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.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11951
Louis Lazarus Silverman
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Louis Lazarus Silverman was an American mathematician, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an academic institution in the state of Missouri. Born in a village in Lithuania, Silverman moved with his parents to the United States when he was eight years old. He received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and then his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1910. From 1910 to 1918 he was a faculty member in the department of mathematics at Cornell University, where he worked with Wallie Abraham Hurwitz on divergent series and summability methods. From 19...
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Ronald M. Foster
1896 - 1998 (102 years)
Ronald Martin Foster , was an American mathematician at Bell Labs whose work was of significance regarding electronic filters for use on telephone lines. He published an important paper, A Reactance Theorem, which quickly inspired Wilhelm Cauer to begin his program of network synthesis filters which put the design of filters on a firm mathematical footing. He is also known for the Foster census of cubic, symmetric graphs and the 90-vertex cubic symmetric Foster graph.
Go to Profile#11953
Paul Riebesell
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Paul Louis Riebesell was a German mathematician, statistician, actuary, and president of Hamburger Feuerkasse. At the International Congress of Mathematicians, he was an invited speaker in 1932 in Zürich and in 1936 in Oslo.
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Luigi Fantappiè
1901 - 1956 (55 years)
Luigi Fantappiè was an Italian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and for creating the theory of analytic functionals: he was a student and follower of Vito Volterra. Later in life, he proposed scientific theories of sweeping scope.
Go to Profile#11955
Pasquale Joseph Federico
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Pasquale Joseph Federico was a lifelong mathematician and longtime high-ranking official of the United States Patent Office. Biography He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania. About 1910 the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he gained a bachelor's degree in physics at Case Institute of Technology in 1923. He then received his LL.B or law degree from Washington College of Law in 1932.
Go to Profile#11956
Federico Cafiero
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Federico Cafiero was an Italian mathematician known for his contributions in real analysis, measure and integration theory, and in the theory of ordinary differential equations. In particular, generalizing the Vitali convergence theorem, the Fichera convergence theorem and previous results of Vladimir Mikhailovich Dubrovskii, he proved a necessary and sufficient condition for the passage to the limit under the sign of integral: this result is, in some sense, definitive. In the field of ordinary differential equations, he studied existence and uniqueness problems under very general hypotheses ...
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Guglielmo Tagliacarne
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Tagliacarne Guglielmo was an Italian statistician Biography Guglielmo Tagliacarne was born in Orta San Giulio, Novara, on May 31, 1893. He studied at the Bocconi University, Milan, obtaining a master's degree in Economics. He carried on his statistical studies analyzing supply chains, buying and consumption behaviors, demographic and occupational trends and the provincial and regional calculation of National Income.
Go to Profile#11958
Clyde E. Love
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Clyde Elton Love was an American contract bridge author and mathematics professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a native of Bancroft, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905.
Go to Profile#11959
Paul Neményi
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...
Go to Profile#11960
Erika Pannwitz
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S. After the war, she became editor-in-chief of Zentralblatt MATH.
Go to Profile#11961
Giacomo Albanese
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Giacomo Albanese was an Italian mathematician known for his work in algebraic geometry. He took a permanent position in the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1936. Biography Albanese attended the school in Palermo, Sicily. He graduated from there in 1909. Then he entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as a student of mathematics, and received his doctorate in 1913. He was awarded the Ulisse Dini prize for his doctoral essay on the topic Continuous systems of curves on an algebraic surface, written under the direction of Eugenio Bertini.
Go to Profile#11962
William Henry Roever
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
William Henry Roever was an American applied mathematician. Roever received in 1897 a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received an A.M. in 1904 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1906 from Harvard University with advisor Maxime Bôcher and thesis Brilliant points. Roever taught astronomy from 1899 to 1901 at Washington University in St. Louis and mathematics from 1905 to 1908 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then returned to Washington University in St. Louis to teach mathematics and later became the chair of the department of mathe...
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George H. Bryan
1864 - 1928 (64 years)
George Hartley Bryan FRS was an English applied mathematician who was an authority on thermodynamics and aeronautics. He was born in Cambridge, and was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, obtaining his BA in 1886 , MA in 1890, and DSc in 1896. He was a professor at University College of North Wales, and is generally credited with developing the modern mathematical treatment of the motion of airplanes in flight as rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom.
