish mathematician and university tutor, a member of the Lwów School of Mathematics, known primarily for his membership in the Scottish Café circle, an extensive monograph on the theory of integrals, his works on measure theory and the Vitali–Hahn–Saks theorem.

#11950

Georges de Rham

1903 - 1990 (87 years)

Georges de Rham was a Swiss mathematician, known for his contributions to differential topology. Biography Georges de Rham was born on 10 September 1903 in Roche, a small village in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. He was the fifth born of the six children in the family of Léon de Rham, a constructions engineer. Georges de Rham grew up in Roche but went to school in nearby Aigle, the main town of the district, travelling daily by train. By his own account, he was not an extraordinary student in school, where he mainly enjoyed painting and dreamed of becoming a painter. In 1919 he moved with...

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