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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#11951

Kerim Erim

1894 - 1952 (58 years)

Kerim Erim was a Turkish mathematician and physicist. He graduated from the Advanced Vocational School for Engineering in Istanbul in 1914 and received a PhD in Germany. He subsequently became Professor of Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Science in the newly established Istanbul University.

#11952

Anthony M. Ralston

#11953

Luigi Poletti

1864 - 1967 (103 years)

Luigi Poletti was an Italian mathematician and poet. He was born in Pontremoli, where he also died, age 102. He attended the episcopal seminary in Potremoli, then the high school of Parma, graduated in Turin and started to study mathematics there. He did not finish and took a job in a bank. 1911 he accidentally found the book of prime number tables written by Lehmer, a mathematician from the United States in the house of professor Gino Loria, a friend of his family, when he visited Genoa. Since then he spent many years to extend the first table in order to simplify "Eratosthenes Crivello" , a method from ancient Greece to find prime numbers.

#11954

Kazimierz Cwojdziński

1878 - 1948 (70 years)

Kazimierz Cwojdziński was a Polish mathematician and professor of the School of Engineering in Poznań. Cwojdziński published his works regarding secondary school curriculum and school mathematics in the journals Wiadomości Matematyczne, Muzeum, Parametr, and Matematyka as well as the German journal Archiv der Mathematik und Physik. He was among the first year-group to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Adam Mickiewicz University.

#11955

Johannes Knoblauch

1855 - 1915 (60 years)

Johannes Knoblauch was a German mathematician. Biography Johannes Knoblauch, whose father was the physics professor Karl Hermann Knoblauch, studied law, mathematics and physics from 1872 in Halle, Heidelberg and Berlin. At the Friedrich Wilhelm University he studied from 1874 to 1878 and from 1880 to 1883 and received his Promotion in 1882 and his Habilitation in 1883. His doctoral dissertation "Ueber die Allgemeine Wellenfläche" was supervised by Karl Weierstrass. Knoblauch was a teacher for the academic year 1878–1879 at the state Gymnasium in Halle and from 1879 to 1880 at Berlin's Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.

#11956

John Caswell

1650 - 1712 (62 years)

John Caswell was an English mathematician who served as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1709 until his death. Life and career John Caswell , was from Crewkerne, Somerset, and he matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, in March 1671 when he was 16 years old. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1674 and his Master of Arts in 1677. He was a pupil of John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry from 1649 until his death in 1703. He worked with the cartographer John Adams on the survey of England and Wales that Adams began in the late 17th century. In 1709, he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and also served as vice-principal of Hart Hall, Oxford.

#11957

John Farrar

1779 - 1853 (74 years)

John Farrar was an American scholar. He first coined the concept of hurricanes as “a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere”, after the Great September Gale of 1815. Farrar remained Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University between 1807 and 1836. During this time, he introduced modern mathematics into the curriculum. He was also a regular contributor to the scientific journals.

#11958

Johann Hommel

1518 - 1562 (44 years)

Johann Hommel was a German astronomer and mathematician. Work Hommel was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Leipzig in 1551. In 1552 or 1553, Richard Cantzlar introduced transversal dot lines in graduations. It was a variant of the zigzag line system introduced by Hommel. Tycho Brahe obtained the zigzag line system from Hommel.

#11959

Christian Wiener

Christian Wiener

1826 - 1896 (70 years)

Ludwig Christian Wiener was a German mathematician who specialized in descriptive geometry. Wiener was also a physicist and philosopher. In 1863, he was the first person to identify qualitatively the internal molecular cause of Brownian motion.

#11960

Elling Holst

1849 - 1915 (66 years)

Elling Bolt Holst was a Norwegian mathematician, biographer and children's writer. Early and personal life Holst was born in Drammen, Norway. He was a son of bookseller Adolph Theodor Holst and Amalie Fredrikke Bergh. He was a grandson of merchant and politician, member of the Storting, Elling Mathias Holst .