Go to Profile#11964
Gaspare Mignosi
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Gaspare Mignósi was an Italian mathematician. Mignosi became in 1930 a professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Cagliari and in 1932 a professor at the University of Palermo. He continued the studies of the school of algebraic geometry and number theory, which flourished in Sicily around 1920 with Gaetano Scorza and Michele Cipolla. Particularly noteworthy is the contribution made by Mignosi to the so-called apiristic solution of binomial congruences.
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Nikolai Luzin
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Nikolai Nikolayevich Luzin was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.
Go to Profile#11966
Charles Jean de la Vallée Poussin
1866 - 1962 (96 years)
Charles-Jean Étienne Gustave Nicolas, baron de la Vallée Poussin was a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for proving the prime number theorem. The King of Belgium ennobled him with the title of baron.
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Johanna Piesch
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Johanna Camilla Piesch was an Austrian librarian, physicist and mathematician who is remembered for the pioneering contributions she made to switching algebra, one of the fundamentals of digital computing and programming languages.
Go to Profile#11968
Vadim Yefremovich
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Vadim Arsenyevich Yefremovich was a Soviet mathematician. Yefremovich was a member of the Moscow Topological School and specialized in the geometric aspects of general topology. He introduced the notion of proximity spaces at the First International Topological Conference in Moscow in 1935. He was imprisoned from 1937 to 1944, and did not publish on proximity spaces until 1951, at which point the theory was developed rapidly by Efremovič and associates.
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Ganesh Prasad
1876 - 1935 (59 years)
Ganesh Prasad was an Indian mathematician who specialised in the theory of potentials, theory of functions of a real variable, Fourier series and the theory of surfaces. He was trained at the Universities of Cambridge and Göttingen and on return to India he helped develop the culture of mathematical research in India. The mathematical community of India considers Ganesh Prasad as the ′Father of Mathematical Research in India′. He was also an educator taking special interest in the advancement of primary education in the rural areas of India.
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Walter Schnee
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Walter Schnee was a German mathematician. From 1904 to 1908 he studied mathematics in Berlin. From 1909 to 1917 he worked at the University of Breslau. He then went to the University of Leipzig, where he stayed till 1954. He worked in the field of number theory.
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Georgi Bradistilov
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Georgi Delchev Bradistilov was a Bulgarian mathematician. Biography Georgi Bradistilov, the fourth and youngest child in the family of the high-ranked civil servant at Bulgarian Ministry of Finance, Delcho Petkov Bradistilov , and teacher Nona Georgieva Bradistilova , was born on 12 October 1904 OS in Panagyurishte. He attended 3rd Sofia gymnasium and in 1922 entered Sofia University to study physics and mathematics. In 1927 he graduated with honors and the same year was appointed as assistant professor in mathematics. In the 1930s he studied at the University of Paris and the University of Munich.
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Francesco Paolo Cantelli
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Francesco Paolo Cantelli was an Italian mathematician. He made contributions to celestial mechanics, probability theory, and actuarial science. Biography Cantelli was born in Palermo. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1899 from the University of Palermo with a thesis on celestial mechanics and continued his interest in astronomy by working until 1903 at Palermo Astronomical Observatory , which was under the direction of Annibale Riccò. Cantelli's early papers were on problems in astronomy and celestial mechanics.
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S. L. Loney
1860 - 1939 (79 years)
Sydney Luxton Loney, M.A. was a Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Holloway College, Egham, Surrey, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England. He authored a number of mathematics texts, some of which have been reprinted numerous times. He is known as an early influence on Srinivasa Ramanujan.
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Geoffrey Timms
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Geoffrey Timms OBE FRSE was a 20th century British mathematician and cryptoanalyst. In the Second World War he was one of the several mathematicians working alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma code.
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Edward Collingwood
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Sir Edward Foyle Collingwood LLD was an English mathematician and scientist. He was a member of the Eglingham branch of a prominent Northumbriann family, the son of Col. Cuthbert Collingwood of the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose family seat was at Lilburn Tower, near Wooler, Northumberland. His great grandfather was a brother of Admiral Lord Collingwood.