#11961

Lorna Swain

1891 - 1936 (45 years)

Lorna Mary Swain was a British mathematician and college lecturer, known for being one of few female mathematicians to contribute their talents to the war effort in World War I, and for being one of few early female lecturers at University of Cambridge. Academically, she is known for her work in fluid dynamics as well as her deep desire to see more women pursue higher education and teaching in the field of mathematics.

#11962

Arthur Hirsch

1866 - 1948 (82 years)

Arthur Hirsch was a German mathematician. Life and work Hirsch completed his schooling in Königsberg in 1882 and then studied mathematics and physics in the universities of Berlin and Königsberg. Among his teachers at Königsberg were David Hilbert and Adolf Hurwitz. In 1892 he received a doctorate from Königsberg for a thesis about linear differential equations.

#11963

Wilhelm Ahrens

1872 - 1927 (55 years)

Wilhelm Ahrens was a German mathematician and writer on recreational mathematics. Biography Ahrens was born in Lübz at the Elde in Mecklenburg and studied from 1890 to 1897 at the University of Rostock, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Freiburg. In 1895 at the University of Rostock he received his Promotion , summa cum laude, under the supervision of Otto Staude with dissertation entitled Über eine Gattung n-fach periodischer Functionen von n reellen Veränderlichen. From 1895 to 1896 he taught at the German school in Antwerp and then studied another semester under Sophus Lie in Leipzig.

#11964

Carl Fabian Björling

1839 - 1910 (71 years)

Carl Fabian Emanuel Björling was a Swedish mathematician and meteorologist. Life He was born on 30 November 1839 in Västerås, Sweden, and died on 6 May 1910. He was the son of mathematician Emanuel Björling and father of lawyer Carl Georg Björling.

#11965

Luca Valerio

1553 - 1618 (65 years)

Luca Valerio was an Italian mathematician. He developed ways to find volumes and centers of gravity of solid bodies using the methods of Archimedes. He corresponded with Galileo Galilei and was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

#11966

Charles de Bovelles

Charles de Bovelles

1479 - 1567 (88 years)

Charles de Bovelles was a French mathematician and philosopher, and canon of Noyon. His Géométrie en françoys was the first scientific work to be printed in French. Bovelles authored a number of philological, theological and mystical treatises, and has been reckoned to be "perhaps the most remarkable French thinker of the 16th century."

#11967

Arima Yoriyuki

1714 - 1783 (69 years)

Arima Yoriyuki was a Japanese mathematician of the Edo period. He was the lord of Kurume Domain. He approximated the value of and its square, correct to 29 digits: Further reading

#11968

Thomas Bartholin

Thomas Bartholin

1616 - 1680 (64 years)

Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.

#11969

Jovan Karamata

1902 - 1967 (65 years)

Jovan Karamata was a Serbian mathematician. He is remembered for contributions to analysis, in particular, the Tauberian theory and the theory of slowly varying functions. Considered to be among the most influential Serbian mathematicians of the 20th century, Karamata was one of the founders of the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, established in 1946.

#11970

Moritz Allé

1837 - 1913 (76 years)

Moritz Allé was an Austrian astronomer and mathematician, one of the teachers of Nikola Tesla. Scientific career After his university graduation, Allé startet his professional career as an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1856. He was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Kraków in 1859. In 1860 he completed his PhD at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. In 1862 he was appointed Adjunkt at the observatory in Prague. It was there where he completed his habilitation in mathematics in 1863. In 1867, Allé was appointed professor of mathematics at the Joanneum in Graz and was elected as its rector in 1875/76.

#11971

John Williams Calkin

John Williams Calkin

1909 - 1964 (55 years)

John Williams Calkin was an American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis. The Calkin algebra is named after him. Biography Calkin received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1933 and his master's degree in 1934 and Ph.D. in 1937 from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation Applications of the Theory of Hilbert Space to Partial Differential Equations; the Self-Adjoint Transformations in Hilbert Space Associated with a Formal Partial Differential Operator of the Second Order and Elliptic Type working with Oswald Veblen and von Neumann

#11972

Oswald Teichmüller

Oswald Teichmüller

1913 - 1943 (30 years)

Paul Julius Oswald Teichmüller was a German mathematician who made contributions to complex analysis. He introduced quasiconformal mappings and differential geometric methods into the study of Riemann surfaces. Teichmüller spaces are named after him.

#11973

Robert Mark Gabriel

1902 - 1957 (55 years)

Robert Mark Gabriel was a New Zealand mathematician at the University of Otago who worked on analysis, in particular on Green's functions.

#11974

Benjamin Abram Bernstein

1881 - 1964 (83 years)

Benjamin Abram Bernstein was an American mathematician, specializing in mathematical logic. Biography With his Jewish family, Bernstein immigrated as a child to the United States. After completing public primary education in 1897 in Baltimore, he completed in 1902 his secondary education at Baltimore City College, and then received in 1905 his A.B. degree from Johns Hopkins University. After completing two years of graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, he became in 1907 an instructor and continuing graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he received in 1913, with supervisor Mellen W.

#11975

Leonard Roth

1904 - 1968 (64 years)

Leonard Roth was a mathematician working in the Italian school of algebraic geometry. He introduced an example of a unirational variety that was not rational . Roth was educated at Latymer Upper School, Dulwich College and Clare College, Cambridge, where he graduated as a Wrangler in 1926. His sister was Queenie Roth, literary critic and wife of F. R. Leavis.

#11976

Paul Finsler

1894 - 1970 (76 years)

Paul Finsler was a German and Swiss mathematician. Finsler did his undergraduate studies at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, and his graduate studies at the University of Göttingen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1919 under the supervision of Constantin Carathéodory. He studied for his habilitation at the University of Cologne, receiving it in 1922. He joined the faculty of the University of Zurich in 1927, and was promoted to ordinary professor there in 1944.

#11977

Willi Rinow

1907 - 1979 (72 years)

Willi Ludwig August Rinow was a German mathematician who specialized in differential geometry and topology. Rinow was the son of a schoolteacher. In 1926, he attended the Humboldt University of Berlin, studying mathematics and physics under professors such as Max Planck, Ludwig Bieberbach, and Heinz Hopf. There, he received his doctorate in 1931 . In 1933, he worked at the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik in Berlin. In 1937, he joined the Nazi Party. During 1937—1940, he was an editor of the journal Deutsche Mathematik. In 1937, he became a professor in Berlin and lectured there until 1950.

#11978

Hans Schwerdtfeger

Hans Schwerdtfeger

1902 - 1990 (88 years)

Hans Wilhelm Eduard Schwerdtfeger was a German-Canadian-Australian mathematician who worked in Galois theory, matrix theory, theory of groups and their geometries, and complex analysis. "In 1962 he published Geometry of Complex Numbers: Circle Geometry, Möbius Transformations, Non-Euclidean Geometry which: ... should be in every library, and every expert in classical function theory should be familiar with this material. The author has performed a distinct service by making this material so conveniently accessible in a single book. " -

#11979

Erich Rothe

1895 - 1988 (93 years)

Erich Hans Rothe was a German-born American mathematician, who did research in mathematical analysis, differential equations, integral equations, and mathematical physics. He is known for the Rothe method used for solving evolution equations.

#11980

Ruth Moufang

1905 - 1977 (72 years)

Ruth Moufang was a German mathematician. Biography She was born to German chemist Eduard Moufang and Else Fecht Moufang. Eduard Moufang was the son of Friedrich Carl Moufang from Mainz, and Elisabeth von Moers from Mainz. Ruth Moufang's mother was Else Fecht, who was the daughter of Alexander Fecht from Kehl and Ella Scholtz . Ruth was the younger of her parents' two daughters, having an elder sister named Erica.