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Ralph Leigh
1915 - 1987 (72 years)
Ralph Alexander Leigh was a modern languages scholar, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of French in the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1982, later Sandars Reader in Bibliography, in 1986–87. He specialized in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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Zygmunt Zalcwasser
1898 - 1943 (45 years)
Zygmunt Zalcwasser was a Polish mathematician from the Warsaw School of Mathematics in the period between the World Wars collaborating especially in the fields of logic, set theory, general topology and real analysis. Zalcwasser, who worked on the Fourier series, introduced the Zalcwasser rank [Za] measuring the uniform convergence of sequences of continuous functions on the unit interval. Zalcwasser received his Ph.D. at the Warsaw University in 1928. He served as professor at the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in 1933–34 and after the invasion of Poland in 1939 lived in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was m...
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Gyula Pál
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Gyula Pál was a noted Hungarian-Danish mathematician. He is known for his work on Jordan curves both in plane and space, and on the Kakeya problem. He proved that every locally connected planar continuum with at least two points is the orthogonal projection of a closed Jordan curve of the Euclidean 3-space.
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Boris Delaunay
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Boris Nikolayevich Delaunay or Delone was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, mountain climber, and the father of physicist, Nikolai Borisovich Delone. The spelling Delone is a straightforward transliteration from Cyrillic he often used in later publications, while Delaunay is the French version he used in the early French and German publications.
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Ernest Esclangon
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Ernest Benjamin Esclangon was a French astronomer and mathematician. Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university.
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Luigi Sante Da Rios
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Luigi Sante Da Rios was an Italian mathematician and physicist who worked on fluid dynamics. In his 1906 work "Sul moto d'un liquido indefinito con un filetto vorticoso di forma qualunque" , he presented the basic equations for the vortex filament model, today used to simulate quantised vortex lines in superfluids.
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Alfred Aeppli
1894 - Present (132 years)
Alfred Aeppli was a Swiss mathematician. The Pólya–Aeppli distribution in probability theory and statistics is named after him and his doctoral advisor George Pólya. Life and work Alfred Aeppli was born in Zürich on 15 July 1894 to Alfred Aeppli and Rosa Aeppli-Gehring. He went to a primary school in Zürich and the canton's Industrial School, where he received his matura in the summer of 1913. Afterwards, Aeppli studied at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule at the department for higher teachers of mathematics and physics. In the winter semester of 1914–1915 he was on leave for military service.
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Pauline Sperry
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Pauline Sperry was an American mathematician. Early life and education Born in Peabody, Massachusetts, Sperry was the daughter of two schoolteachers; her father, William Gardner Sperry, was also a Congregational minister and later became president of Olivet College. Perry began her own undergraduate studies at Olivet College, but then moved to Smith College. She graduated from Smith in 1906 at age 21 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After teaching at a private school, she returned to Smith in 1907 to do graduate work in mathematics and music, and earned a master's degree in music in 1908. ...
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John Stuart Anderson
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
John Stuart Anderson FRS, FAA, was a British and Australian scientist who was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He was born in Islington, London, the son of a Scottish cabinet-maker, and attended school in the area but learned most of his chemistry at the Islington Public Library. His tertiary education was at the Northern Polytechnic Institute, Imperial College and the Royal College of Science, all in London.
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Alberto González Domínguez
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Alberto González Domínguez was an Argentine mathematician working on analysis, probability theory and quantum field theory. González Domínguez received his Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires in 1939 under the direction of Julio Rey Pastor. That same year, González Domínguez received a Guggenheim Fellowship and worked for two years with Jacob Tamarkin at Brown University. González Domínguez spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
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Giuseppina Masotti Biggiogero
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Giuseppina Masotti Biggiogero was an Italian mathematician and historian. Known for her work in algebraic geometry, she also wrote noted histories of mathematicians, like Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Luca Pacioli. She was a member of the and won both the Bordoni Prize and Torelli Prize for her work.
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Leifur Ásgeirsson
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Leifur Ásgeirsson was the first Icelandic mathematician to gain major international recognition. Education and career Ásgeirsson graduated in 1927 from Reykjavik Junior College and received his doctorate in 1933 from the University of Göttingen. His doctoral advisor was Richard Courant. From 1931 to 1943 Ásgeirrson was the head of a district school in Laugar, located in southwestern Iceland's Reykjadalur Valley east of Reykjavík. In 1936 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. At the University of Iceland he was appointed in 1943 a lecturer in mathem...