#11981

George Ridsdale Goldsbrough

1881 - 1963 (82 years)

George Ridsdale Goldsbrough CBE FRS was an English mathematician and mathematical physicist. After education at Bede Higher Grade School, Goldsbrough matriculated at Armstrong College and graduated there with honours in 1903. From 1905 to 1919 he was the senior mathematics master at Jarrow-on-Tyne, Secondary School. In 1910 in conversation, R. A. Sampson suggested that Goldsbrough should do research on the theory of tides and gravitational astronomy.

#11982

Viktor Vladimirovich Nemytskii

1900 - 1967 (67 years)

#11983

Jon Folkman

1938 - 1969 (31 years)

Jon Hal Folkman was an American mathematician, a student of John Milnor, and a researcher at the RAND Corporation. Schooling Folkman was a Putnam Fellow in 1960. He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from Princeton University, under the supervision of Milnor, with a thesis entitled Equivariant Maps of Spheres into the Classical Groups.

#11984

Igor Girsanov

1934 - 1967 (33 years)

Igor Vladimirovich Girsanov Early life Igor Girsanov was born on 10 September 1934, in Turkestan . He studied in Baku until his family moved to Moscow in 1950. While at school he was an active member of the Moscow State University maths club and won multiple Moscow mathematics olympiads.

#11985

Jean Favard

1902 - 1965 (63 years)

Jean Favard was a French mathematician who worked on analysis. Favard was born in Peyrat-la-Nonière. During World War II he was a prisoner of war in Germany. He also was a President of the French Mathematical Society in 1946. He died in La Tronche, aged 62.

#11986

Paul Koebe

1882 - 1945 (63 years)

Paul Koebe was a 20th-century German mathematician. His work dealt exclusively with the complex numbers, his most important results being on the uniformization of Riemann surfaces in a series of four papers in 1907–1909. He did his thesis at Berlin, where he worked under Hermann Schwarz. He was an extraordinary professor at Leipzig from 1910 to 1914, then an ordinary professor at the University of Jena before returning to Leipzig in 1926 as an ordinary professor. He died in Leipzig.

#11987

Torrence Parsons

1941 - 1987 (46 years)

Torrence Douglas Parsons was an American mathematician. He worked mainly in graph theory, and is known for introducing a graph-theoretic view of pursuit–evasion problems . He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1966 under the supervision of Albert W. Tucker.

#11988

David van Dantzig

David van Dantzig

1900 - 1959 (59 years)

David van Dantzig was a Dutch mathematician, well known for the construction in topology of the dyadic solenoid. He was a member of the Significs Group. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1900, Van Dantzig started to study Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam in 1917, where Gerrit Mannoury lectured. He received his PhD at the University of Groningen in 1931 with a thesis entitled "" under supervision of Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.

#11989

Robert H. Coats

1874 - 1960 (86 years)

Robert Hamilton Coats was Canada's first Dominion Statistician. He was born in Clinton, Huron County, Ontario in 1874, the son of Robert Coats, who came to Canada from Scotland. In 1896, Coats received a B.A. from the University College in Toronto. He worked as a journalist for The Toronto World and then the Toronto Globe until 1902 when, at the request of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, he became editor of the Labour Gazette; King himself had been the first editor of this publication which included statistical information related to labour.

#11990

Gladys L. Palmer

1895 - 1967 (72 years)

Gladys Louise Palmer was an American social statistician who "gained worldwide attention for her research on manpower problems and labor mobility" and for her work on the standardization of labor statistics.

#11991

Robert Edouard Moritz

1868 - 1940 (72 years)

Robert Edouard Moritz was a German-American mathematician. He published about 75 books and papers. For over 30 years he was head of the mathematics department at the University of Washington. Biography Moritz was born in Schleswig-Holstein to Karl R. and Maria Stahlhut Moritz, and emigrated to the United States at the age of twelve where the family settled on a farm in Nebraska. From 1885 to 1892 he attended Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska, and then studied another year at the University of Chicago. After two summer quarters in the next years he received his MA in mathematics in 1896.