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Charles Pisot
1910 - 1984 (74 years)
Charles Pisot was a French mathematician. He is chiefly recognized as one of the primary investigators of the numerical set associated with his name, the Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers. He followed the classical path of great French mathematicians by studying at the École Normale Supérieure on Ulm street, where he was received first at the agrégation in 1932. He then began his academic career at the Bordeaux University before being offered a chair at the Science Faculty of Paris and at the École Polytechnique. He was a member of Bourbaki.
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Louis Bachelier
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his doctoral thesis The Theory of Speculation .
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Henry Louis Smith
1859 - 1951 (92 years)
Henry Louis Smith was the ninth president of Davidson College and the first president to not be an ordained Presbyterian minister. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Smith graduated from Davidson in 1881 but returned as a professor of physics before becoming president in 1901. It was during his time as a professor that Smith and a group of students created one of the first x-ray images in America.
Go to Profile#11991
Charles Thompson Sullivan
1884 - 1948 (64 years)
Charles Thompson Sullivan, was a Canadian mathematician. Education and career Sullivan graduated with B.A. in 1906 from Dalhousie University and was Science Master at Alberta College, Edmonton from 1906 to 1908. He enrolled as a graduate student in 1908 at McGill University and graduated there with M.Sc. in 1909. In 1910 he became a lecturer in mathematics at McGill. At the University of Chicago he attended summer quarters in 1909 and in 1910 and 4 consecutive quarters in 1911-1912, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1912. His thesis advisor was Ernest Julius Wilczynski.
Go to Profile#11992
Fibonacci
1170 - Present (856 years)
Fibonacci , also known as Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Bigollo Pisano , was an Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be "the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages".
Go to Profile#11993
J. C. P. Miller
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Jeffrey Charles Percy Miller was an English mathematician and computing pioneer. He worked in number theory and on geometry, particularly polyhedra, where Miller's monster refers to the great dirhombicosidodecahedron.
Go to Profile#11994
William James Sidis
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 , in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#11995
Alexander Gelfond
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Alexander Osipovich Gelfond was a Soviet mathematician. Gelfond's theorem, also known as the Gelfond-Schneider theorem is named after him. Biography Alexander Gelfond was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the son of a professional physician and amateur philosopher Osip Gelfond. He entered Moscow State University in 1924, started his postgraduate studies there in 1927, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1930. His advisors were Aleksandr Khinchin and Vyacheslav Stepanov.
Go to Profile#11996
Joseph Pérès
1890 - 1962 (72 years)
Joseph Pérès was a French mathematician. Early life and education Pérès was born in Clermont-Ferrand on 31 October 1890. Former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure, he worked in Rome with Vito Volterra and defended his doctoral thesis in 1915.
Go to Profile#11997
R. Catesby Taliaferro
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Robert Catesby Taliaferro was an American mathematician, science historian, classical philologist, philosopher, and translator of ancient Greek and Latin works into English. An Episcopalian from an old Virginia family, he taught in the mathematics department of the University of Notre Dame. He is cited as R. Catesby Taliaferro or R. C. Taliaferro.
Go to Profile#11998
Amedeo Agostini
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Amedeo Agostini was an Italian mathematician born in Capugnano di Porretta Terme. Biography In 1919 he graduated at the University of Bologna, where he later worked on a freelance basis as teaching assistant and professor of History of Mathematics. Since 1925 he taught analytical geometry at the Naval Academy in Livorno. Agostini also held - on assignment - several lectures at the University of Pisa. He dealt mainly with the history of mathematics following the principles of his own teacher, Ettore Bortolotti, emphasizing the assessment of the facts more than their synthesis.
Go to Profile#11999
Ernst Stueckelberg
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, regarded as one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century. Despite making key advances in theoretical physics, including the exchange particle model of fundamental forces, causal S-matrix theory, and the renormalization group, his idiosyncratic style and publication in minor journals led to his work not being widely recognized until the mid-1990s.
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Paul Flamant
1892 - 1940 (48 years)
Paul Flamant was a French mathematician, known as the transcriber and editor of Gaston Julia's lectures published in the important monograph Leçons sur les Fonctions Uniformes à Point Singulier Essentiel Isolé . According to Joseph Ritt, "Julia's monograph is probably one of the finest in the Borel collection."
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