#11992

Lila Knudsen Randolph

1908 - 1965 (57 years)

Lila Knudsen Randolph was the chief statistician at the Food and Drug Administration and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. At the FDA, her work involved statistical sampling of food and drugs, and "she was instrumental in developing practical applications of statistics in the validation of analytical methods". She also did early work in computational statistics, writing in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1942 about the use of punched cards to construct orthogonal polynomials.

#11993

Stefan Mazurkiewicz

Stefan Mazurkiewicz

1888 - 1945 (57 years)

Stefan Mazurkiewicz was a Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology, and probability. He was a student of Wacław Sierpiński and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning . His students included Karol Borsuk, Bronisław Knaster, Kazimierz Kuratowski, Stanisław Saks, and Antoni Zygmund. For a time Mazurkiewicz was a professor at the University of Paris; however, he spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Warsaw.

#11994

Gertrude Blanch

Gertrude Blanch

1897 - 1996 (99 years)

Gertrude Blanch was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. She was a leader of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York from its beginning. She worked later as the assistant director and leader of the Numerical Analysis at UCLA computing division and was head of mathematical research for the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

#11995

Ernest Preston Lane

1886 - 1969 (83 years)

Ernest Preston Lane was an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Education and career In 1909, he received his bachelor's degree in from the University of Tennessee. Later in life, he went on to receive his master's degree from the University of Virginia in 1913. He taught mathematics at several academic institutions before receiving in 1918 from the University of Chicago his PhD under Ernest Julius Wilczynski with thesis Conjugate systems with indeterminate axis curves. At the University of Wisconsin Lane was from 1919 to 1923 an assistant professor. At the Universi...

#11996

Herman L. Smith

1892 - 1950 (58 years)

Herman Lyle Smith was an American mathematician, the co-discoverer, with E. H. Moore, of netss, and also a discoverer of the related notion of filterss independently of Henri Cartan. Born in Pittwood, Illinois, Smith received his B.S. degree from the University of Oregon in 1914 and his M.S. from the University of Chicago the following year. His Ph.D. was granted in 1926 by the University of Chicago for work done under Moore. He was later employed as a professor of mathematics by Louisiana State University.

#11997

Leonard Bairstow

1880 - 1963 (83 years)

Sir Leonard Bairstow was an English aeronautical engineer. Bairstow is best remembered for his work in aviation and for Bairstow's method for arbitrarily finding the roots of polynomials. Early life and education Bairstow was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, the son of Uriah Bairstow, a wealthy and keen mathematician. As a boy, Leonard went to Queens Road and Moorside Council Schools before going to Heath Grammar School which he attended briefly before going to the Council Secondary School - then known as the Higher Grade School. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Science where he se...

#11998

Heinrich Wieleitner

1874 - 1931 (57 years)

Heinrich Wieleitner was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He became an honorary professor of mathematics at the University of Munich but for much of his career worked in school- and college-level education.

#11999

František Wolf

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

František Wolf was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to trigonometry and mathematical analysis, specifically the study of the perturbation of linear operators. Wolf was born 1904 in Prostějov, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now part of the Czech Republic, the elder of two children of a furniture maker. He studied physics at Charles University in Prague, and then mathematics at Masaryk University in Brno under the supervision of Otakar Borůvka; he was awarded a doctorate in 1928 . He then taught mathematics at the high school level until 1937, when he obtained a faculty position at Charles University.

#12000

Tudor Ganea

1922 - 1971 (49 years)

Tudor Ganea was a Romanian-American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology, especially homotopy theory. Ganea left Communist Romania to settle in the United States in the early 1960s. He taught at the University of Washington.

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